Site Structure Question

I'm building a site around the first really promising keyword niche I've found since learning exactly what that means (ie high search volume, mediocre competition), and I really want to get everything right.

It's going to be a large static content site, and I've read in the forums a few times that attaching a blog to such a site can really help you in the SERPs for various reasons.

My question is this. What is the most effective place to put the blog? Would it be blog.sitename.com or sitename.com/blog? Do the links I build to the subdomain count towards the overall backlink count of the parent domain? I feel like blog.sitename.com is more professional, but I want to make sure I optimize my SEO efforts.

Thanks for any help.

Most people agree that a subdomain is a one way path so blog.yoursite.com will pass google love to yoursite.com but yoursite.com will not pass rank to blog.yoursite.com... unless there are links of course, which I'm assuming there will be?

I normally use sitename.com/blog and make sure there are links going from the static site to the blog and from the blogroll and header back to the main site. Put a big targeted ping list on and some seo plugins and you are away. Everytime you update your blog it'll be automatically promoted which will encourage spiders to your static site.

why go with "blog" at all? go with your keyword and all posts will juice up that keyword eg... yourdomain.com/yourkeyword and your link on main page can have the achor text BLOG..

Thanks for the tips...I'm going to go with keywordblog.sitename.com

S7apster said:

Thanks for the tips...I'm going to go with keywordblog.sitename.com

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I wouldn't do that. There is no clear cut answer as to how google feels about blog.domain.com and they change their stand every couple of months. On the other side, it you cannot go wrong with domain.com/blog in any way so that would be your best bet if you want to future proof your website.

I definately wouldn't subdomain your blog.

The point of attaching a blog to your site is that you update it regularly and it encourages Google crawl + Trust Rank. If your going to stick in under a subdomain your going to be losing a % of the juice for no reason at all.

My 2 cents.

I totally agree with you on this one.

A subdomain is recognized as an independent domain itself. Yes, it will give you a small % of blacklink juice to your main domain property. However, Google will then begin to rank them over time as completely seperate domains, as they see the two properties that way.

Proof of this point is in any web 2.0 property that allows use affiliate/sub domain pages to represent them, such as; squidoo and hubpages, that actually create subdomains for you as username.squidoo.com, etc.

That is part of their property and they link reference back to those links within the anchor texts of both pages, pulling power back and forth. However, over time, if the sub domain loses traffic pull, popularity, due to content age that happens with every article post...it will die off.

IF you feel you must go with the sub domain route, use them as seperate domains, as google will use them and rank them that way as well.

Talsin said:

I definately wouldn't subdomain your blog.

The point of attaching a blog to your site is that you update it regularly and it encourages Google crawl + Trust Rank. If your going to stick in under a subdomain your going to be losing a % of the juice for no reason at all.

My 2 cents.

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