How to best host a blog - standalone or on the site?

[Pday]

HI

We are redesiging our site currently - at the moment we have a low key blog on the site which is pretty well hidden (to be changed with redesign) but is hosted as brand.com/blog name.  I have been advised it might be a good idea on relaunch to have the blog as a standalone blog linking back to our main site but also having a graphic on the site that promotes the blog.  The blog does not currently have the same name as the website so would work as a standalone site but I understand it would not have any seo benefits from the original site.  I have seen on previous posts here that the best practise is domain.com/blog but wondered if anyone thought different?

Hope someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks, Penny

[TheeDigital]

I agree with Jesse and Jonathan that you should usually have your website connected to your blog in some sort of "brand.com/blog" fashion.

The only situation where I would argue different is if plan on creating a lot of content and you are imagining your blog as a movement or other subculture, that will market your brand.  For example the company Citrix blogs at WorkShifting.com, which is their blog about working "outside of the office" which overall helps them since all of their tools are based around work shifting.

[jesse-landry]

"domain.com/blog" all the way. Jonathan was spot-on.

[Jonathan1979]

I always do blogs on the same site.  The reason is that good content will give the site a freshness boost, plus if you really focus on content you will also get natural backlinks, and social media signals coming back to your site.

The reason why someone might suggest doing it the other way is to get free backlinks to your site, but I don't think this will be any where near as affective as producing the top quality content for your site, and getting a buzz on social media, and backlinks from third party sites.