Subdomains – A Best Practice Guide

There’s been much debate about whether ot not the strategy of creating subdomains to improve natural search ranking works or not. Well, I’m writing here to tell you that it does, but only if you do it right.

First of all, let me explain to you what a subdomain is.  Its basically what it says, a sub section of your domain (your site) and it usually looks like this:

subdomain.domain.com

A subdomain can usually be created through your server’s control panel.  With Apache C-panel you can login and go to manage subdomains and easily create one there.

Best practices for creating subdomains: 

1) Subdomains are considered as standalone sites by most search engines and therefore it is crucial to ensure that you have a reason for creating your subdomain (ie you have sufficient useful content to add to it)  I recommend at least ten pages of at least 450-500 words.

2) Make sure that your subdomain is keyword rich and does not cannibalise any content on your site.  So for example, if you have a site about computers, an idea for a subdomain would be suppliers.computers.com.

3) Don’t overdo it.  Too many subdomains and you will raise some red flags.  Also you don’t want to siphon off your main domain popularity unless you absolutely need to.

4) Make sure that your subdomain is well supported with keyword rich internal links from your main domain and also enough outbound links (links from other sites).

5) If your’ using subdomains to target various markets (ie. uk.yourdomain.com) try and host the UK subdomain on a UK server with a UK IP address.

Thats about it.  So to conclude, make sure to follow the above guidelines when deciding to go with a subdomain strategy. 

Good luck!