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: 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 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.

Editor's note:

This article was submitted for publication by an anonymous user.