External Domain for Company Blog

[bcmull]

Please help me decide the benefit (from an SEO perspective) of hosting a company blog externally (either on blogger or self-setup external domain) or hosting on company's website.

[Volusion.com]

It depends on the purpose of your blog. I recommend on a separate domain if you want to gain shelf space or for reputation management purposes.if you have a site that already has great domain authority and high PageRank, you could use the blog separately to have value on two different domains. However, if your site is fairly new, i recommend to host it within your company's website as Lewis and Barry say, to use those links and help your main domain.

[StalkerB]

Definitely host it on the company website, unless you're doing something risqué with the blog.

Your blog is going to be collecting links, you will probably want to be using it as a hub for other social activity and it's much easier to convert people by directing them around the site than it is to get them to go there in the first place.

Using Blogger or WordPress.com limits a lot of what you can do, plus you're then accumulating links into a domain you don't control.

As for using the blog to point links to your main site, well that's not usually the best strategy either - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake

If your set up absolutely prevents you from doing it on the site then go for a self-hosted blog.

[CPU]

If you use an external domain you can potentially choose a keyword match domain which may be beneficial (if it hasn't already been taken by someone else).

However I would recommend hosting your blog on your main site at www.example.com/blog. Any links achieved by the blog will also benefit the rest of the pages on the main site domain whereas any links to a separate blog will only benefit the ranking of the blog.