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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.