Will similar keyword phrases compete on my site?

if they're on more than one page

[website]

hello again,

This may be confusing so i will lay it out the best i can

Lets say i make a website about "pea soup" and i have a subdomain about "green pea soup" and inside that subdomain i have a section about "How to make green pea soup"

it would look like this:

www.pea-soup.com
green-pea-soup.pea-soup.com
green-pea-soup.pea-soup.com/How-to-make-green-pea-soup.html

Would it be wise to make one of my keywords for

"How-to-make-green-pea-soup.html"

( green pea soup )

if i am using that same keyword for

"green-pea-soup.pea-soup.com"

Would this make both of these pages compete for the same keyword if both use two other individual keywords?

i hope this made sense
thank you

[specter]

Would this make both of these pages compete for the same keyword if both use two other individual keywords?

Not necessarily:it depends on many other factors such as the presence of the kw in the text,ALT attr.,link anchor texts etc.
So if you want to differentiate,make sure to have different contents (and links).

[keywordguru]

I would agree to say that search engine ranking weight is much more reliant on the text on the page, title, h1 tags, and anchor text links.

Keep your domain simple enough. It looks very messy with the subdomain. I would keep it www.yourdomain.com/peasoup with a title of "How to make pea soup"

Just a suggestion to start.
KG

[website]

thank you for the replies, i have another question though. Are subdomains considered to bulky for effective use? i want to build my site in a very tight pyramid, so by using subdomains i am creating a section that deals entirely with specific sections.

ex: articles.widget.com

would house all articles i ever write

such as:

articles.widget.com/how_to_be_a_widget.html
articles.widget.com/how_to_cook_widgets.html
articles.widget.com/where_to_find_widgets.html

ect....

my theory is that this will make a very tight website that is highly navigable for users and spiders...

it seems more organinzed this way in surfing (and with FTP's) to set it up this way rather than having longer page adresses like:

[edit reason - no urls, thanks ]TOS [webmasterworld.com][/edit]

[edited by: mona at 9:02 pm (utc) on Mar. 30, 2005]

[website]

.....

adresses like:

www.widget.com/articles/home_repair/fixing_your_home.html

^^^
this is not a real site

[mona]

Here are a couple different points of view that I found, website. I don't use them much myself. See if these help...

[webmasterworld.com...]
One from WebGuerrilla -

In theory, the subdomain structure is more beneficial because it allows you to present the same content higher up in the directory structure. There is a limit to how deep the few remaining free crawlers will go, and engines like AltaVista have stated that the depth of the content plays a role in determining relevance.

Another advantage has to do with results clustering. If someone searches for some kind of broad term, and you have multiple pages that could be a match, pages from different subdomains will be displayed individually, while multiple pages from a sub directory structure will not.

[webmasterworld.com...]
And one from tedster:

1. Many search engines treat subdomains as separate sites. This can mean you get extra positions in the results for some keywords. It can also help focus the various themes of your site semantically, and that can boost ranking for some searches.

2. A year back or more there was a lot of SEO that played off "wild card" subdomains. Anything you searched on seemed to have a subdomain with that word. Search engines did not like this and took steps to minimize its influence.

So when you say "major sections" make sure the sections really are major in size and relatively stand alone for content, with minimal but effective cross-linking. If that's your set-up, then you may get treated like about.com, for instance, who has used subdomains to good effect going way back.

But if you only have a few pages with minimal content, you may get treated like the wild-card folks did, and wake up to find everything has vanished from the SERPs.

[website]

thank you very much, these look to be very informative. I will give them a look over and post back if i found the info i was looking for inside of them.