Creating theme-based mini-sites can add great value to your existing presence and considerably improve search engine rankings by offering specific content to more targeted audience. It is a cost-effective way to address precise market segments, enhancing both customer relationships and brand awareness while improving search engine rankings overall, and generating additional qualified sales referrals. SEO Samba is an excellent vehicle to develop and manage online properties and mini-sites.
Marketing Domains are an additional positioning tactic that can be used in a number of situations. They can allow intensive positioning for a select group of competitive keyword phrases that would be impossible to effectively position within the main site. They can also overcome many of the problems presented by sites that use extensive Flash, database-driven content or Web 2.0 applications.
The "mini-site" concept is therefore gaining ground as effective sales channels, though it faces three major problems in order to drive a critical number of search engine referrals. Specifically, marketing mini-sites lack, in order: keywords, content, and linkage. Unfortunately those are three of the most wanted items on search engines check list. But for those who know the ropes mini-sites can turn into powerful brand vehicles and marketing tools.
A concentrate of keywords
As it is much more specific a mini-site should be entirely build around a few efficient and related keywords, articulating a consistent theme throughout the few pages on the site. Industry-oriented or informational sites are ideal candidates as they can branch out to products or services presented on your main web site. The main difference with larger sites is that mini-sites address a much more targeted niche, and require to go through the same optimization process as bigger sites, only on a much smaller scale.
Content is the key
No matter how cool and well rounded is your mini-site, if you don't offer original, up-to-date and interesting content, visitors will ignore your site, your traffic will stay low, and your rankings will follow suit. But even by simply broadcasting a small part of your staff combined knowledge you will both provide useful information and gain opportunities to disseminate selected keywords within your content, reinforcing your chances of top ranking. Copy-writing services, information swapping, content aggregation and email marketing will complement your content offering and provide you with a great platform for your industry, market, services or products.
Link popularity
As you may know by now, a decisive factor in search engines positioning is the number of links pointing to you. For out-of-the-box marketing sites can be accomplished by first referencing the site in directories using fee-based submissions. Once listed you can submit optimized pages who will in turn generate top listings and traffic referrals. The trick here is that you will get many prominent links coming from well-know sites. Each page referenced in a search engine is an additional link. After a few months your site will be ranked as reasonably popular, and that is good enough for your pages to be considered for inclusion at each submission request.
