Technique: Search Engine Optimization with Subdomain or Subdirectory

Search Engine Optimization requires your website to fulfill many criteria, and the website URL should contain your keyword that reflects the web page’s theme. This keyword or key-phrase should be present in the URL as the domain name, the subdomain name, the subdirectory name, or the filename.

A profitable niche website will be able to create a serious online income for you, but to create real wealth opportunities on the Internet even if one of your niche website fails to perform well, you must create multiple websites with many different niche topics.

To create hundreds of different niche websites, you will need to either:

• Procure different domain names for each niche topic (for example, www.dog-care.com, www.HealthAndFitness.info, www.WeightLoss.com, etc),
• Or, create different subdirectory for each niche topics under your existing website (like, Website.com/dog-care/, MainSite.com/HealthAndFitness/, MainSite.com/WeightLoss/, etc),
• Or, create different subdomain (like, dog-care. MainSite.com, HealthAndFitness.MainSite.com, WeightLoss.MainSite.com, etc) for each niche topics.

Although the first option is the best SEO option, the cost of procuring so many different domain names, even if they are just approximately about $8 a piece, will definitely be a financial burden. Every year, you will have to incur the re-registration fees for all those domains, and also remember to register at their different due dates.

The second and the third options mentioned above are obviously the better choices, considering that you will have the option of having the best keywords or key-phrases as the subdirectory or the subdomain names. This also removes the obstacle of the best keyword or key-phrase domain names being unavailable to you. As these keywords or key-phrase are used only as the subdomain or subdirectory names, you can freely use them for your search engine optimization requirements.

The third option of using the subdomain depends up on your website hosting company’s policies of either making that option available to you or not. Normally, most of the web hosting companies does allow their clients to create unlimited subdomain names. So, it depends up on you to use these options for creating the many niche websites. If this option is unavailable to you, then you can create niche websites using the subdirectories option.

Many people who are unaware that the name of the subdomain or the subdirectory can play an important role in search engine optimization, can now optimize their niche websites in the best possible ways where the domain names are concerned.

They can now create a lot of separate niche websites using the subdomain and the subdirectory options freely, and generate more profit opportunities with them. Even if one or some of those niche websites fail to generate any income, they can still depend up on plenty of other niche websites that were created with the above options.

The subdomain part of the URL is completely separate from the main site as far as the search engines are concerned. The various search engines, especially Google, does not treat the subdomains as part of the main website. This causes your subdomains to be treated as a separate website and gets all benefits of the major search engines’ benefits, including the search engine optimization factors.

You can study the success of about.com, which has utilized this method of using the subdomains and creating thousands of different niche websites under one main website, about.com. Its various high ranking niche topics are created as subdomains and interlinked across the entire subdomains to create a very successful brand name.

Of course, maintaining such a huge website with hundreds of subdomains can be a daunting task. Yet, the magnitude of the success achieved through this method can well be duplicated by you and others quite easily.

By using the subdomain or the subdirectory options, you get all these benefits without incurring the additional costs of purchasing separate domain names and paying their annual charges too. The hosting costs are also paid only once for the entire website because all the subdomains and the subdirectories are just the extensions of the main website.

With all these benefits, you have separate niche websites without additional costs and thus save hundreds of dollars worth of domain name purchase and their annual fees.

The downside to using the subdomain is that, as it is treated as a separate website by the search engines, you will have to create all search engine optimization techniques like creating back links to each subdomain separately along with other SEO techniques like submitting to website submission directories, creating additional subdomain-specific forum-related signature and external blog links, creating on-page and off-page optimization, separate niche specific content on vastly different niche topics, possibly different website designing to make each subdomain look unique. Other factors of web designing, development, and optimization will have to be undertaken as many times for each niche subdomain website.

The possibilities of creating new forums, paid or free membership sites, adsense ready sites, affiliate websites, and even powerful mini-sites are the additional benefits if you opt for niche subdomain sites. If some of these subdomains become very popular, then your online income opportunities will get a huge boost because your total expenditure is considerably low as you are using only one main website. The niche subdomains act as multiple revenue generating sites from different niche topics.

Although each different niche will require different content, you can acquire the help of expert writers to write them. The internet provides you with many websites where freelance content writers can be hired for nominal fees to write great content for your different topics. The internet itself is filled with content on every possible topic that can be researched to create high quality unique content for your different niche sites.

You can also use the control panel of your main site to create different platforms to create your subdomains.

For example, one niche site can use WordPress, while other can be based on Joomla, which is a very popular content management system (CMS). Another site can be a community forum, while yet another subdomain can an eCommerce website. You can also use the cPanel and Fantastico’s “Site Builder” option to quickly create entire sites.

As the subdomains are nothing but the subdirectories on your main website, the cPanel of your main website can be used to manage all the subdomains residing on the website as actual subdirectories of the main website. The cPanel can also be used to manage other normal subdirectories as well. Hence, the cPanel’s “Addon Domains” option can be used to create the subdirectory for each acquired domain name, and the “FTP Manager” and the “File Manager” can be used to populate those subdomains with the content pages.

The same “MySQL Database” function can be used to create databases for each subdomain, and the “Web/FTP Stats” can be used to view the statistics of every subdomain. In this way, you can use the main website to create multiple niche websites – each subdomain is treated as a separate website by the search engines – which broaden your opportunities of creating multiple online income earning opportunities.

With these options of creating additional websites by using the subdomains and the subdirectories and using creative and successful search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for these sites, your main website’s horizons grow exponentially in every direction. While creating these multiple websites, you must also take care to calculate your web space needs for all the sites, and any future growths expected.

Hence, it is also worthwhile to watch the performance of every site that has been created, especially those sites that are showing growth in popularity and the web traffic that it is getting periodically. Using the cPanel, you must also watch and record the monthly bandwidth used, the disk space usage, and the disk space that is still available.

This will reveal how your websites are performing monthly, and especially reveal the time of the year when your websites are are getting more web traffic. Your website would have more than sufficient resources if it is revealing signs of good growth.

You must also plan for future additions to these websites, and calculate the approximate disk space that will be required in future. It can be a difficult task, but this method will also reveal when you should plan to upgrade your existing hosting plan and get greater hosting resources like the disk space and bandwidth.

Hence, this mode of search engine optimization (through using the subdomain and subdirectory) is not an easy one, but the careful efforts are worth the successful results!