SEO (search engine optimisation)
and web-positioning tutorials,
tricks, tips, and techniques.

Using sub-domains for effect in
marketing and promotion

by Ammon Johns

Buying multiple domains is cheap enough and a good solution when you have a range of keywords, but it isn't always essential for 'link popularity' boosting. Often you can get similar effects by simply using sub-domains, which then adds the bonus of making each site possibly help the main domain in a new way too.

You'll probably have noticed that most of the biggest 'brand names' on the internet are now using sub-domains to reinforce the brand awareness. Lycos, Microsoft and Yahoo all use sub-domains for services that once had their own domain, you could do worse than follow their example.

If you don't already have a brand, and this is purely about link popularity and SEO then your main domain for this should be your most common keyword - the one that makes the most phrases when another keyword is added as the sub-domain name.

For an example, lets say you have a company offering a range of services in web-design, site submissions, etc. Your most obvious common word is probably going to be something like 'website'. Now obviously you can't get website.com for under about $4m so you get the domain name superior-website.com and congratulate yourself.

Now you want to build up all those additional sites for increased link popularity, and you want to increase your relevance on themes based engines too, and this next step can help with both.

Your first sub-domain is design.superior-website.com and you put all of your info and examples of your site design services in this site. You have the keywords 'website' and 'design' in the root URL now of course, and by keeping this sub-domain purely on the topic of web design, you have a stronger theme. Naturally, you link it to your central 'hub' at www.superior-website.com .

Your next sub-domain is submissions.superior-website.com and again is an indepth site purely devoted to your submissions services. It links to your 'hub' again, and now you also link the sub-domains to each other.

You have three sites now with 'website' as a keyword, and have also created sites which have a strong theme and the keywords 'design' or 'submissions' in the root url.

You can keep doing this forever, so long as you can think of more subdomain name variations, and each one will boost the value of the hub, and of each other. Each one is streamlined to a single service and so maximizes the 'theme' value of the sub-domain.

To really rock those sales, use variations too in your copy and create sub-domains for slight variations on a word. Lets say that we add submitting.superior-website.com into the mix. We don't want to duplicate the site in submissions.superior-website.com too closely in case the SEs detect and penalize it, so instead we use a different style of copy.

Different copy is useful anyway. Each SE yeilds a slightly different demographic as its 'average' customer. Yahoo! directory generally gives you newer or less net-smart users. They tend to like things pretty and they trust bigger names (else they wouldn't use Yahoo when all evidence tells us its rubbish). Make your site for this variation of the keyword look smart and glossy and make the customer think you are the biggest most popular service in the class and your Yahoo conversions should rise slightly.

Maybe one of your subdomains does especially well in google. Well think about google users. They are people who sacrifice eye-candy to get useful results fast. They are more interested in facts and data than in hype. Make the copy concise and relevant, deliver your points quickly and your google conversions should rise.

Think about why users will have come from a specific engine. Altavista gives me more non-english speaking users than most other engines, especially eastern Europeans and spanish speaking surfers. Could AltaVista's provision of babelfish be the reason? I think so. AV provided something extra that got them a good rep early on. To increase AV conversions it could be worthwhile adding foriegn language versions (or at least support) to the site.

Related Links:

How do web search directories regard sub-domains?