Sunday, December 21, 2008

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.