Should your blog be integrated with your website or have a life of its own in the blogosphere? There is no right or wrong answer, it depends on your strategy. Here are the pro’s and con’s to help you decide:

The pro’s

1. Content, as we all know, is good for SEO. Google likes sites that are periodically updated because they have lots of content related to the same cluster of keyword phrases that your target readers search for.
2. A content-rich website is good for the “Long Tail” – rather than focusing all your efforts on the most popular words and just a few pages, concentrate on making lots of pages serve different keywords niches. There is less competition and you’ll appear more often in Google’s SERPs.
3.  You might convert your readers into loyal customers because you will have gained their trust as a thought leader.
4. The more content you have on your website, the longer your visitors are likely to stay which can lead to higher conversion rates.
5. If you decide to go for a stand-alone blog, you might upset your readers if they follow your blog and they realise that it’s linking to your website. This won’t happen here.

The con’s

1. People tend to trust corporate blogs less than independent blogs – social sharing will be more difficult.
2. Because writing a coherent blog that supports the company’s goals is very time-consuming, the blog could fall in the hands off someone who has time on his hands but doesn’t have much to say and thus affect the reputation of the company.
3. Similarly, because independent blogs are seen as being non-commercial, they tend to receive more user comments which is good for customer insight.
4. You cannot use another domain name that contains the keywords you’re targeting and that’s unfortunate since the URL and page title are the most important SEO ranking factors.