Nice article. On my first website, I made the huge mistake of placing the blog as the domain. But Wordpress is flexible enough to play around with the homepage to get a unique look, other than a traditional blog.

Thanks for the good information. I got it right the second time around: http://www.keepm.com/blog/

First, if you’re a business that sells to people locally then you should strongly consider inserting the name of your community/city in your URL. e.g. MiamiBridals.com. This is shown to help your local search rankings (e.g. Google Local) It’s also a lot easier to get a good URL!

Here’s an example with my mother-in-law’s cleaning business (she’s on the first page of local Google search results for her town now with very little SEO work). We purchased WellingtonCleaning.com/ and permanently re-directed her original url Lindascleaningservice.com to her new URL. People who know her as Linda’s Cleaning Service can still find her, plus the search engines know where her original site now lives (the new URL). Most importantly, local search engines and shoppers know that she’s a cleaning service in their town of Wellington Florida even before they visit her site. This strategy is also tied to your local branding – playing on consumer’s preference to do business with people in their own community.

Finally, your points are all very well made about sub-domains and directories. These days though if you use a content management system like Wordpress, it’s possible to avoid the sub-domain and sub-directory question all together. I advocate using Wordpress to power your main web site, and decide now or later if you want to have a blog. You can have Wordpress display a static home page (like a typical web site) or display like a typical blog where content is listed in reverse chronological order (newest posts first). You can then setup your blog posts to go to a category (like blog!). I do this with the Wordpress template I use for my site Local Na8ion. My home page is static and my blog posts go under my url/category like this localna8ion.com/category/blog/. I didn’t even have to set this up, I just bought a Wordpress theme for $50 that did it for me and away I went. These are some alternative strategies at dealing with url’s, sub-domains and sub-directories. While they’re uncommon now, there’s a very quick adoption of this tactic starting to take place with people using Wordpress to host their regular site (with or without blog) and more and more design themes are popping up to support this. Wow, long comment, should have written a post!

Cheers

Julian