Photo Credits: Davichi

Once you’ve selected your domain name, it’s time to set up your blog and choose what URL to use.

Generally, you have three choices:

1. Placing your blog in the root directory: yourdomain.com
2. Using a sub-domain: blog.yourdomain.com
3. Using a sub-directory or folder: yourdomain.com/blog/

While everybody seems to have their own opinion, I’m hereby laying out my two cents:

Placing your blog in the root directory is the easiest choice, however it may represent a problem in the future, if you want your site to be more than just a blog.

For example, in addition to your blog you may want to have a forum, a product page, and a tools and resources page. In that case, you may want your homepage to act as a showcase, with links to all those different sections.

This leaves us with options 2 and 3.

While there is virtually no difference between a sub-domain and a sub-directory from a SEO perspective , a sub-domain is more complicated to set up.

A sub-domain, also called an “alias” of your main domain, must be mapped out by making a series on entries in the DNS section of your domain control panel. If you ever want to change the architecture of your site, you will have to make changes to your DNS settings and wait until they propagate (become active).

Sub-directories are much easier to manage, since they are just folders within your main domain. The files in a sub-directory share the same file storage space as your domain, so making changes is just a matter of moving folders around and/or renaming files (just like you would with folders and files in your computer using Windows Explorer).

My personal preference is to use a sub-directory instead of a sub-domain, for simplicity’s sake.

Now, you may ask, what about my home page, if I still don’t have other products or sections to feature?

If all you have on your site right now is a blog and you don’t want visitors who type in your domain name to go to an empty page (like this one), you can implement a temporary(or “302”) automatic redirect from your homepage to your blog’s URL.

With a temporary automatic redirect, anybody who types yourdomain.com will be automatically redirected to yourdomain.com/blog/. You can easily set up the re-direct from your hosting account’s control panel by choosing the “redirects” option.

If in the future you develop other sections of your site and want to showcase them in your homepage, you can simply remove the redirect.

Summarizing:

• It is better not to set up your blog in your root directory, just in case you want your site to be more than a blog in the future.
• For simplicity’s sake, set up your blog in a sub-directory (folder), i.e. yourdomain.com/blog/ instead of a sub-domain: blog.yourdomain.com
• If you don’t want visitors to type yourdomain.com and go to an empty page, set up a temporary automatic redirect from yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com/blog. This is called a “302” re-direct and can easily be done from your hosting account’s control panel.

Disclaimer: before you call me out for not eating my own dog food, this blog is in the root directory because I intend it to always be a blog. However, if I ever decide to move it to a ‘blog’ folder, I will have to do a 301 (permanent) redirect for all my posts to their new location, which is likely to cause problems with search engines that don’t handle redirects very well. If you’re not sure of what you will do in the future, just set your blog in a ‘blog’ folder.

Del.icio.us / Digg / Stumble it!

Subscribe