Subdomains and SEO

Are there any benefits in using subdomains for the purpose of website search optimisation? The answer is yes, but with a few reservations. Subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. For example "serivces.seo.com" is a subdomain of the "seo.com". At present, maximum two results can appear for a domain in the top 10. There is one exception that applies only to major portals such as Amazon, Ebay, About.com etc. Search Engine Land advice is to use subdomains when you have very disparate content that you feel searchers would feel relevant. For instance, if you have a travel site, it may make sense to use subdomains to categorize cities. Recommending further that for each search query that you want to list, make sure that you have one or two pages that you most want to rank for those terms and focus on optimizing those with keywords, anchor text, and links. Know that every page on your site won’t rank for each query, so decide which are the most relevant.

Search Engine Bias

The question of search engine bias can be easily verified by examining search results for popular words and phrases. I have performed search for very competitive and frequently searched word finance on Google and Yahoo.
As I expected Google lists as number one:
Google Finance
Google Finance offers a broad range of information about stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies. In addition, Google Finance offers interactive ... finance.google.com
And Yahoo shows in top position... no surpise here:
Yahoo! Finance
Free sharemarket information, financial news, glossaries and guides to help you learn about Australian and international markets.
au.finance.yahoo.com
See if you can find other examples of search engine bias.

Two Words Phrases

One of the leading web ranking provider RankStat.com reported that most people use two word phrases in search engines. There is also a tendency developing that single word phrases searches are in decline and multi word phrase searches are becoming most common. Of all search engines world wide, 28.38 percent use 2 word phrases, 27.15 percent use 3 word phrases and 16.42 percent 4 word phrases.
The 10 most used word phrases in search engines on the web are:
1. Two word phrases 28.38 percent
2. Three word phrases 27.15 percent
3. Four word phrases 16.42 percent
4. One word phrase 13.48 percent
5. Five word phrases 8.03 percent
6. Six word phrases 3.67 percent
7. Seven word phrases 1.63 percent
8. Eight word phrases 0.73 percent
9. Nine word phrases 0.34 percent
10. Ten word phrases 0.16 percent

MyHome in Difficulty

Major online Australian property portal MyHome is about to shut down its website after burning cash for past 15 months. MyHome.com.au owners are Microsoft and PBL which shows that having money is just not enough to succeed or should I say to survive in business. They have spent around 20 millions dollars in an attempt to capture a share of the $140 million online property advertising market. However MyHome found that it could not attract nearly enough online property searchers to at least break even. Unique visitors have reached half a million per month, while Domain.com.au has two million and Realestate.com.au more than four million unique browsers. The costs were too high and hence the decision to pull the plug. From SEO perspective the website has been only at around # 18 on Google while searching for "property for sale". Failure to get to top 5 listings as well as usabilty issues had a negative impact on the whole business model.

Search Events in 2008

If you are looking to learn more about SEO I have a list of upcoming SEO events and search marketing conferences. This year Search Engine Strategies will be held on March 17-20, 2008 in New York City. WebmasterWorld's PubCon will be in Las Vegas Nevada in later months of 2008. Ad Tech online marketing conference is now hosting in 10 cities around the world with the first in Sydney on March 12, 2008. SXSW Interactive Festival will take place from March 7 to March 11 in Austin, Texas. Those are the most important shows, but please leave a comment if there are any other SEO events which could be included on this short list.