Is it better to have a blog on my site or to guest blog and submit articles to other sites?

[Roger]

Hi! Both are very positive for your SEO, but in slightly different ways.

Having the blog on site means adding more quality content to your site - content is important for your rankings and visibility, especially if you run a web shop where text content may be limited. It gives you the chance to talk about the products or any promotions you might have on and also give a bit more detail that people will be searching for. This will help catch additional people searching for these types of keywords

Guest blogging - or writing content elsewhere on social media sites (such as creating a Squidoo lense as you mention) benefits your site through the backlinks it has to your site. Unlike standard links from places like business directories, these links occur in very content rich areas (which you have created by setting up the Squidoo lense - or Wordpress blog of whatever).

I would say that both are necessary and essential for good SEO - along with your other activities, and there is no particular reason for choosing one over the other except to ask how much content you currently have on the site (if you have a lot already, then maybe post elsewhere as articles etc)

But if content is limited, I would put the blog on-site

I hope this helps!