One of my focuses at work this month is online marketing.  That includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Analytics, Social Networking and Google Adwords.  I've just barely gotten started, but I'm going to go over a few things I've learned.

Subdomains of the same master domain aren't treated as the same website

For a few days, we had blog.zanebenefits.com pointing to the location of our old blog and www.zanebenefits.com/blog going to the new blog.  They both go to the same place now, but for those days where they were different, Google ranked the new blog higher than the old one even though the new blog had exactly zero posts on it.

The reason this happened (as far as I can tell) is because "www.zanebenefits.com" is a domain name that google knows about from our corporate site whereas "blog.zanebenefits.com" only had the blog on it and was not a highly ranked domain as a result.

So if you're making a site, I suggest keeping all the important stuff under one domain (and not subdomains) at least until you get some clout with google.

Google loves constantly changing content

This site (tylerking.net) ranks pretty highly among many different Zane Benefits related searches.  The only reason I can come up with for why this might be the case is that the content on this site is constantly changing.  ZaneBenefits.com is more or less static text and I think that's hurting its page rank.

That's actually one of the main reasons I've rededicated myself to updating the blog over there.  Whether people read the blog or not, the page rank for ZB should go up.

It's hard to track analytics on blogs

A lot of blogs force you to click a "Read More" link to read an entire article.  I think that's incredibly annoying, and I always assumed it was just to get more ad impressions.  Now I realize that it also seriously improves reporting.  Right now, the ZB blog has an exit rate of 78% which means that about three out four visitors leave the site after seeing the blog.  That might seem like a problem, but they're spending an average of six minutes on the main blog page.

So what does this mean?  I show a bunch of posts in their entirety on the main blog page (just like I do with this blog).  People go to that main page and spend a bunch of time reading, but I have no idea exactly what they're reading.

This would be a good argument for making people click through to read entire posts.  I'm not going to do that because it's annoying, but I'll certainly have to keep it in mind if the traffic grows considerably.

That's it for now.  We're still early in the month of July so I'll probably learn a lot more about all this before too long.  I'll keep you updated.