How should we setup of a side (slightly off-topic) blog?

[Bill4Time]

Our web application targets small business owners and entrepreneurs. However, the developers at our company have a lot of great content to offer the web development community and so we want to start a "behind the scenes" blog where we can discuss technical topics... JavaScript performance, web accessibility, etc.

Our customers and the visitors of our website would probably not be interested this new content... So we want to be careful not to cannibalize or damage our current SEO.

What are some of the major risks we should watch out for? If we put it on a subdomain, is that enough to not impact our main site SEO or introduce keyword confusion?

Conversely, are there opportunities for this side blog to help the SEO and authority of our main website/domain?

Thanks for the help!

[ProjectLabs]

I don't think it will hurt rankings for your other important keywords, it will just increase the number of keywords that attract traffic.  Links from development sites should help your overall keyword rankings. To me, it makes sense that developers would naturally link to a site that has created a web application.

SEOMoz appears to have taken the approach you suggested with their development blog: http://devblog.seomoz.org/

Other examples:

http://dev.hubspot.com/

https://developer.apple.com/news/

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/

https://developer.amazon.com/blog/index.html

https://engineering.groupon.com/

http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/category/game-development/

[AndieF]

I'm not an expert here, so I'd wait for others to chime in before making a decision.

But I would imagine having a "Behind the scenes" category on your blog (and perhaps not showing it on the main blog index) would be the way to go. It is still relevant for your web application and some of the inbound links there may help you in future.

I think it's relevant enough to stay on the same domain, but perhaps I'm wrong.