We've recently been discussing adding a blog component to our CMS360 content management system. Right away the question came up as to whether it's better to incorporate your blog as part of your site, or host it on a separate domain. I had always assumed it was better to host it separately because then you'd have another quality site linking to yours. However, on further study, I discovered that Google seems to have wised up to that, and no longer considers subdomains to be separate websites, with some exceptions for very large, highly trafficked websites. For example a search for dell will show dell.com and support.dell.com, both sites with different goals and a lot of unique content. But for the average small/medium business website, only one result per domain will be listed.

I read a number of blogs on this topic and the opinions all seem to agree - in general, a blog should be listed in a subfolder, not on a subdomain. It's better to consolidate your content on a single domain for the maximum search engine impact.

Depending on your site structure, there may be a number of other advantages to keeping your blog in a subfolder. All of your images will be in a single location and you may be able to share files between your site and your blog, making updating easier. You may also save money on hosting and have a single login to manage.

For us, this was a good discovery, because it will make our integration to CMS360 simpler. We'll still have a single site and code to set up and manage, which also makes things easier for our clients.

We plan to provide this new blog component to our clients as soon as possible. We'll start with our own site, moving our current blog from Blogger to our own installation of CMS360. Then we'll analyze our analytics to see how it impacts our traffic and search engine rankings. We'll write up another blog post to let you know how it goes, so keep an eye out.

In the future, we'll also be integrating the Blogger API with CMS360, because we know some clients may still prefer to keep their blog separate from their website, or may have multiple blogs to maintain. Either way, we want our CMS360 users to be able to update their website, blog and other content from a single location. We know it's hard to keep up with all the things on the web these days, so we want to make it as easy as possible.

Further reading:
Here are some of the articles I read about subdomains vs. subfolders, if you'd like more in-depth information on this topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
http://www.seohawk.com/blog/subfolders-vs-subdomains-seo-analysis/
http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/seo/which-is-best-for-blog-seo-subdomain-or-subfolder/
http://www.pointit.com/blog/subdomain-or-subfolder-seo/

In the competitive Applicant Tracking System market, RecruitGear Express was not achieving the visibilty that we wanted. Ranking well for such general keywords as"recruiting software", "hiring software" , and "applicant tracking system" seemed impossible, so we performed keyword research using Google's Keyword Tool to determine more specific keyword phrases that would be less competitive.

Four industries were targeted: Health Care, Hospitality, Retail and Seasonal/Temporary workers. A "landing page" was added to the site for each of the industries, with graphics and text customized to that industry.

As a result, RecruitGear Express now ranks:

• #1 on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL for "online retail hiring software"
• #1 on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL for "seasonal temporary hiring software"
• #1 on Google and Yahoo for "hospitality hiring software", #2 on MSN and AOL
• #4 on Google for "health care recruiting software", #1 on MSN, #8 on Yahoo

While the traffic for those keyword phrases may be lower, the visitors who do see RecruitGear Express are more likely to be looking for the exact service that the software provides. It's better to have a high conversion rate on a small group of visitors, than a low conversion rate on a large group. Your clickthroughs and bounce rate are now being factored into your quality score by Google, to be used on both organic search results and Adwords listings.

Your goal should be the same as the search engine's goal: to get the right visitors to the right place.

I was looking for a tool/component/code to generate an xml sitemap on the fly from a SqlSitemapProvider for our new website - why invent the wheel, right? - but I didn't have much luck at first.

I found this blog post: Google Sitemaps for ASP.NET 2.0
But unfortunately you can no longer get the source code, since the author assumes that everyone is now using ASP.NET 3.5.

I also found this post, which discussed that handler and some changes to it: Generate a Google Sitemap Using ASP.NET
But that didn't have the dll or source code either.

Then I found this: Sitemaps.NET
But after setting it up, I received the "Url cannot be relative" error that other commenters were getting. Luckily James included his source code in the download. I was able to make a small change and now it works perfectly for our site.

In the WriteUrlValueElements function, I changed:

if (UrlPath.IsRelativeUrl(nodeUrl))
throw new SitemapWriterException("Url cannot be relative", siteMapNode.Key);

to:

if (UrlPath.IsRelativeUrl(nodeUrl))
nodeUrl = _siteHostUrl + "/" + nodeUrl;

That may not work for everyone, but it works just fine for me because of the way our database is set up.

I hope someone else will find this useful; here is a link to the source code and dll: sitemaps.zip