Lesson #06 The Power of Subdomains
Written By Cyndalie

When marketing in search engines, using subdomains can be a powerful ally. Since subdomains are often viewed by engines as a unique web site entity, building up more properties to lend relevance to and filter traffic to your Primary Traffic Targets is a key marketing goal for long term rankings. Subdomains also eliminate the need to register and pay for additional domains and is a cost effective alternative for building up your own traffic network.

What is a Subdomain?

A Subdomain is a "domain within a domain". Subdomains are individual upper level web addresses built upon a pre-existing domain name, for example, support.yourdomain.com. By definition, a subdomain should not have the prefix of "www".

Subdomains tend to be indexed more readily than URLs containing sub directories. For example, the subdomain keyword.mydomain.com can generate better results than subdirectory mydomain.com/keyword. Even according to Danny Sullivan "[search engines] tend to see subdomains as independent web sites deserving their own listings" (Source). Since the idea is to build up optimized keyword pages that link to and support the relevance of your home site, do not create the subdomain to mirror the content of other pages already submitted to the search engines. Multiple pages that contain the same exact content are considered search engine spam.

Setting Up Subdomains

There are a few tricks to get the most out of using subdomains for marketing. First start out by selecting 3-5 keywords to use as the subdomain name. You want these to be your most highly competitive keywords. If you have an amateur site then comes up with a few like: amateurs.mydomains.com, amateur-pics.mydomain.com, and xxx-amateur-pics.mydomain.com. Using hyphens to separate the keywords is better than blending the words together, as it makes the keyword more prominent to the search engine.

The next step is to create a home page for each subdomain that targets the keywords in that subdomain and that looks like an official entry way into your site (containing appropriate disclaimers, etc.). This will be a traffic filter page for your site and your sponsors. Since each subdomain will contain small HTML pages that push traffic to your primary domain, explain it to your hosting company what your needs are to avoid being charged a separate hosting fee for each subdomain. Tell them you will be hosting up to 30 html pages and no adult image content other than design graphics. Many hosting companies now offer 10 to unlimited subdomain accounts included with your hosting package. If they are going to charge you an extra $20 per month, shop around.

The tricky part is that ideally you want each subdomain to reside on individual IP addresses. This will help the search engine to recognize the subdomain as an individual web site giving it an advantage over subdirectories as well as lend the site more relevance to the domain itself and to other sites that you link to and FROM it. Talk to your web host about your options for individual IP's for each subdomain and request they be on separate class C's where possible.

The "Easy" Way Out

Not quite as effective, but much easier to setup and using less resources, is to ask your hosting company to set up your DNS so that anything.mydomain.com points to your home site. The idea is that more keywords in the URL support the keywords the page is trying to rank for. So if you have optimized a page for "live amateur sex" you can name the page amateur_sex.html and submit it as live.mydomain.com/amateur_sex.html. Any keyword can be used as a subdomain and, when submitting a specified page, will pull up that page as if the subdomain was a "www." or "subdomain" was not even there.

Although any keyword as a subdomain will point to your one main site, that search engines will know that it is still all one site. So DO NOT go submitting the same page using different subdomains hoping for multiple rankings. I've tried and it doesn't really work that well or last that long. This tip/trick is just a needle in the haystack to help your well optimized pages rank even higher.

So subdomains can be used a powerful ally when used properly. But it comes to high keyword ranking it all really comes down to how well optimized your pages. Over the years I have focused on Google "the untrickable engine" and have had some major success. One example is the ranking held by a client http://Fetish-Factory.com who has held a top 10 ranking for "fetish" in Google for over 3 years. Since that keyword is the top of that pyramid of keywords I was aiming for, I have found that more highly yielding results come from the huge foundation of keyword it also ranks for, like "latex fetish" or "fetish clothing", and it is more important to focus on and maintain those types of keyword rankings as people become more specific in knowing what they are searching for.