SEO Best Practices: Setting Up a Blog

Pros

Can create an "unbiased" resource (that just happens to link to your corporate website, on occasion).

If the content is good, and it becomes respected in your industry, the blog can gain authority that can then be passed through to your corporate website through "unbiased" linking.

Cons:

There's a better than average chance that gaining good authority/ability for posts to rank is going to take considerable time.

Does little to really show thought-leadership for your company.

If you really do drop links to the corporate website, there's a good chance that it'll be seen for what it is: a paid advertisement, not an official unbiased reference. The backlash from this could be (should be) huge.

Blog on WordPress.com or Blogger

Some pretty large companies have gone this route because – to them – it's the easiest to execute. Mind you, a link from WordPress.com isn't a bad thing, but how does this help with any of the aforementioned reasons why you might want to blog in the first place?

Are you tying in the "thought leadership" to the brand? Are you adding fresh content to the domain? Are you aiding your abilities to provide an additional "official brand presence" to the SERPs? (Perhaps, but you're better off with subdomain).

Pros:

You could create some very aggressive link building tactics or "test" things without burning the domain.

You would gain a link that is coming from an authority domain (remember, a quality link profile is about gaining links from many different/authoritative/relevant websites/domains; not many links on one domain)

Easy. Just about anyone can get engaged and start blogging today.

Cons:

Limitations as to how you can design/template to fit your brand.

Any content promoted (linked to) won't provide direct value to your main company website/domain.

Inability to utilize plugins.

Cheesy. It is what it is. Not gonna be a great representation for your company.

Summary

Blogging should be a part of any sound marketing plan, nowadays. You need to create engagement and provide the ability for people to share content coming from your company. Face it, very few people are going to feel compelled to share your "service page", much less link to it.

Do blogging for the right reasons, and set it up in the right manner for your needs and you'll realize positive results.

Now that you've addressed best practices for setting up your blog, realize that you're just getting started...