Online Marketing - Marketing Don

How To Stay In Business In 2009

Posted by Al Scillitani on February 9, 2009 – 8:21 am

Let’s face it, it is harder to sell your products today than it was 12 months ago.  Not only is it harder, but net revenues are dropping.  With all the discounts, promotions, and coupons to encourage sales, net revenues are getting smaller and smaller.  On top of all of this, it actually looks like it might be getting worse before it gets better.   There are a few things you can do to get through these tough times. 

In 2009, you are not going to make more money from selling each product online.  One the ways to compensate for this loss is to sell more of each product.

Think “dollar store” marketing rather than trying to hit that home run and sell a few products at a huge profit margin.   You normally sell 500 products a day at a net profit of $20 each ($10,000 a day).  You are now seeing not only the number of sales drop to 400 a day, but your net profit dropped to $15 ($6,000 a day).   In today’s economy it is going to be very difficult to bump up your net profits, so the alternative is to increase the number of orders.  To match your previous revenue number of $10,000 per day, you will need to sell about 667 products a day instead of 500 you were selling (667 products x $15 = $10,000). So let’s take a look at increasing products sales. 

STEP 1: Increase your current revenue streams

1. Increase the number of paid search engines
I will assume you are selling your products in Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN Adcenter already.  It’s time to explore and test those 2nd and 3rd tier engines.  Remember, we are not looking for blow out revenue numbers.  We are simply looking to increase the number of orders while maintaining a positive return on investment.  Even if the other main paid engines are generating tens of thousands of dollars a month and these little 2nd and 3rd tiers are only netting $500 to $1000 each, keep them open.  You will see why in a minute.  Examples of some 2nd tier engines are Ask.com, 7search, MIVA, search123, and there are various niche ones and country specific ones as well if you search for them online.

2. Increase the number of shopping engines
If you are not in Google base and you sell products online, I want you to stop reading this article, go to your google account, sign up and get your products in their asap.  It is 100% free.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but you have absolutely nothing to lose.  We sell a lot of products through google base.  Did I mention it was FREE!!!  If you are already using shopping engines, using the same concept as above, add more of them. 
 
Here is a list of some shopping engines (in no particular order):
Google Base FREE
The Find FREE
Yahoo shopping
Shopping.com
MSN shopping
Bizrate
Like
Shopzilla
PriceGrabber
Nextag
Smarter
Become
Shop.com

Monitor everything closely at first, but once they get going, again, you can generate anything from a lot to a little bit more per engine.

All said and done, let’s you are averaging $1000 a month each.  Depending on the size of your company, you may think individually this is not worth it, however in these slow, low margin times, when you add up those 5 new second tier engines and 5 new shopping engines at $1000, you are at $10,000 a month.  This side extra $10,000 a month could mean the difference between layoffs or closing up shop.

3.  This one has to do with search engine optimization and usability best practices.  I am not going to go to deep into them because they are all over the internet, but will add a quick list of must do’s:

a. Each product/service should have its own webpage
b. Each page of your website should have a totally unique title tag, meta tag, and content.  If you sell red sticks and blue sticks, do not simply replace the words “red” and “blue” on those product pages and tags.  The tags and content need to be 100% unique.  By doing this, you may add 1000’s of pages to the search engines search results and increase your chances of long tail sales dramatically.
c. Go through your website as if you were going to buy something.  Ask a friend to do that as well.  You will be surprised by what you see.  “Buy” button hard to find? Once you find the product are there clear instructions on what to do next? How long is your check out process?  Is it simple, fast, and easy to buy your product or service?
d. Using your analytics program, which is an absolute must have, look at your bounce rates, and where people are leaving your site.  Why are they leaving?  Also, it is time to start testing! Test upsell pages and adding x/y promotions.  Test different promotion modules- is “Save Up To 50%” better than “Free Shipping?”

STEP 2:  Time to add new multiple stream of income
It is time to step back from your business.  You look at your business everyday and you are immersed in it.  It is time to step back and look at your business as if you were an outside consultant.  What are you missing? Do you sell shoes?  Are there popular brands or models you are not selling?  Get those brands and start selling them.   Do you have an affiliate program?  Look into starting an affiliate program and have others sell your products for you.
What payment types do you accept?  Do you ship overseas?  By simply adding PayPal as a payment method you may increase the number of sales not just due to the addition of a new way for your customers to pay, but our overseas sales increased as well because it is a trusted source of international payments.  Remember, we are not looking for one home run, we are looking to increase the number of sales through multiple channels and “payment method” is just another channel.

Posted in Online Marketing | 1 Comment »

Yahoo Is Stealing Your Money

Posted by Al Scillitani on December 9, 2008 – 8:08 am

Yahoo Sponsored Search emailed me the email below.  They are basically saying they went into my Yahoo paid search account and made changes to it.  After they made the changes (that is my main complaint), they emailed me about the changes and informed me about their new program.

They added a couple of new ads and new campaigns (with new budgets).  One of the ads had a promotion code in it.  That code expires.  Were they going to keep checking when the code expired and then pause the ad or leave it running so people would click and not buy because the promo was over (either way, Yahoo gets paid).

So, what new program? The program where Yahoo goes into customers accounts:

1. Not knowing conversion data so they do not know which terms are actually generating income and which are not
2. Not knowing the products, margins, or inventory of the products you are selling
3. Yahoo tries to increase clicks, increasing my costs, and generating more revenue for Yahoo – Huge conflict of interest!
4. Plays with the account owners money without prior approval
5. Not knowing any restrictions that the account owner may have with merchants and manufacturers as far as terms they are allowed to use for ad copy or bid placement restrictions.

What would be the difference if I had money in a bank savings account and a bank stock broker, that I do not know, went into my savings account and bought some stock, using that money, without knowing my investment portfolio, diversification needs or retirement goals.  Then after he bought the stock, emails me and to tell me what they did with MY money.

I would like to hear from others and your feelings about this new program.  Here is the email:
Yahoo! is committed to the success of account “account name” and we believe there is an opportunity to provide you with improved performance.

To help you save time and get the most out of your campaigns, we are launching a new automatic account optimization program. It’s intended to help raise the performance of accounts that are experiencing issues like low quality scores, low lead volume or low click-through rates.

And the best part is, we will do the work for you: Our content developers will use their search advertising experience to help your marketing dollars go further.

What we will keep an eye out for:
-    Search ads with low click-through rates relative to competitors
-    Ad testing not in use? missing an opportunity to optimize ad copy
-    Ad groups that have a quality index score of 2 or lower

How we can help:
-    Create new ads for existing ad groups, enabling ad testing
-    Write multiple versions of ads for any new ad groups we create, enabling the use of ad testing to help ensure that the best-performing ads are displayed more often
-    Search our database for keywords that can drive more targeted traffic to your site

In short, our goal is to make sure that your account is firing on all cylinders–and do this while keeping your existing keywords and without exceeding your spending limits!

As always, you are in control of your account. If we make any optimization changes to your account through this program, we will notify you by email, and you can let us know whether the account changes are positively affecting your account. Also, you are welcome to contact your account manager to review, edit or ask us to reverse any of the changes. Finally, if you do not wish to participate in this program, you may opt out by contacting your account manager.

We’ve identified keywords and ads in your account that are significantly underperforming, and we’ve initiated the changes to the creatives that you will find attached.

We are very excited about this new program, and hope it will provide you with improved performance and a higher level of service. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
I highly recommend everyone immediately contacts their account manager, or clicks the contact link in their account, and lets Yahoo know that you do not want to be part of this program.

Posted in PPC | 22 Comments »

Personalization: Don’t Jump Out The Window Just Yet!

Posted by Al Scillitani on November 21, 2008 – 8:35 am

All the talk right now seems to be about Google’s Personalization and how it will affect the rankings and your sales.  It is all doom and gloom.  After reading some of the articles and hearing people speak, you feel like shutting down your sites and giving up.  They discuss how your ranking will now drop and there is nothing you can do about it.  Well I am here to tell you, it is not doom and gloom and probably 90% of you will not even notice a drop in sales or leads.

That is right, optimistic Al says, “if you have been adhering to SEO best practices, most will not notice any drop is sales or leads due to personalization.”  As many of my blog readers know, I won’t leave it at that, I am going to outline some things you should do and why your site will probably not be affected. 

Here goes:

First let’s try to figure out why Google started personalization.  It makes complete sense to me that they would want to do it.  If someone searches a broad term, like “soccer,” are they looking for news about soccer, do they want to purchase soccer balls, looking to buy soccer apparel, are they looking for a soccer league to join, etc..  Google will see that you have been searching and viewing daily news about soccer and may start bumping some of those more relevant sites that were in positions 7 and 8 to higher positions.  Makes sense and is good for the searcher and for Google (always keep the word “relevant” in mind).

Now, why is it important for you to understand that?  People are searching smarter.  It is very unlikely a person that types in “soccer” is ready to immediately buy soccer equipment.  If someone wants to buy soccer shoes, or better yet have a brand they like, and search for “Adidas soccer shoes” or cleats, I will bet the personalization will not negatively affect the rankings of this search. As people learn more and more about personalization and searching, they will search for more specific things when they want to buy.  If someone searched “adidas adiPURE TRX FG cleats” Google will not be serving tons of press releases and news articles to people even if they searched some soccer related news articles a couple of times before.  I also feel as searchers get more educated they will be using “buy,” “discount,” “sale,” and other “ready to purchase” terms in their searches which will bring the highly relevant stores selling these products to the top.

In a nutshell, personalization may affect the less relevant one keyword searched broader terms more than specific long tail terms.  As many in ecommerce know, the long tail is the most relevant, highest converting traffic.

I try not to ever talk in absolutes.  I have helped optimize 100’s of accounts from mom and pops to Lowes Home Improvement and Motorola and I know first hand all sites are not created equal.  I can not say personalization will never hugely affect a specific site, but I will say it is not all doom and gloom.  Most will not even notice any changes to revenue solely due to personalization, some may see a slight drop, some may see a slight increase and there actually are things you can do to help your site.  Here are a few things you can do to help reduce, or possibly eliminate, the affects of personalization.  Basically, these 3 simple things will help Google a) understand what is on your site, b) who your potential customers are, and c) where information is located on your site.  All of these suggestions have been written about before, nothing earth shattering, but now that you have a better understanding of personalization, you can see why these recommendations are even more important and how they will help.

1. Descriptive Unique Title and Description Tags
The long tail is going to be even more important with personalization.  Every single one of your products/pages MUST have a unique title and description tag.  The tags must contain the specific product/service you are offering and possibly other information as needed.
2. Write for the User, Write for the User, Write for the User!!
Did I mention write for the user?  Describe the product or service in the body of the page as if someone walked up to you and asked about it.  Use the specific product/service name, similar words (example- shoes, footwear), and be thorough.
3. Use a Google Site Map

Lastly, if your traffic and sales have been dramatically affected by personalization for a particular search term, and after checking with many people on multiple computers it appears your competitors has not been affected, then it may be your site.  Why do I say that?  If many people search a term like “soccer cleats” and you feel your competitors ranking stayed the same, but only you dropped, you have to ask yourself “why does Google think my competitors site is more relevant for that term?”  Review the competing sites title, description, and content and compare it to yours.  Try to get backlinks with that keyword adtext.  Again, this falls back to best practices.

If Google does make a mistake and ends up dropping the rank of your site and of your competitors for a converting term, you have another tool you should be using to compensate for these lost sales (notice I didn’t write lost traffic, I wrote lost sales), Paid Search!  Take advantage of this opportunity and run some highly relevant, compelling, ads with great calls to action.  This may be only a temporary glitch.  Your paid search manager will be your hero!

Conclusion:  Relax, take a deep breath and follow SEO best practices.  Personalization is your friend and is simply a feature Google created to serve relevant (there is that word again) sites to their users requests.  You obviously made it through the “Universal Search” doom and gloom hysteria, you can make it through this as well.

I would love to hear you feedback on what I wrote and from people that have experienced any changes to their site due to personalization (good or bad). 

Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »

Google Webinar Summary October, 2008

Posted by Al Scillitani on October 23, 2008 – 11:01 am

 

Summary of Google Webinar October 22, 2008

With Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik

 

You will not receive a penalty for duplicate content.  However, only one page will be served.  Create Sitemap to help Google decide which page to show.

See my duplicate content post.

 

If you submit your site to 1000’s of search engines, it will not help you.

I did notice they used the term “search engines” and not “directories.”

 

Adding adsense or other Google sponsored products will not hurt your ranking in anyway.

 

There is not an optimal keyword density to shoot for.

Tru dat!

 

XML sitemaps do not hurt your rankings

 

Once your site is in Google, you do not need to continually submit your site.

 

Just because your site is ranking well, that does not mean you should just leave it alone.

 

Valid code does not help site ranking.

This may be true, but if the bots can find information and you pages better/faster, I think you should do it.

 

Disallow in robots.txt will still index landing page.  You must still add no index/no follow if you want to block it completely.

 

Shared IP hosting will not affect site in any way.

Hmmm… I am not 100% convinced on this one?

 

If you find old 404 pages in the Google, 301 them to correct page.

 

Google PageRank, plus over 200 factors, are looked at to determine the positioning of a site.

 

Use Google Webmaster Tools to find indexing and crawling errors.

 

For subdomains vs subcateories, use what is easiest for yourself and users.  Even though engines treat subdomains as separate domain, they stated not to base it that.

I wrote about subdomains as well

 

You can set up country specific subdomains or subcategories in webmaster tools

 

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

Increasing Online Conversions In Tough Economic Times

Posted by Al Scillitani on October 21, 2008 – 7:14 am

I recently created a paid search account for a new website. I intentionally created multiple ads with

a) Different verbiage for saving percents
b) Gift with purchase ad

I wanted to see what increases click thru rates and mainly conversions for one of our ecommerce sites.

Here are some of the results so far. Hopefully you will find them as interesting as I did.

- Using targeted sports related terms as an example, the lowest ad CTR in the last 5 days was 20% and the highest 46.25%. This was most likely increased due to the email, press releases, posted on social sites, blogs, etc… but still very interesting to see the high amount of interest in the site.

- Ads with “save over 60%” had a slightly higher click thru rate than ads with “Save up to 70%”   (40.31% vs 35.08%)

- Gift with purchase for targeted terms, is the key
The gift with purchase ad I created had a click thru rate in the above group of 34.50% which was actually lower than some of the other ads. HOWEVER! The conversion rate of this ad was much higher.  The highest CTR ad (42.19%) was an ad using keyword insertion and had a conversion rate of 1.0% with a lower number of total conversions.  The Free Hat with Purchase ad had a CTR of 34.50% but a conversion rate of 3.7% and tripled the number of total conversions.

This is even more dramatic in other adgroups.  In the another adgroup, the highest CTR ad (16.4%) had zero conversions, the Free Hat With Purchase ad (CTR 12.72%) had 2 conversions for a 4.7% conversion rate.

For broader keyword groups, I found different results.  Other ads ended up with a higher CTR 5.64% vs 2.80% for the gift with purchase ad.  The difference here is, the other ads converted about the same percentage, but generated more conversions/revenue.  In the end, the other ads converted 5 times more customers than the free gift with purchase ads.

Conclusions:

1. People are still clicking on ads and looking.  They may not be buying as much as they used to right now, but they are still looking.  Overall visits have not dramatically decreased, which adds to this conclusion.
2. “Save over” is preferred to “save up to”
3. The gift with purchase works for generating revenue.  If you offer free shipping promotions, you may be better off giving a gift with purchase if the gift cost is lower than your shipping costs.  Higher conversions and less overall cost.  I think conversions were higher for targeted terms with the gift because these customers may have been ready to buy.  They searched a targeted term, knew what they wanted, and just needed a little incentive to buy.  The broader terms, the gift may not have been an incentive because they were not planning to buy.  Once they got to the site, they ended up buying – which could have been partly due to the hat promo on the site, but what got them there was the keyword insertion ad or ad that came close to their keyword search rather than the gift.

Targeted keywords = gift ads    Much broad keywords = match search query ads

4. Lastly, I read and write articles on paid search and many other writers focus on higher click thru rates.  Higher CTR does not always mean higher revenue. I have read many articles that state to create multiple ads and then pause the 2 with the lowest CTR.  I have argued this point before, but still get a lot of push back.  This test legitimized my own little challenge test: For ecommerce sites, “Higher CTR does not always mean higher revenue.”  I will take a well written/targeted lower CTR ad with a higher number of conversions over a higher CTR ad with little or no conversions any day of the week.

Posted in PPC | 4 Comments »

Is Social Media Killing Social Media?

Posted by Al Scillitani on July 24, 2008 – 10:47 am

With everyone trying to “get in” on the social media bandwagon, will the influx of unprepared and mismanaged social media programs and millions of nonsense postings deter people from using them?

Let’s discuss the first issue, unprepared and mismanaged social media programs.  Seems like everyday another program pops up.  Either a new one with new functionality or a new one trying to make a current program you are using more functional.  It is way to confusing.  Then you finally sign up to find out it sucks and no one is using it anymore.  By the end of the month you are now a member of 15 sites that you no longer visit. 

Another problem with these programs are their capabilities and capacities.  It frustrating as hell to sign into a program only to find the program is down.  It seems like people are creating programs with no vision or plan.  They are building the program and then waiting to see if it works and what it evolves into.  This isn’t necessarily a bad idea (let the people decide what it will be become), however you have to be ready and adapt accordingly.  You see an influx of users, immediately expand.  You see the users starting to complain for more functionality, immediately create this functionality.  The current programs are not scalable nor are they ready for change due to poor planning.

Second issue is the actual content being posted.  I will admit, sometimes I post a comment or blog about something that will not interest 99.9999% of people.  I am talking about the people the post just to post over and over.  There are millions of them.  These posts show up in search results or end up getting read because I clicked to follow them on Twitter, but didn’t realize they never have anything to say.  I end up unfollowing, but it still wasted my time and I just end up following someone else hoping for some real conversation.

I think time is the key to all of this.  When you think about it, how many hours a day do you spend on blogs, twitter, and other sites?  Out of those hours, how much time was wasted because you got absolutely no beneficial information at all?  This is why social media will end up killing itself.  There is still no real definition of what social media is and is not, no definite way to track ROI on the time you are spending on these sites, and it is growing so fast there is no way to filter out useless information and prevent thousands of broken programs from being created.

Britekite, Twitter, and all of these are great, but unless a company gets out there and defines social media and brands itself as the leader, I am not sure the social media hype will be around much longer.  Unless this happens, my prediction is in a few years people will revert back to reading trusted forums and blogs and that is about it.  It is much easier and much less time consuming for me to go to SearchEngineWatch.com and read posts from Nathania Johnson then to read 20 blog posts and go to 10 social media sites.  Let someone else filter out the junk and post the quality information you are looking for.  It is kind of the theory behind “The 4-Hour Workweek,” by Timothy Ferriss.  People will start to outsource their information gathering.

Posted in Social Media | 7 Comments »

Google Showing Search Volume Numbers

Posted by Al Scillitani on July 9, 2008 – 7:52 am

Google is now showing actual search numbers in it’s Adwords Keyword tool.  I logged into my account as I normally do and added terms to the keyword tool within one of my adgroups, POOF!  Numbers were showing how many times those terms were searched on average for the previous month. 

Posted in PPC | No Comments »

Creating Unique Content For Google

Posted by Al Scillitani on June 10, 2008 – 8:02 am

Some of what I am about to write may not be new to some of you, others will be blown away.  I have been researching what Google defines as duplicate content for a few years now.  I want to share what I have found.

December 18, 2006 Adam Lasnik (you may remember him, he is the Google employee that sent me the pain killers) wrote an article about Duplicate Content

Adam wrote: “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” This all makes sense to me.  Google does not want the top ten results to show identical content.  This wouldn’t be good for the original writer of the content, nor Google searchers.  What I am looking for is, what is the definition of “appreciably similar?”  Google will not post what percent of the content must be different to be seen as different content. 

In the latest article written by Google Team Member Sven Naumann, posted June 9, 2008,  Duplicate Content Due To Scrapers Sven writes,

Generally, we can differentiate between two major scenarios for issues related to duplicate content:

• Within-your-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content which (often unintentionally) appears in more than one place on your site
• Cross-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content of your site which appears (again, often unintentionally) on different external sites

For “Within-your-domain-duplicate-content” Sven recommends blocking what you don’t want Google to claim as the main content and using the Sitemap to tell Google which page is the main one.

For “Cross-domain” content, Sven writes, “we look at various signals to determine which site is the original one, which usually works very well. This also means that you shouldn’t be very concerned about seeing negative effects on your site’s presence on Google if you notice someone scraping your content.”

One of the most important sentences in Sven’s entire post is, “I’d like to point out that in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site’s presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out.”

So what does this mean to you?  This means if you sell the same products that a major brand sells and a 100 other sites sell, if your content is the same or similar, it will most likely not rank because Google will deem the brands website “original one.”  Your product page will be filtered out and not shown in the top results.

One thing I would like to add, that is not discussed in either article, is your title and description tags.  Even though these are only a sentence or two, I had tested and noted that duplicate description tags will be considered duplicate content and will cause Google to “filter out” pages.  You should have unique title and description tags anyway, but same or similar tags will have a dramatic affect on your indexing/ranking of pages.

So, what is the magic number that Google uses to deem a page similar?  In my opinion, there isn’t one.  Like Google’s algorithm, it is very complex and based on several factors (vertical, theme, how many words are on the page, site layout, density, sentence structure, proximity of words, etc…)  For all websites, you can not randomly say, “if you change 20% of your copy, Google will treat it as unique.”  Basically, you want the bot to think your page is unique even though it contains a lot of the same information, but is worded differently than other sites.

To get cross domain similar pages and articles indexed, you can either add totally new content or try my recommendations below:

1. 100% unique title and description tags.  Don’t even look at the other sites tags.
2. Depending on the amount of copy, try not to have more than 2 sentences in a row exactly the same within the page.  The first few sentences of the copy must be different.  There are ways to change the wording, but still say the same thing.  This is key is trying to get your point across without duplication.
3. Re-arrange the paragraph order.  If there are 3 paragraphs, can the middle one be worded so that it can be moved to the first position?  This combined with re-arranging some of the sentences will help the page appear unique to bots. 
4. Remember, Google is looking at density, number of words, theme, etc.. so adding a new unique SEO optimized first paragraph will help.  Change some of the words towards the end of the page using a thesaurus.  For example, if you have a page selling a particular brand and model shoe, towards the bottom page add the term “footwear” replacing some of “shoe” text. 
5. If you have 100’s or 1000’s of pages like this, there are ways to automate the process.  It is easier when adding new pages.  The title tags can be created based on the unique new title you give to the product (again rearrange the words).  This product title will be placed on your page as well.  When content is added, there are ways to rearrange how it is laid out and written, developers can help with this.  It still needs to be readable, but if you are concerned about duplicate content, the tedious task of making these tweaks are a must.
6. When I am all done, I would like to see a new SEO optimized first paragraph and the remaining copy to adhere to the steps 1 thru 5 above.  Yes, it takes time, but it is better than adding all these product pages just for them to be “filtered out.”

Feel free to test.  Test a category or a few product pages.  Make the changes above and see if it makes a difference.  There are no guarantee’s when it comes to Google’s algorithm and there are 100’s of other factors involved in natural rankings, but making these changes should help Googlebot consider your pages unique. 

Posted in SEO | 22 Comments »

Twitter Flipped Me The Bird!

Posted by Al Scillitani on May 22, 2008 – 1:24 pm

Ok, I got this error on Twitter.  Is the robot giving me the finger or am I going crazy?

Posted in Online Marketing | 2 Comments »

Blog As a Subdomain Or Subcategory? The Final Word

Posted by Al Scillitani on May 14, 2008 – 8:56 am

I have been trying to figure out a definite answer to this question for almost a year now.  I have read probably hundreds of arguments back and forth with people within the industry argue why one is better than the other.  The problem is, the debate pretty much ended up even.  About half said go with the subdomain and the other half said go with subcategory.  I have come up with a conclusion.  If you don’t want to read how I got to it, go to the bottom of the page and read the conclusion paragraph.  If you want to see how I ended up with the conclusion, read on.

It started back in May of 2007 when I asked on Search Engine Watch forums.  I asked

 “There are many ways to add a blog to your corporate site: sub-category (domain.com/blog/title), sub-domain (blog.domain.com), a new domain, etc..

I would like to hear everyones opinion as to which is best and why.”

Highlights:
I would think the sub-category.
1. you would increase pages of your site
2. you would increase quantity and quality of backlinks to your main site (if you create good posts for people to link to)
3. sub-domain would not be good because it is treated like a different domain in the engines.
4. seperate domain name would not be good because all the links going back and forth, then engines find out they are on the same IP or same owner, they may penalize one of the sites/pages thinking something strange is going on.”

Other Highlights of forum thread

I think you are correct… those pages will be stronger under a developed parent domain (www.domain.com/blog/topic) and will increase content and potential SERP results within your site.
I see no value in launching it as a separate domain or sub-domain…

—-
Just a slight disagreement here based upon extensive experience with Corporate Blogs. I think the Sub-domains are the way to go, for many reasons - not the least being that they are easier for end users to remember than directories. A lot of traffic from Blogs can come from a sales force out talking to prospects sending them to a blog. It’s easier to say blog (dot) mycompany (dot) com than mycompanyname (slash) directory (slash) blog or somesuch. If you still want to use a directory, make sure its at the top level.

Also, sub-domains are great for internal linking purposes. I’m not going to go into the whole theory behind this, but believe me, it works.

——
For a company blog, we always opt for a totally different domainname for several reasons :

You can use the authority of your company site to launch your blog.

It’s far more easier to get links from and to get cited on other blogs if your blog is not on the company domain. It looks a lot more natural.

When multiple languages are needed, you can start multiple blogs and have the advantage of interlinking them.

——-
we are leading the pack in our niche of SEM with blogging. We have tried setting the blogs up both ways - on a subdomain and in a sub-directory. We have much more success with the subdomains.
because our site is so complex with many pages already, we found our newsletter blog pages were competing with other informational pages for possibly the same keywords. By setting up subdomains we have 2 “sites” ranking for the same keywords.

–

I then asked on Gooruze and found another, even older, thread on search engine watch

Three of the answers stood out.  The first was from Andy Beal. He wrote
“So both options are great if you want your blog tied to your company brand. Neither of them work well if you want to build a blog that might stand on its own two feet.”

If the blog is mostly designed to add content to the main site, with all the SEO benefits, go with the subfolder setup.
If you don’t care about the SEO benefits, go with the subdomain.”

Second was from Duncan Riley. “Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re trying to add traffic to a main site go with name.com/blog, if you’re looking at building a destination in itself go with blogtitle.name.com. Google considers subdomains as separate sites for memory.”

And the third was from Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Watch from a post on January 12, 2005.  Danny writes

“I generally advise people pondering the directory versus the subdomain/new domain question as follows:

1) If there’s substantial content you have that somehow warrants in your mind, and to your users, the need to have an entirely new web site, then go for having it under either a subdomain or new domain.

1B) Why do a subdomain over a new domain? First, it’s free. Second, you might like the consistency with branding.

2) If you have content that really fits with your main site, keep it in a subdirectory.

OK, so now I’ll take SEW as an example, since that was raised.

Our main site with original content is searchenginewatch.com, of course.

When we started the forums, they could have been searchenginewatch.com/forums. However, I thought the content and activities of the forums were important enough that they should have their own site.

In particular, people in my view tend to bookmark or treat sites with a little more respect if they aren’t full of slashes  In other words, making the forums as a subsection of SEW makes cause a few people not to perhaps bookmark it as readily, link to it or see it as standalone from the site itself.

For a pure SEO point, having it on its own subdomain means that it’s possible more pages will get indexed than if it were within a single site, since all search engine will spend only a certain amount of time within any one given site. Having your own home page at a root level may also help the particular topics central to that page perhaps rank you a bit better.

We also have a blog, blog.searchenginewatch.com. It was put on a subdomain for the same reason — substantial content different from the main site and with reasons warranting having its own site.

I have a long standing “webmasters” area about how to do submission, http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/. Why not make that webmasters.searchenginewatch.com or seo.searchenginewatch.com? The content isn’t substantial. There’s 10-15 pages total within that section. It’s a natural part of our main site. There’s no overriding reason to put it on its own.

FYI, we also considered doing something like sewforums.com. If we’d done that, we’d have all the same exact advantages of having a subdomain. Being a subdomain still for the major search engines seems to operate as being exactly the same as a completely different domain — which makes sense, as it is (all domains that end in .com are, for example, subdomains of .com itself).

As further proof of this, some noted when we launched that the site’s home page was PR3. Now I really, really, really don’t encourage people to worry about PR values — and I certainly don’t. But if forums.searchenginewatch.com were somehow seen as connected with searchenginewatch.com, you’d expect it would have been a higher value like the root domain itself. That didn’t happen. Only recently did the score rise, which I would assume is due to external links helping it rise over time (the blog, in contrast, started off at something like PR6 — links from the blogging world probably pushed it up more quickly)

Why not do sewforums.com? We didn’t for branding reasons. We wanted the domain name to be consistent with our main domain name.

You can also look at Google itself for examples of this. Google Images at google.com/images? No, images.google.com — and news.google.com — and froogle.com/froogle.google.com. Substantial content different from the main site that warrants being on its own domain/subdomain.

In conclusion, I come back to my standard advice for many things SEO — do what you think is best for your users. If you think it helps to have your site broken into subsites, do it. If you think you should link between them, as long as you are really doing it in a way that makes sense to human visitors, you should be fine.

Here’s a last warning sign. When you start doing a diagram of your interlinking and pondering really detailed questions of “if I do X, will that help or hurt with search engines,” that generally means you aren’t thinking from the human perspective.

In your case, if your products and services are really distinct — and they really have substantial content about each product, then the Intuit idea of quicken.com, turbotax.com, quickbooks.com and so on model may make sense.”

—
Most recently, on May 13th, 2008 I met with Ben Wills to discuss this issue as well.  He was pro subdomains and I was pro subcategories.

Almost all of the issues and benefits from threads above came up.  One of the bigger debates was possible crosslinking issues.  Ben brought up the main points above in favor of subdomains and it all made sense based on the sites he was referring to.  He also focused on Google and Googles algorithm.  I also mainly focus on Google due to the fact that they have the largest market share, however I do not dismiss Yahoo, MSN, and other 2nd and 3rd tier engines. While working with different agencies, I have gotten company sites unbanned from Google and Yahoo.  Everyone of the sites that I worked with that were banned in Yahoo had crosslinking issues.  Multiple sites, on same IP, with hundreds of pages crosslinking to the other sites.  I have not seen these issues with Google, though Google does state “excessive” crosslinking is not allowed.  A subdomain is considered a separate domain.  Will Yahoo, MSN, and other understand the site owner is not trying to be deceiving or understand these sites are legitimately related?  Is it worth taking that chance?
After discussing the pros and cons of both, I came up with the conclusion below.

CONCLUSION

Whew, that is a lot of info.  To conclude, there is not a definite answer for everyone.  There are factors you must ask yourself about your unique site and what your end goal is.

In my case, I am going with the companyname.com/blog.  Why?  We have an ecommerce site.  There are thousands of pages with products that other sites and manufacturers sell.  Some products must include descriptions given by the manufacturer.  This leads to duplicate content between our competing sites because they are doing the same.  We try to add information and tweak the information we get, but are very limited to the changes we can make.  We need unique, fresh content to our site.  Therefore I am opting for the subdirectory approach.

There are many things to consider when adding a blog. 

What is the goal of the blog?
Will you have it in several languages?
Does your current site need unique content? 
Are you using the blog for branding purposes? 
Will the content of the blog coincide with the products or services on your main site? 

Once you find out these answers regarding your sites,  and read this post and forum threads thoroughly, you should have a good idea on which way you should go.

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