Using subdomains to rank for 150-200 keywords on one site.

[Ur23]

How would you approach a situation in which you have to rank 150-200 keywords for a single website (for example a large online shop), many of which are quite difficult?
It may seem that the only possibility is to link the most general keywords to the main page, leaving the rest of them for the subpages. But the problem is that there are too many general keywords to link all of them to the main page. Another problem is that most of the Internet catalogs won't accept links to subpages.
So, we have invented a solution - what if we divide the list of keywords into groups, and for each of those groups we create a subdomain to which the group would link? For example, if we have a list of keywords:

Green product
Yellow product
Black product
First item
Second item
Third item

Then for the webpage www.example.com we would create subdomain www.product.example.com to which we would link first three words, and www.item.example.com to which we would link the other three. Websites on those subdomains would be created specifically for the corresponding keywords. This means that those sites wouldn't really be a shop, but would still use the shop's layout.
However, this solution brings certain difficulties:
1.Duplicate content - specifically duplicate layout and menus. Wouldn't that be enough for Google to consider those subdomains as spam or some kind of SEO-trash?
2.Internal linking - how to link those subpages between each other? Can all of those subdomains link to the main page? Or would it be safer to put nofollow everywhere?
3.How to make the customer go to the main page as quickly as possible? Perhaps using a flash animation or some large button?

What do you think? Is all this subdomain mess worthwile? Maybe it would be easier and as efficient to simply link the subpages?

[marketingmagic]

As long as the customer has the budget for tons of unique content to cover that many keywords on one site, it shouldn't be a problem - but I'd skip using the subdomains - looks dodgey and there's no advantage in using them.

Just create a robust nav (categorize), and create lots of unique content and HTML. That'll do it for onsite optimization, then you just need to do the offsite stuff to create your inbound links.

Your bigest challenge will be the fact that you're starting with a brand new site and it'll take time to get it ranking no matter what you do (almost).

Good luck!

[Robert Charlton]

...what if we divide the list of keywords into groups, and for each of those groups we create a subdomain to which the group would link?

Why use a subdomain for each group? Why not just use directories (folders)? What's the perceived advantage of a subdomain?

[Ur23]

Well the main advantage is that I could use web catalogs for ranking (as they accept only homepages). But maybe it's not worth the trouble?

[marketingmagic]

Yes, stay away from subdomains - it's not worth the trouble. Use categories, and organize your nav so you can use /folder/index.html for each main section.

[kidder]

Subs work ok for some things. I've done a few trials with this over the last year or so. A certain amount of authority will pass to a sub which you can then use to rank a page or pages. The other advantage is that you can get a keyword at the start of a URL that may attract a click. I run a dated script on the main domain of my test site, it's password protected and not very seo friendly but it works for my community, I've used a few subdomains on this site with good seo friendly scripts to capture search traffic. And think of this, google uses subs.....

[aj113]

Im relatively new to SEO so this may be nonesense, but if I wanted to rank for 150 keywords I would write 150 articles each with its own page, with the page title and url containing the keyword, and incorporating internal links to the relevant product(s) within the content of of the article.

Does that make sense?

[kamikaze Optimizer]

I am currently transcribing a 50,000 page site into 14 non-English languages and I intend to use sub-domains for each of these foreign languages.

I feel that this is a valid use of sub-domains.