we recently had an interesting question from a client looking for a new website design.

They were wondering if they should go with an external blog ( to send traffic to their site ) or and internal blog ( to bring traffic to their site ). Always being eager to learn some new tricks, I set about doing some research on the subject. The first thing that I should make perfectly clear is that any content you create for SEO purposes, internal or external, should be comprised of quality information.

Slapping up some nonsense on a website and packing it out with keywords isn’t going to help you. Years ago this keyword stacking it might have helped, but the big search engine companies like Google and Bing are getting smarter every day. Google founder Larry Page has aspirations of creating an artificial intelligence capable of thinking for itself. So that should give you some idea of the leaps and bounds that have occurred in recent years in terms of making the Google search engine smarter. If you put gibberish on your site to try and fool these search engines, chances are they will recognize this and punish you for it. And these leaps and bounds will certainly continue into the future, so even if they don’t recognize it now, they will eventually.

So back to the question, internal or external blog? SEO always seems to be about two things, content and backlinks, with everything else falling somewhere in the middle. So it’s natural to assume that if you create your own content and backlink to your site, then you’re killing two birds with one stone right? Yes and no. Yes and no. These days it’s generally acknowledged that both options offer the same amount of benefit to your SEO, but if you choose to set up an external blog, there’s one drawback.

By running an external blog you essentially have to run two websites. 

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