Q: We have a blog at a free blog site which is well linked to and fairly well trafficked. I’m wondering how best to leverage the popularity of the blog to increase traffic to our company’s site. I’d consider incorporating the blog into the main site, but that risks breaking all of the existing links to it. Are there any other options?

A: Your situation is not uncommon – we often hear about folks who for various reasons have two websites and then want to merge them without any loss of page strength. Here’s our take on some approaches to this situation:

• Option (1) Move your blog to a new URL location on your company’s main website. Like any website move, this would be best if done with a 301 server-side redirect from each old URL to the corresponding new URL, so that links and search engine robots would follow through to the new address. Unfortunately, setting up a 301 redirect probably isn’t possible with your free blog host.
• Option (2) Move your blog to a new URL location on your company’s main website, but without a 301 redirect. This would unfortunately mean a loss of the built-up page strength that you have created for your blog. You would need to manually request updates to all links pointing to your old site, and cross your fingers. The up-side of this approach is that at least your future blog work will be integrated with the primary site. If it is a fantastic blog with loyal readers, you may be surprised that new links and references will build up quickly. (Note that in this option, you keep all old posts at the old location in archived form – no comments allowed – and then continue with new posts on the new location).
• Option (3) Keep the blog at its current URL location, but re-skin it so that it includes the global navigation for your company website (similarly add the ‘blog’ link to the primary website so that the navigation is seamless between the two). If this is possible on your blog provider, then this would probably be your easiest option.
• Option (4) Keep the blog at its current URL location and brand it with your company, link to the primary site, and periodically include posts that in some way feature your company.

Regardless of how you leverage it, a popular, respected blog is a fantastic asset to your company. Congratulations!