Which is better and why?

for what?

My original thoughts on a blog was that they are supposed to help keep your website fresh with continually updated posts.

Now, I thought to myself that if I had one as a subdomain, those posts and fresh content woudl constantly having Big G's attention, crawling me all the time as it does with an offsite blog (Big G crawling the blog, not my site).

So, would having my site be fresh and constantly seen next to my blog (if it were a subdomain of my main eCommerce site) be more beneficial for rankings and visitors as opposed to it being hosted offsite?

The answers are No and No

"fresh" content does NOT mean anything of the sort. The only reason "blogs" get crawled frequently is because people link to interesting content from their own own sites.

Just because you "update" your site/blog on a regular basis does not mean it will get any "special" attention from search engines

Originally Posted by BoSolaris

Which is better and why?

I think it's better if you would create folder within your domain for your blog. This should be like this http://www.domain.com/blog

My preference having set up e-commerce sites with blogs would be to make it a sub-domain. A lot of conversations have gone on about the sub domain vs sub folder debate. The consensus that I have seen is that it does not matter.

If you want to create multiple landing page style blogs pointing to your e-commerce website that is another option. First I would concentrate on improving your current website before developing additional web properties.

The frequency at which search engines crawl your website is correlated with the frequency of new content. This should pretty much answer the search engine attention issue. If you don't believe it write a blog post every day for 30 days and examine your pre blog post and post blog post numbers for crawlers.

One often overlooked aspect of blog posts is that you can tailor them to low competition product + location specific searches. This offers one of the highest conversion searches plus it is easy to rank because of low competition. Normally it wouldn't make sense to tailor a single product page or e-commerce site page for such low search volume. Since blog posts are so easy to create and the shear number it is a great way to improve ranking for less competitive terms. Plus you can create keyword rich links in your blog posts pointing to the corresponding products.

Having a regular blog has multiple online marketing benefits. When writing blog posts make sure to create links to specific products that relate to your blog posts. If you install a blogging CMS like WordPress you can customize meta information, set up an automatically updating sitemap, and automatically syndicate your blog post to your twitter and Facebook account.

Remember content is king for helping to improve search engine ranking. If your site has a large number of blog posts on topics relating to your products, especially if you use keyword rich links, your search engine ranking should improve.

You also get the benefit of engaging potential and existing customers by providing worthwhile content. This will also increase the likelihood that your website will receive links from people who find value in your posts. You can also submit your blog posts to popular social bookmarking websites to get more exposure.

One thing to remember is that the purpose of a search engine is to find the best resource of information for given words. If you build your blog that is attached to your website, linking to your products as the best resource of information on your products you will have a competitive advantage.

first of all.....crawl rate does not really matter. What is the difference if your site is crawled one a week or a month. google will still see the new content at some point.

New content is definitely the best thing you can do!

I have my blogs at subdomains. When you set a blog at a subdomain it acts as an entirely different site in the eyes of google. so keep that in mind. But i create a power blog on a subdomain and then pass all the pagerank and juice to the main site.