SEO Mistake #3: Spreading Your Content Over Multiple Domains
Domain names are practically a dime a dozen these days. And who doesn’t know someone who has at least that many in their portfolio? Purchasing a new domain is as easy as hopping out of bed at 3 a.m., doing a quick search to see if it’s available and whipping out your credit card.
Setting up a new site to go along with your shiny new domain name can be just as quick and easy with some of the site builder tools and blog tools out there. And Viola! There’s a shiny new WordPress site ready to go.
It’s so easy to do, and there are so many reasons that make setting up a new domain name sound good. But from an SEO perspective, is it really the smart thing to do?
When You Should Use a New Domain Name ws Sub-Domain
Sometimes it does make sense to use a new domain name or to setup a sub-domain. (For those who don’t know, a sub-domain is a part of a larger domain and the subdomain name is added before the top-level domain with a period, e.g. subdomain.topleveldomain.com.)
If you’re selling a single product, such as an e-book, and you have an army of affiliates that will want to send their customers to a single domain and sales letter page that has nothing but the product to purchase on it, then multiple domains may be a good idea.
Or, if you’re company provides information on multiple, unrelated topics, you may want to setup a website for each topic. For example, if you have an online store and a place where you talk about and support the brand you sell, would benefit from separate domain names (like a store.topleveldomain.com and a support.topleveldomain.com).
Using a sub-domain makes sense if you’re setting up a monstrous website like About.com with multiple content categories that need to be completely separate from one another – but still under the same domain name. Sub-domains are also useful if your company offers several completely different products. For example, Google uses sub-domains in this manner: maps.google.com, news.google.com, mail.google.com.
When You Should NOT Use Multiple Domain Names or Sub-Domains
That said; you need to make sure your customers or visitors can navigate your site easily and that you consider the impact of a separate domain or sub-domain on your SEO efforts before you start building.
The first question you need to ask yourself before you start building is why you need more than one domain name or sub-domain.
If your reasoning is so that you can take over the search engine results pages (SERPs) with several websites, go back to the drawing board.
This is a bad idea from an SEO standpoint because the search engines frown upon the practice of having multiple sites with essentially the same content. Anytime you’re attempting to deceive the search engines, you’re walking on thin ice with your site’s credibility in the eyes of the search engines.
That’s just the SEO perspective. Unless you have an army of website updaters and content writers, keeping each of your sites fresh and meeting the needs of your visitors is going to be nearly impossible.
It’s best to keep similar content, or content that targets the same market, on one site and in one sub-domain. Think long and hard about what impact you’ll have and what your motives are before you branch out.
Stay tuned for next week's SEO article. Or, stop by the new website of Volition and get a jump with your own personalized site review.
Save Your Small Business Marketing Budget With Google Analytics On Your Website
Google offers a free statistical tool to analyze your website visitors. It is called Google Analytics and it can save your small business marketing budget. It is very easy to use. Once you sign up with the service and add the URL of your website, you get a snippet of Java Script code that you add onto every web page you want to track (they tell you exactly where to copy and paste it, so it's simple enough for beginners even).
The key to this is that Google Analytics tracks visitors from all sources, including display ad campaigns, PPC (pay per click) campaigns, organic searches from search engines, email marketing, bookmarks, websites that have your inbound links, and other digital sources like URLs embedded in PDF files or Power Point slides.
Why would you want to do this, you might ask? If you know that the last local flyer campaign that cost $25 inspired 32 people to visit your website, and your postcard campaign which cost $125 inspired only 7 people to go to your website, you might make different decisions with your marketing budget, wouldn't you?
You want to know if your marketing campaign is going in the right direction or not. For example, if you are doing article marketing to drive traffic to your site, you want to know the article directories that are the most effective in sending visitors to your website.
You don't want to waste your time submitting articles to directories that are not sending you any traffic or a very low amount of traffic. You can write more articles and submit to only those directories that are sending you a good amount of traffic.
If you are using a pay per click (PPC) marketing campaign, you can use split testing to test the effectiveness of different ads. You want to know which ads are performing better than the others in terms of conversions. If you integrate Google Analytics with your AdWords PPC campaigns, you will be able to track the effectiveness of each ad you are using in your PPC campaigns.
Using data from Google Analytics, you will be able to find the pages that are getting the most traffic from search engines, bookmarks and inbound links. Knowing this information helps you spend time on optimizing only those pages that are getting the most traffic and, if necessary, change the navigation of the site so your most important pages get the number of visitors you would like.
You can work on providing improved user experience of your site on those high traffic pages. Make it easy to navigate those pages from anywhere in your site. Place a "What is new" about your site on those pages.
If you're selling ads on your site to advertisers directly, you need a visitors portfolio of your site. This portfolio contains information about the number of monthly unique visitors to your site, visitors' geographic locations, the number of page views per visitor, the bounce rate of visitors, etc.
Google Analytics will help you develop a visitors portfolio, or even help you flesh out the details of specific personas for your site. The more information about your visitors you have, the easier it is to make decisions about how to increase your business.
At Starfire Creative, we use Google Analytics on every new site we build to give us as much information as possible. After all, knowledge is power.
Even if you are not going to use the power of Google Analytics immediately, you can still sign up for Google Analytics and let the tool start collecting visitors data about your site. When you need the data, you will have it in your Google Analytics account.
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