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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
April 2005, Volume 4, Issue 4

search engine marketing

Spring Cleaning: Using Sub-Domains to Nurture Your Inner Neat-Freak

by Heather Molina, Algorithmic Team Leader, iProspect

It’s officially spring time. And with the temperature finally getting close to the 60s in the northeast, it’s time to re-evaluate my wardrobe.

On my laptop, I have a spreadsheet that I created about four years ago. This spreadsheet contains a running inventory of every piece of clothing, every hand bag, every pair of shoes and every accessory I own.

And this spreadsheet, as well as my closet, is broken down into the following categories: In case you haven’t picked up on it, I’m a bit of a neat-freak. I organize everything. And I’m extremely particular when it comes to my closet because I love shopping and I love clothes. An immaculate inventory of what I own allows me to keep track of where everything is, as well as allows me to determine what I “need” to buy. (Note to self: I still need to get that spring trench coat.)

With such a diverse group of wardrobe elements, it’s critical to keep things categorized and segmented. And we’ve seen the exact same phenomenon with a number of our clients’ websites.

Let’s say you have a diverse offering of products/services — and corresponding content — on your website, and you want users to find what they are looking for. If your site isn’t well organized, users may never find what they seek, or learn what you have available on your site. And having a wide assortment of content makes it difficult for search engines to recognize what your site is about, and how to index it. The organizational solution: categorize your products/content and divide the site into sub-domains — each containing its own unique content.

Sub-domains are separate accounts that reside within a main domain but are accessed by separate URLs. For example, if I had an online store website (heathers-stuff.com) where I kept a running list of my wardrobe inventory for users to look at and purchase from, I could break the website into the following sub-domains: Breaking the site into sub-domains offers a number of benefits — both from an end-user, and search engine, perspective. One of the most important technical benefits is that search engine spiders see each sub-domain as a unique entity from the main domain. This provides an excellent workaround to the restriction, employed by many search engines, that allows a site to have no more than two listings within the search results on a given page of matches for a conducted query. With sub-domains in place, it is possible to achieve more than two listings per search engine results page for your company, allowing you to possibly dominate a page on a given term.

From a user experience standpoint, reorganizing a website into sub-domains often results in updating the navigation. This makes it easier for visitors of the site to browse the content by the new, more organized categories that have been created. This, in turn, often results in new and unique content being created to describe, introduce and provide details about each of the categories — and now each relates to, or differs from, the other.

Not only is this very helpful information that will assist the visitor in finding what they are looking for, but this new content should be rich with keywords that describe the category and the products offered within it — thereby increasing the quality and quantity of the content on your site for spiders to crawl and index.

Having a spider index each sub-domain as a separate site also means more opportunity for increased directory listings, and as a result, increased link popularity value. Sub-domains also provide a prime opportunity to take advantage of incorporating targeted keyword phrases into your URLs, thus enhancing the relevancy of your website on the targeted keyword phrase.

So as you start making your spring cleaning to-do list, remember to take a good, hard look at your website. Re-evaluate where you are, what you have, and how it can be better organized. Implementing sub-domains may be the answer to your visibility and traffic problems — enabling search engine spiders to find your site and index it appropriately, and your site visitors to more easily find what they’re looking for.

And maybe I will remember to buy that spring trench coat I “need.”

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