You must host your Blog on your own website - Here's why

It is extremely important that your blog be hosted on your own web domain.  Do not host your web blog on an external domain.  For example, you do not want your website address to be: yourblog.blogger.com, yourblog.worpress.com, or yourblog.blogspot.com.  You want your blog address to be something like blog.yourdomain.com or www.youdomain.com/blog which are both hosted on your web site's domain.  Here's why...

There are several benefits to hosting your blog on your domain. The first and most important reason is for building authority links to your website.

Your blog will likely contain some of your websites best content, so people who are interested in the subject of your website will be inclined to link to your blog articles.  These links can be expected to be from websites or social network accounts related to your industry.  Links to your website from industry related websites are called authority links and are the best kind of links for improving the rank of your website in the search engines.  Great blog content is a great source of authority links.

A second reason for locating your blog on your domain is to increase the saturation level of your website in the Google index.  Each article in your blog is a web page, and as the number of articles on your blog grows so does the number of pages on your website.  The more pages you have on your website, the more pages Google will have for your website.  The number of pages Google has for your website is called the saturation level.  The higher the saturation level in Google for your website, the more your website will show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a wider variety of keywords.  Of course, the more you show up in the SERPs the more traffic you will get, which hopefully converts to more sales or better web results.

Finally, hosting your blog articles on your own website will keep your website fresh, and fresh content is important for SEO.  Google keeps track of how often your website is updated, and Google will have a better opinion of your website if it is frequently updated.  So hosting your blog on your website will increase your freshness factor to Google and other search engines.

Takeaway: You should host your blog on your website to increase the number of authority links, the Google saturation level and the freshness factor for your website.