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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!

Say for instance you are in the business of "lawn mower repair," and you are ranking for that keyword. If you were doing an AdWord campaign on that keyword, would that also affect your organic rankings in the SERPs for that keyword?

Awesome! Thank you Anthony and Albin.

So say for instance you rank well in "online medical billing software." Does that help or influence your rank for derivatives of it (eg: "medical billing," "billing software," or "online medical billing")?

Well, for starters, Vimeo doesn't allow business videos since it leans more on artistic pieces or something that deals with art.

Rand suggests the Cross-Domain Rel Canonical in his WBF vid last May: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday. Go to 4:00 into the vid and I think that is more relevant to your situation. I think the other questions are: Are these old pages ranking well for particular keywords? Do any of these pages still get recent traffic? Do any of these pages have any strong links to them? Those are the ones you want to bring with you.

Why can't I double thumb-up this?! haha - thanks, Ryan. I appreciate the step-by-step advice.

Good point with the percentages! Thanks, Mike.

With my linkbuilding efforts, I know what keywords I want to target but my homepage ranks for most of my keywords. The other pages were written and built for specific keywords, but do they need linkbuilding TLC? They don't rank in the SERPs much anyway (if not at all) and the homepage is by-far the strongest in the SERPs.

Rand suggests the Cross-Domain Rel Canonical in his WBF vid last May: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday. Go to 4:00 into the vid and I think that is more relevant to your situation. I think the other questions are: Are these old pages ranking well for particular keywords? Do any of these pages still get recent traffic? Do any of these pages have any strong links to them? Those are the ones you want to bring with you.