The Power of Subdomains
For those looking for a great way to create quality
web sites that are extremely cost effective and easy
to set up, subdomains are quite possibly your best
choice. We all know what a domain is, but many webmasters
are not yet familiar with the power and the many benefits
of subdomains, here are some tips.
What is a Subdomain?
In order to understand what a subdomain is, first
let's look at a regular domain. Most domains look
like the following; www.yoursite.com. Each domain
refers to a specific site on the web and the search
engines acknowledge each domain as a separate web
site. While many domains have several web pages, each
extra page is still considered the same site (for
instance, www.yoursite.com/baseball). While this is
an easy way to add extra pages to your web site, for
most web developers that would like to start web pages
on new categories (called niches), they usually will
purchase a new domain name to create each new niche.
Subdomains make the whole process of adding new niches
to a domain easy, affordable and with lots of added
value. A subdomain is considered a sub extension of
your already working domain. A subdomain is considered
to be a separate domain and entity from the domain
that it extends from. This means that all search engines
(including Google) see the subdomain as a unique domain.
Domains are created usually using your web hosting
administration panel. In order to create a subdomain,
the process usually takes a few minutes. For instance,
instead of adding web pages that are on completely
different topics to your website such as www.yoursite.com/baseball,
you can choose to create a subdomain, which is written
as follows: www.baseball.yoursite.com. You might have
noticed all we did is add the word "baseball"
and a dot before your domain name.
The Benefits of Subdomains
Subdomains are not as popular as regular domains,
because most webmasters are not aware of how easy
they are to create and all the benefits that they
can provide. Subdomains can be created on most web
hosting accounts, usually taking a couple of minutes
or less. There are many benefits of using subdomains;
however here are the top three.
First off, while domains are affordable (costing
about $10 for a .com), if you are a web developer
that is looking to create dozens of web sites, $10
adds up quickly. Many web developers purchase 50,
100 or even 1,000 domains to create web sites that
each bring in a small amount of income. Having 100
domains can easily cost $1,000 per year and once you
add in the web hosting costs and annual renewal fees,
you can easily see how quickly it can become expensive.
Subdomains cost $0. Subdomains are free to create,
whether you have 1 or 10,000.
Another benefit of subdomains is that all search
engines view subdomains as being unique from the regular
domain. To Google, www.yoursite.com/baseball and www.baseball.yoursite.com
are two unique sites. In essence, you get all the
benefits of having many websites, without the costs
of registering new domains sites and hosting them
separately. In fact, subdomains are easily hosted
on the same account as your normal domain (they just
show up as a separate folder).
Finally, subdomains are extremely easy to create.
You do not need a lot of technical expertise or special
software. If you want to create a few subdomains,
the process is relatively simple and straightforward,
however to create many subdomains at one time, the
process can be tedious and there are software tools
available to easily accomplish this task.
About the Author:
Henrik Wanner-Olsen Has been working behind scenes
for many years. He owns different great websites worth
a visit. One of them is, http://www.softwaremagic.org
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