New URL is the best, but you have to get lots of inbound links for it to start ranking properly in search engines. If its in a directory and there is just 1 link to it it will start ranking nearly right away, assuming that www.companyname.com doesn’t have 10′s of thousands of pages indexed. A subdomain may takes weeks or months to rank. It takes so long because your site needs to gain some sort of reputation or credability, that is usually done via links. If you always have a site and are just adding a blog section the site probably already has credability.

This is true too, but I don’t think you can host a typepad blog as a

directory on your site without some kind of redirect, and that’s going to

blow it all anyway.

While subdomains are good for separation and security, / extensions are fast

and easy to blend right into the existing website.

Theoretically you can host a subdomain on a totally different separate

server, but it is not always necessary to have that much separation.

I say the bestdietforme.com/weblog option is easy to setup and we could

stick with it for a long time until traffic to the blog is un-bearable on

the same server (we should be so lucky)!!!

Subdomain is going to be easiest, you will need to be able to create a cname

record for the subdomain in order to have it hosted properly on Typepad.

My answer would be both, especially if you’re running multiple sites with multiple domains off of a single installation.

There are only two situations when it really matters were MT exists:

* When an author is going to the MT interface to create entries

* When your resulting site is calling mt-comments.cgi or mt-script.cgi

Personally, I think it’s easier for people to remember “mt.domain.com” than it is for them to remember “www.domain.com/mt” (I also put in automated redirectors to take a user directly to /cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi). So I generally set up MT as a subdomain when possible (I also use it at work at a huge company where they won’t create subdomains in the DNS system without huge business justifications).

I then create symbolic links from www.myblog.com/cgi-bin/mt to mt.domain.com/cgi-bin/mt. That way the files can be accessed from both domains. And more importantly, the only domain that ever shows up to a visitor is the blog domain, not my admin domain.

In 3.2, they’ve made this really easy to set up by splitting out AdminCGIPath from CGIPath. Set CGIPath to a relative URL (“/cgi-bin/mt/”) and then set AdminCGIPath to “mt.domain.com/cgi-bin/mt/”

If you don’t like relative URL’s in your resulting pages, you can combine the use of MTCGIPath with MTBlogURL to create absolute URL’s.