When to use a Subdomain and a Subdirectory

A year ago I wrote a post about subdomain vs subdirectory as there was a lot of discussion on which URL format to use.

People are still confused as to which format to use, mainly because Google keeps changing the game plan. Therefore I have written a post about the two different choices explaining both clearly.

Reasons to use subdirectories:

1) The content in the subdirectory benefits from the link authority from your domain.

2) If you have all your content in a subdirectory, the code is in the same file storage space making it easier to edit, find, change and move the code.

3) Simpler

Sometimes it is easier to use a subdirectory – Matt Cutts loves subdirectories – he set up mattcutts.com/blog to keep things simple.

Reasons to use subdomains:

1) Different content.

A subdomain works if your site has different content for its products. For example Google has subdomains for its distinct products such as maps, news – maps.google.com, news.google.com.

2) Localised content

Companies that have content for specific langauges or local areas use subdomains. Gumtree has a subdomain for it’s cities in Australia. For example http://sydney.gumtree.com.au/  while in London, the URL would be gumtree.com/london.

3) Restrictions from hosting company

If you already have a site and want to add blogging software to your site but your hosting company will not allow you to do so.  Therefore you will use a third-party blogging platform such as wordpress, blogger or typepad.  Your blog will therefore look like blog.wordpress.com instead of yoursite.com/blog.

Matt Cutts recommends using subdirectories if you are a new webmaster until you are confident with the architecture of your site. If you have a small site just stick with subdirectories.  If your site sells different key products and you want your site to be known for those, then set up subdomains.

Search Predictions for 2012

So 2012 is as begun, what does this year have in stall for us? Lets have a quick look at what my predictions were for seo 2011.

 
1) Integration between ppc, seo and social media
There is definitely and has been more of an integration between seo and social media last year.  From my personal experience with the panda update we did far more blogger outreach as a way of link building.  The social media team in my last agency doubled in size from mid 2010 until the end of 2011. SEO predictions for 2011

2) Local search
With the introduction of Google Places in September 2009 and then the merger of the local business centre in April last year, local search played a very important role in 2011.  A client at my last agency was keen to ensure for every store they had a Google Place.  Therefore we had to get all their stores whitelisted in order to automatically verify all the new shops.

 3) Mobile
Last year I said that people have been jumping on the mobile apps and mobile site bandwagon. I mentioned that mobile would be increasingly important in 2011 and it did.  For our clients, we had to have a mobile ppc strategy as well as a desktop strategy.  We had mobile ppc ads with our own ad groups and campaigns. 

So after reviewing 2011 predictions, we can now move onto 2012

1) Less spam

2011 we saw the Panda updates in an effort to crack down on the content farms on the web.  This will mean there will be less spam out from these content and article syndication sites and therefore they will be less important in terms of link building. Google will  continue to role out alogirthms to make sure users are getting quality search results, making sure that very low quality links to a site have no weight.

 2) SEO and Social will be one package

Link building through social media will be paramount to an seo strategy.  Blogger outreach where clients have content placed on third party authorative sites will have far more weight than using article sites.  An agency that offers seo without a social media strategy incorporated within it will find it harder to compete in the market place. Updates from Google such as Google + means seo needs to use social media if it wants to stay ahead as Google added Google+ brand pages in the search results  in December last year. 

3) Personlised and local seach

Google Plus – Facebook’s new rival

Last month, Google launched Google+ which is pretty much their attempt to jump onto the social media bandwagon. Before we jump into the stats from Hitwise, lets have a quick recap of What is Google+?

Google vs Facebook

Google+ brings all your contacts in one place, and lets you organise them into different groups. You can have a group for your work friends, school friends and so on. Google+ is made of five key areas:

* Circles — your friends hub. Instead of grouping everyone together as your “friend,” you can create different circles for the different types of people in your life like colleagues, relatives, tennis partners. It is very easy to make new groups and add contacts – drag and drop.
* Hangouts — this is where you can send a broadcast to your friends that you are online and want to chat face to face. You have everyone “hanging out” together – only virtually though. It is like a massive three, four way skype chat.
* Sparks — Designate your interests in Sparks, and Google+ will collect articles, videos, and photos of the things you love from around the web to read when you’re free (like an RSS reader). You can share these items with specific circles of friends instead of all of your friends.
* Instant Upload — With Instant Upload, your mobile photos and videos are automatically uploaded to the web. (So no worrying about backing up your media, you can have it stored online in your own cloud)
* Huddle — A group messaging system, Huddle allows you to chat with a number of friends on the go via your mobile phone.

So do you think Google+ will take off? Only time will tell. Hitwise have come up with the following interesting stats, so it looks like people are using it. I doubt they will give up on Facebook, so the battle between to the two search giants will continue.

- Google+ received more than 1.79M total visits the week ending July 23, 2011. That is a decrease of 3% vs. the previous week (July 16th). The site received 1.86M total visits the previous week
- The average time spent on the site was down as well by 10% from 5minutes and 50seconds to 5minutes and 15seconds
- Among the top 50 Upstream sites, 59% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from other Google properties. Google.com accounted for 37% of Upstream traffic to the site. Gmail accounted 15.59%, a 9% increase from previous week
- 40% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from Search Engines (8% increase). Email provided the 2nd largest amount of Upstream traffic accounting for 19%.
- 59% of visits to Google+ are from Males.
- Among age demos, 33% of visits are from users age 25-34 for the 4 weeks ending July 23rd.

I have yet to really engage with Google+. At the beginning, only those with invitations could use Google+ but now everyone has an invite.

Integration is Key – SEO, PPC and Social

I held a meetup last Thursday on the HMS President. We had two speakers:

Martin McDonald from seoforums.org
Matt Owen from Econsultancy

Martin McDonald kicked off the event with:

A brief history of search
Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up Backrub.com – yes that was the name before they changed it to Google. They were both students at Stanford University at the time. There were two search boxes. There was the option users to search Stanford University and also the web. In order to be seen within the search engine, you had to have keywords in the code of your site telling the engine what your site was about. This is now referred to as “Keyword Stuffing” and it did help many sites rank for 7 or 8 years.

What is PageRank?
PageRank is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of many factors used to determine which pages appear in search results. It was designed by Page and Sergey. The more links a site had to it, the higher the PageRank it could achieve. Therefore people started buying and selling links, trying to boost their own PageRank. This is not what Google intended and this is where social signals comes in.
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What is Google Social Search?

Google announced a product update last Thursday, May 19th – called Social Search.

Google first launched it in 2009 on google.com only. It was supposed to be, as they say “an experimental feature designed to help you find more relevant information from your friends and the people you care about.” We know Google, they keep developing their products and they introduced Google Plus 1 earlier this year. Now, Google are bringing Social Search to more users around the world.

Social search results in other languages and on other domains are mixed throughout the Google results page based on their relevance. If you are looking for a particular product, it will highlight blog posts, twitter feeds that you are connected to .

Click on the link which is a video showing how social search works.

Google Social Search

So what do these updates mean for those in online marketing? It means you need to make sure you are covering all bases. You have to be present on blogs, in forums, on twitter, have an active facebook page (although Google cannot work out Facebook’s algorithm that mean. Social Search will be rolling out globally in 19 languages and should be available in the coming week, with more languages on the way. You cannot ignore social anymore. It is here to stay, Google have also said they will be rolling out the + 1 feature soon.

Google is constantly updating its range of products and even launched its first blog dedicated to search last Wednesday. http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/ I know I will be checking this one out on a regular basis. Google certainly invest heavily in R&D and it has paid off. They are now the number one search engine in the west.

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How has the google panda update affected your site?

I have noticed whenever there is a change to the Google’s algorithm, everyone panics. Those that did not pay attention to seo before, suddenly sit up and take notice. The latest algorithm news was the panda or farmer update.

Why did Google introduce the Panda alogrithm?
They wanted to clean up the search engine results pages from low quality websites. Content farms and sites which that had a lot poor quality information were hit the most. Some of these included well known article syndication sites like Ezine Articles.

Google panda update

(source of photo: http://terry.henfleet.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Google-Big-Panda-Update2.jpg)

So how do you know if you have lost out on the update?
Check your rankings and your website traffic from the beginning of April until now. If you have lost traffic and rankings and year on year it is low, then you have been affected.

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Top 5 tips to optimise your blog

It is really simple and easy to set up your own website. One of the most common CMS (content management systems) is wordpress. This blog will highlight the key tips you should do to optimise your blog to help you appear higher in the search engine results (SERPs) and bring more traffic to your site.

1) All in one SEO Pack
A great wordpress plugin that allows you to add a title tag and meta description to each of your posts. This is important as each post will have a separate URL and therefore should have an optimised page title and meta description. This means you can optimise different posts for different keywords.

2) Tracking
You definitely need tracking in place. The easiest is google analytics, I wrote a post about how to install ga on your wordpress blog. It is important to see where your visitors are coming from, which sites and on what keywords. If you have done a lot of link building, you want to check that the links are sending traffic to your site and which sites are sending you the most.

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How to optimise your home page

Your home page is your most important page on your site. It is the portal to the rest of your website and therefore should have enough content and information to prevent your visitors from bouncing off. You need to keep them within the site and convert on sales (if you are selling products)

So how should you optimise your home page?

1. One of the most important elements in seo is the title tag.

The title tag tells users and search engines the topic of that particular page. The title tag should be placed within the tag of the HTML document. There should be a unique title for each page on your site and they appear in the search results as the below illustrates.

Title tag example from seojoblogs

The homepage is probably the only page on your site where the title tag should feature your brand early followed by relevant keyword second. Typically, this is opposite to how your title tags should read for your internal pages.

2. Optimise the metadescription

This tells the search engine what the page is about. It is a summary of the page. It also appears in the search engine result pages and should be compelling enough for users to click through. Like the title tag, the description meta tag is placed within the tag of your HTML document.

If you do not have a metadescription tag, other content from the page will be pulled through.

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The Panda is coming to the UK

What is the Panda update?

It is the major algorithm update to Google search with the aim to improve the quality of the search engine results. It started in the US at the end of February but has now rolled out across the UK. Many sites have seen their rankings drop which means they will be getting a lot less traffic following on from the update.

The Google Panda update hits the UK

(source of photo: http://terry.henfleet.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Google-Big-Panda-Update2.jpg)

The panda update has received a lot of criticism. The product comparison sites, reviews and voucher sites came off badly from the Panda update. Ciao’s UK site lost 94% of its SEO visibility after the update went live in the UK earlier this week. Ciao is the shopping comparison site owned by Microsoft and Ciao along with other Microsoft sites including Foundem and ejustice.fr complained to the EU that Google was abusing its dominant position by lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competitor services in November.
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What is the Google Plus One

Unless you have all been living offline for the past two weeks, then you would have seen Google’s new product – the +1.

What is Google +1?

It was announced on 30th March, posted on the Google blog by product manager, Rob Spiro. Google basically is jumping on the social media bandwagon and many reference the +1 as similar to the Facebook like button. To recommend something, users will click the +1 on a webpage or ad. The +1s will start appearing in Google’s search results.

Google +1

So I bet you are all asking whether this will affect the natural search listings. The answer is yes. If you have two websites all with the same page rank, optimised pages, lots of link building and one site has more +1s than the other, then that site will rank higher. This means you still have to optimise your pages, this update reinforces how important seo is.

Here is a little bit of blurb for the search engine giants Google:

“So how do we know which +1’s to show you? Like social search, we use many signals to identify the most useful recommendations, including things like the people you are already connected to through Google (your chat buddies and contacts, for example). Soon we may also incorporate other signals, such as your connections on sites like Twitter, to ensure your recommendations are as relevant as possible. If you want to know who you’re connected to, and how, visit the “Social Circle and Content” section of the Google Dashboard.

To get started +1’ing the stuff you like, you’ll need to create a Google profile—or if you already have one, upgrade it. You can use your profile to see all of your +1’s in one place, and delete those you no longer want to recommend. To see +1’s in your Google search results you’ll need to be logged into your Google Account.”

When will it appear?
Google will slowly be rolling out +1’s, starting in English on Google.com. You can also see what it looks like before the launch be going to Google’s experimental search site. Initially, +1’s will appear alongside search results and ads, but in the weeks ahead they’ll appear in many more places (including other Google products and sites across the web). If you’re an advertiser and want to learn more about how the +1 button works on search ads and websites, visit our AdWords blog.

Google did say at the beginning of the year and at Search London – New Year Search Club that 2011 was the year for social, so keep a look out on the updates coming out this year.

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