My answer: Subdomains are like standalone websites without the advantage of having a real domain name. You can build whole sites on subdomains, but they won’t help the website on the actual domain and the subdomains carry less weight than a site on an actual domain name. /folders help add content to your website. If what you want to put on the subdomain isn’t to help your website, then it’s better to get a domain name for that content. Google has been wavering on how they treat subdomains.

So I looked it up on the Google Webmaster Blog just to be sure.

Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

What’s the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories?

When it comes to Google, there aren’t major differences between the two, so when you’re making that decision, do what works for you and your visitors.

In addition to those considerations, if you use Webmaster Tools (which we hope you do!), keep in mind that you’ll automatically be verified for deeper subdirectories of any sites you’ve verified, but subdomains need to be verified separately.

So, they are the same from an SEO perspective, at least for Google. Remember, you need traffic from other search engines as well. The Google Webmaster blog only applies to Google Optimization. The advice that Matt Cutts gives us is also only about Google Optimization.

Some search engines may treat subdomains as separate websites and subdirectories or folders as part of the actual website. So the safer way to go for SEO purposes is to use subdirectories or folders for content you want to be seen as part of your website.

This is from Matt Cutts on how Google treats subdomains and subdirectories;

My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content.

A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example.

If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you’ll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.

Remember the KISS principle. keep it simple and stupid. The more you complicate your SEO efforts, the more likely you will make a mistake.

In addition to that, Google has changed their policy on subdomains more than once. They have always counted subdirectories as content for your site. Do you really want to put all that effort into building subdomains just to have them change that policy again?

I recommend subdirectories / folders if you must use them at all. For most websites I put all of the web pages in the root with folders for images, docs, scripts, styles, etc. It makes it very easy to work on your website when you do it this way.

Excessive folders with different keyword names can make your URLs seem like spam. I can’t prove that is a problem, but anything that looks like spam, smells like spam and tastes like spam is probably spam.

What experience have you had with subdomains vs. subdirectories? I don’t mean just in Google. How do they do for you in Yahoo and Bing or other search engines?

According to OneStat.com;

OneStat.com ( www.onestat.com ), the number one provider of real-time intelligence web analytics, today reported that most people use 2 word phrases in search engines. Of all the search phrases world wide, 32.58 percent of the people use 2 word phrases, 25.61 percent use 3 word phrases and 19.02 percent use 1 word phrase. More and more people use 3 word phrases instead of 1 word phrase. The global usage of 2 word phrases has increased with 3.36 percent from 29.22 percent to 32.58 percent since April 2003. The use of 1 word phrase has decreased with 5.74 percent from 24.76 percent to 19.02 percent.

The 7 most used word phrases in search engines on the web are:

1. 2 word phrases 32.58%
2. 3 word phrase 25.61%
3. 1 word phrases 19.02%
4. 4 word phrases 12.83%
5. 5 word phrases 5.64%
6. 6 word phrases 2.32%
7. 7 word phrases 0.98%

Longtail keywords are getting more and more percentage of searches which has been confirmed by a lot of SEO Bloggers recently as well. Add that to the fact that longtail searches mean more targeted traffic and more leads or sales and you know how to target your seo efforts in a more productive way. Example; The term “insurance” will have a lower conversion percentage than “insurance qoute”. The person typing the longer phrase is looking to get a quote and buy insurance.

Now as to how many people use search engines when trying to find a website to make a purchase, look at this chart.

41% of consumers use a search engine when searching for something they want to buy. So if Google has 60% of all searches performed by search engine users, that is about 25% of Internet users who buy something online.

You need to pay attention to all of the ways you can get traffic to your website, not just Google. The chart also does not account for how many people find websites and blogs through social networking websites.

If twitter, digg, delicious, stumbleupon, facebook and others have millions of users, then that means a lot of websites or blogs are “discovered” through social bookmarking. Anyone know a study that compares how many people find websites through social networking vs. search engines?

There is SEO or search engine optimization and there is Google Optimization. There is a big difference between the two. Matt Cutts is a really smart guy and a lot of people read his blog. When interviewed the stories have titles like “Matt Cutts on SEO”. But in reality, he works for Google and the story should read “Matt Cutts on Google Optimization”.

We all know that more searches are performed at Google than any other search engine or portal. But a good SEO Professional will tell you that putting all of your eggs into just one basket is a bad idea, even if the basket is really big.

SEO is more than just optimizing your website for the Google Search Engine. You want traffic from multiple sources, not just one. Can you survive on just Google traffic alone? Yes. You can survive on bread and water for awhile too, but do you want to?

MSN Traffic converts higher for some websites than Google Traffic does and vice versa. Yahoo traffic converts higher than either one of those for some products and services. Then there is Ask, AOL, Dogpile, Alta Vista, and many others out there. Some are just compilations of results from other search engines and some have their own way of rankling sites. You want traffic coming in from all of them, not just Google.

You can also get quality traffic from email marketing, advertising on websites that target the same audience as you, press releases, article marketing, web directory submissions, and more. All of these sources can bring you more traffic and sales.

Number of Searches VS Number of People

On SEO Blogs and Forums you see people arguing that Google has 60% or 70% or 80% of the traffic and the numbers they use change with each post they make. There is a huge problem with their numbers.

More experienced Internet users generally use Google, while newer users tend to use MSN, Yahoo, or AOL. How do I know? When you bought your last new computer, what was the default home page? More than likely it was MSN. Yahoo seems to become many people’s home page as well because of their advertising and marketing strategies combined with Yahoo Chat and Yahoo Mail. If the user chose AOL as their internet service provide as millions of people have, then AOL becomes their home page.

Newer users do not tend to change their home page as much as you might think. Many don’t even know they can or know how to do it. So they use the search feature found on their home page.

Now add to that, more experienced users search more times per day than less experienced users. SEO Persons, Web Designers, Marketers, and other Techies do as many as 20-30 searches or more per day. Researchers, Writers, Teachers, Professors, and others may even search more times than that per day.

Newbies or part time Internet users would consider 10 searches in one day a lot. Many of them likely search way less times than that per day.

So Google has, well let’s say, 70% of all searches done in search engines. But each person who uses Google searches an average of 10 times per day to use a low figure.

Yahoo has about 15% of the searches made each day. Let’s say their users search an average of 5 times per day.

Now let’s take a sampling of 100,000 searches. Many more than that are done each day, it’s just a round figure to work with. 70,000 of those made at Google and 15,000 of those made at yahoo. That would mean the 70,000 searches at Google were performed by 7,000 people. The 15,000 searches at yahoo would represent 3,000 people. So Google would have 2 1/3 more people searching than yahoo.

But when you say 70% of the searches vs. 15% of the searches, it makes it sound like Google represents 4 2/3 more people than yahoo. The Number of searches vs. the number of actual people searching tells two completely different stories.

Traffic from other websites, web directories, article marketing, press releases, smaller search engines and directories, and more are not counted when people talk about these percentages either. This means if you factor in all of the other traffic sources, Google becomes even smaller in terms of actual number of people.

What About Social Bookmarking?

Now if you want to really talk about percentages, the growth of social bookmarking and social networking has really changed the numbers. Many people today find what they are looking for at social bookmarking websites and for many these sites are now their home page.

Millions of people are using Technorati, Digg, Delicious, Mixx, Sphinn, Facebook, UAN.ME, Blog Catalog, Bloglines, and other Social Networking and Blog Search Websites

So why is it when people compare searches done at Google, msn, and yahoo, don’t they include the number of searches done at social bookmarking sites in the equation?

The Internet is evolving. Social Bookmarking is becoming the primary source for information for millions of users.

I’ll close this by saying once again; do not gamble all of your resources on just one source of traffic. Do not ignore Google because more searches are done there than any other search portal, but diversify your SEO Strategy to combine all of the different sources of traffic if you want to guarantee the stability of your online business.

Users are going to be the biggest factor in how you rank in the search engines at some point. As Yahoo and Google get more sophisticated, user information is going to become much more important to your rankings.

Google Page Rank is all but ignored by most people in the SEO business now. Page rank changes daily, yet google only updates the google toolbar every 3 months or so and even then the data is just what your page rank WAS on a specific day about 3 months ago.

So the page rank you see in the google toolbar is not really much of an indicator of the importance of a page. It really doesn’t help us at all. I don’t make any changes based on what the toolbar page rank is.

Yahoo wants to improve on how page rank works. This is from WebProNews.com

What Yahoo plans to do:

Measure link weight – influenced by the frequency with which users follow a link

Note when links are ignored and users leave (teleport) to another page of their choosing

Calculate the probability that a user stops and reads a webpage rather than views it and moves on.

Incorporate user data into the algorithm – “User Sensitive PageRank could reflect “the navigational behavior of the user population with regard to documents, pages, sites, and domains visited, and links selected.”

Personalize PageRank based on demographic information – age, gender, income, user location)

Emphasize recent information

Weigh anchor text more heavily – the patent filing calls anchor text “one of the most useful features used in ranking retrieved Web search results”

You can bet Google is working on the same things. What this tells us is that users are soon going to have a lot more to do with how your website ranks than ever before. User behavior on your webpages will determine how well you do. I think this trend is a great advancement and look forward to it.

That means you need good original content for your website that does more than have your keywords in it. Your content will need to engage the reader so they stay on pages longer if you want the rank of that page to go up.

Your linking strategy or navigation is going to have to be done well if you want your webpages to rank higher. That includes using anchor text properly.

We have always evaluated user behavior as part of the way we write webpages and how we design navigation. You have to guide the user to get them to do what you want them to, to get them to go where you want them to go.

You have to identify the various types of people that might come to your website and then divide them up according to their reasons for coming there, then send each group to the page that can close them on the sale.

To get great original content that closes sales written for you, call 786-317-8774, or click here to read more about our approach to writing good original content.

Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

You can also use it to analyzer your competitor’s websites and blogs to see how well they are indexed. It even gives the number of links into the site.