Subdomain Network

Search Engine Optimization is still a significant component of my daily Internet Marketing work. I refuse on this blog to discuss basic SEO techniques, I will cover fundamental concepts like Hilltop, LSI and techniques which will make your sites make sense to the engines.

I’m going to cover the idea of using a series of subdomains around a main domain to increase the breadth of search terms and the overall prominence of your site in the engines. From a number of perspectives creating a series of subdomains with related content can be an extremely powerful technique.

The example I am putting forward is this:

Splitting http://www.yourdomain.com into subdomains with an outline like:

http://news.yourdomain.com

http://images.yourdomain.com

http://shopping.yourdomain.com

http://forums.yourdomain.com

http://products.yourdomain.com

There are a ton of reasons why this is the case, and here are only a few of them:

1. Content is segregated so that your customers understand where they are within your website. For instance shopping.mydomain.com or news.mydomain.com or press.mydomain.com can help to clarify the purpose of the area on the site.
2. It allows for design and creative freedom within the various areas of your site. Look, feel, user interface design, visual appearance are all key to the process. SEO does not stop when the user hits the site, in order to be effective as a search marketer you must work through the process to the ’success event’ - whether it’s a join, deposit , purchase or signup, it doesn’t really matter.
3. You have the ability to highly structure various areas of your site using various tools that exist. This includes blogs, forums, image galleries, content management systems (all using basic SEO techniques). This is a huge benefit for the search engines since when you strongly structure your site content the engines can quickly and easily index your site(s). This is of huge benefit for search optimization.
4. Linking becomes incredibly simple since you can easily manipulate the inbound links to your site(s). You also have the ability to saturate the engines which means you can then attack major keywords without ignoring the tail of search at the same time. This is critical since if you have a decent ranking with a major keyword on the main domain then optimizing for the tail of search on the subdomains becomes simple. You can easily own those keyphrases on a massive scale.
5. Modular site design. This is a straightforward concept that is quite often missed by the general design world. Keeping in that mind - having the ability to create a building block style site will make your life much easier. Both from a software development perspective (modularity is key) and also from an updating and urgrading point of view you will have the ability to update one module without adversely affecting any other portions of your site.
6. Network structures are the hgh level model of many authority websites which is what you want to mimic in every single way possible. By modelling your site in similar ways to larger sites you are effectively telling an engine that your site carries the same properties as an authority site. Now don’t forget to do the rest of the things neccessary to make your site an authority.
7. You have the ability to create multiple points of syndication from all areas of your site. I would strongly suggest you do this under any circumstances. XML and RSS feeds are beginning to integrate seamlessly into many aspects of both the internet, desktop computing and handhled devices. Creating numerous feed touchpoints is a huge point towards your search engine ranking.

Networks are important, fundamentally the internet is one giant network and the engines are the ones that trying to find site which are strongly related to specific content. The engines look for format, topicality, linking structure (both in and outbound).

Creating a structured solid network with subdomains can help to ensure that you are one step closer to seach dominance in your particular field. Also keep in mind that it is critical to structure each of the subdomains as if they were completely unique domains (pull them out and they would function independantly) then strongly link from there.

Good Luck!