One Website or Mini Sites?

[Laz101]

Hello and thank you in advance for your responses.

My wife and I have been running a small service business for over 5 years and we recently came upon an untapped niche in our industry we will like to explore.

We have found some niche keyword specific domains and have been contemplating building a few specific minisites linking to our main site(blog) in order to reach a more targeted audience.   It seems the more I research this concept the more confused I guess.  My questions are the following:

1.  Should we create a main blog, for example: "BestHotelConferences.com" and have some (about 10) independent optimized sites "HiltonConferences.com," "MarriottConferences.com," linking to our main blog or should we optimize these pages within our main blog?

2.  If we choose to create this minisite buildout concept and these domains yield the following monthly search results which one should we pick?

• HiltonConference.com - 3900

• HiltonConference**s.**com - 1700

• HiltonHotelConference - 730

• HiltonHotelConferences - 580

I have heard that the plurals already include the singular version however they will not be an exact match.  Also if we add the word hotelwe will be targeting a broader audience since "hilton conference" will still be included in the domain name, but once again it will not be an exact match.  Please help!  Which domain name should we pick?

[GrassRootsSEO]

Personally I would create one main site and have the url contain the keyword for each page..

so you would end up with (for example)

HiltonConference.com

HiltonConference.com/HiltonConferences

HiltonConference.com/HiltonHotelConference

HiltonConference.com/HiltonHotelConferences

This makes it easier to build content and keep it manageable in one place, plus all the deep linking gives the domain more authority. Also to have seperate sites I'd want them hosted on seperate C-Class IP addresses so they could interlink with each other - this would increase your costs.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

In the old days, microsites could be powerful tools for exact match domains with sufficient keyword volumes. Today, Google has worked to minimize the potential advantage of exact match domains, so unless you're launching a product that you want to differentiate from your main brand, it usually doesn't make sense to use microsites.

For one, you still have to build links to the microsites in order for them to rank. And if the sites are for competitive terms, it may take a significant amount of authority to get them visible in search results.

For example, the SEOmoz keyword analysis tool shows that "Hilton Conference" scores a keyword difficulty of 55%. It would take a significant amount of domain authority to rank in the top 3 for that keyword, no matter what the domain.

These are some older videos, but they stand up pretty well in terms of explaining this concept:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

In the 2-3 years since these videos were made, microsites have become even less effective than what they were.

In the end, your best bet is to build pages/directories on your own related site. If this means starting a new site (because your current site isn't related) it's still much easier to build up the popularity of one site, than 5 or 10.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.