Many people avoid using subdomains because they add a prefix to the name and don’t look quite right. A lot of people also believe that search engines overlook them.
Firstly, let me explain: there are two kinds of subdomains:
1. Second Tier subdomains: These are linked to, and link directly to, the main domain.
2. Orphan Subdomains: These have no links to or from the main domain.
Second Tier Subdomains
You have a website. You spend a lot of time building it, refining it and tweaking it to get the search engine results you are looking for, yet you don’t get visitors. By now we have all heard about the advantages of having a blog to promote your website. When I suggest this to my clients, the number one answer I get is, “Then I have to pay for another hosting package?” No, you don’t. You can put it on a subdomain. For example:
www.yoursite.com will be your main domain
blog.yoursite.com will be where your blog lives.
Once you have your blog, adding a link to it on your menu takes a couple of seconds, and voilà, your blog is up and running. This is the part where you start posting articles about your niche, your product or your service, and link to relevant pages on your website from each article. Search engines love fresh, useful content, and a good blog can earn links and attention quickly. Links from your blog to your main site also help visitors and search engines find your most important pages, especially when you link to specific pages rather than only your home page. (Many site owners now put their blog in a folder instead, such as yoursite.com/blog, which keeps all your content on one domain. Both approaches work.)
Orphan Subdomains
After pointing out the advantages of a second-tier subdomain, you might be wondering what an orphan subdomain is for.
An orphan subdomain is useful for anything you want to keep separate from your main website. For example, you can use one as a test or staging site, where you try out a new design or plugin before using it on your live site, or to run a separate project, such as an event site or a landing page for a campaign. You can also host a completely different product or brand on it without affecting your main site’s navigation. If you use a subdomain for testing, ask search engines not to index it (or protect it with a password), so its pages don’t compete with your main website in the search results. Search engines treat each subdomain much like a separate site, so its content won’t help or hurt your main domain’s rankings directly.