ok guys, One of my sites is a niche site that is focused currently on one county of the UK. It is expanding and soon I am going to be covering more regions. I have a dilemma though. My domain/brand name has one of my main keywords in it, however I plan to use the area keywords in subdomains or to buy a list of new domains and use them.. (for an hypothetical example only, 'plantsworld' where 'plants' is the keyword!) The idea is to either create a load of subdomains of my current main domain. (around 30 subdomains or new domains will be utlilised at first) eg// http://london.plantsworld.com where the keywords Im targetting are 'london plants' and the same for a whole raft of other areas, like http://essex.plantsworld.com etc or// The other option is to register a whole batch of new domains (with the consequent problems a brand new freshly regged domain name brings to the scenario).. for example: londonplantsworld.com and so on. The sub sites or subdomain pages will rank for the targetted keyowords and will each have a custom landing page for that area. When a user has landed they can do a product search and they are cunningly routed through to our main site where there product search results are displayed (thats the plan anyway!) So I'm seeking opinions from other SEO'ers please... Which would you go for? Buy the New domains and tough it out for 12 months until they are aged and established? I can get them indexed fast and can link them all from the main site which is PR5 but I know they wont rank for a good while and I will have to build their PR as I go along.. or/ Create subdomains of the main site in question and have the same problems as above ... I know G treats subdomains as a new domain in relation to PR but Im not sure how it thinks about the 'domain age' issue? I would guess it will strongly favour subdomains in terms of ranking faster for these keywords but I could be wrong. Ive seen a competitor do it in a different niche and it seems to work very well for him. Thanks for the input folks
In your case I would stick to the subdomain. Your Web site is about UK plants, and each subdomain on the Web site would focus on a particular county within the UK and the plants contained therein. This is considered to be a very good use of subdomains. Besides, you'll also be able to keep people on your Web site, and once they figure out that the subdomains refer to counties, I'm sure they'll just start typing in their county of choice just to see if you have a subdomain for it.
you should be using subdomians for few reasons in your case. if you register new domain, you have to wait till google indexes those sites and get them ranked. since you have an existing site, you don;t have to worry about a new domain indexing and the time it takes to get out of sandbox (in some cases). also, your current site can pass some PR juice to the subdomains to get them ranked high relatively faster.
I wouldn't go with the subdirectory in this case. As I said before, he has related groups of separate content that are part of the same site. I'd save the directories for the contents of the various subdomains. Remember, building a Web site is not all about SEO.