Hi,

Does anyone have any suggestions/opinions on where it's best to place your shop from a SEO point of view. Is it better to create a sub domain like shop.domain.com or is www.domain.com/shop just as useful?

Functionally, the shop will work either way, so I'm just wondering if there are any pros / cons to using subdomains versus just using a folder when it comes to being found by search engines etc.

Thanks,
David

You will get varying answers to this, as we all have our own opinions !!

On my part i would not use sub domains at all any more.

Your shop is going to be i guess fixtronix.ie/shop

But for SEO puposes i would have something like

fixtronix.ie/audiospares

or fixtronix.ie/audiosparesshop Bit long but you will get my point.

Looking at your shop, from an SEO point of view fixtronix.ie/services is missing some SEO as well

How about fixtronix.ie/audiorepairs

Hi Viv,
I see what you mean, the name of the page matters from a SEO point of view.
I have keywords and description on every page (or so I thought!) What's missing from services.html?
I had a quick look but it seems to be carrying the same meta tags as the other pages.
Thanks for your interest.
Dave

No you missed my point !

I was just referring to the /services it would have some SEO impact if it it had some relevance.

someone searching in ireland for audio repairs wont type in fixtronics but they might type in audio repairs or repairers

So fixtronics.ie/audiorepairs

likewise a page about spares for DIY audio repairs might be fixtronics.ie/audiospares

have a look at my delorean site it might give you some clues to what i am suggesting.

did you see my guide http://www.coffeecup.com/forums/designe … e-ranking/

Have you considered having another domain name as a parked domain (ie) ft-audioreparers.ie

That would result in ft-audiorepairers.ie/radiospares.html

Hi Viv,

I used to own fixtronics.com as well as fixtronix.com and fixtronix.ie but I now use Google Adwords to catch and direct people to my site based on misspellings as well as pro audio repairs & brand names etc. etc.

I will have a good read over your SEO guide this evening and thanks for the info

I have to be very careful about how I attract traffic because I actually specialise in professional audio only, and I do not want people looking for Hi-Fi or other consumer electronics repaired. Some manufacturers are crossover brands, making pro and consumer audio, but most are just pro, so I tend to concentrate on brand names rather than generic terms like audio.

Using Google tools, I can see that people search for things like "authorised Tascam repair centre" or "Irish Focusrite service centre" and so on, so using these brands and many others as keywords works well for me.

With brands like Pioneer, who are very popular with commercial DJ equipment, they also make lots of car audio & Hi-Fi, so with that brand I use model numbers of the professional products as keywords because people looking for repairers are highly likely to narrow their search by using the model I find.

It's all trial and error and I've been playing with my SEO since 1997!
My current site is all new and I've yet to deal with all the SEO side of it as I was too focused on design and layout etc.

So, now I'm also building a shop and learning more new things, including wondering about SEO for sales/shop sites as for the past 15 years all we've done is service & repair.

Fun times

Cheers,
Dave

I relied totally on good old suck it and see, using my usual DIY approach to everything i do, and its just results that confirm what i do works for me., i am certainly no expert.

I see your point about professional, rather than hi fi so my key word techniques might not work for you.

as for the shop side, i have found SCCP to be very google friendly, my sales have quadrupled over what i sold with any other cart system i have tried, though in my case a continual effort to improve on my photographs has also been a contributing factor, and i am still working on that side of things.

Good luck,

I have a question...

Are you going to make this shop a part of your current Website or as a offshoot?

If it is part of your site then I would suggest using site.com/shop

If you want this as a separate site altogether (One that does not pull page rank from your current site) then you should make it a sub-domain.

Good point SirAGE.

I have been in the exclusive business of repairs for 15 years and my site ranks well in Google, Bing and so on. So, it is vital to me that this experiment - dipping my toe into sales - does not hurt my core business.

So, I think you might just have answered my original question - in my case it's going to be much better to use a subdomain and build its ranking separately to the main site which is my lifeline, core business.

Many thanks to you, and to our mutual partner in crime, Viv

Dave

good point SirAge