How To Direct Multiple Streams Of Traffic Through Microsites

Welcome back!

Targeted traffic is valuable. The challenge is finding a reliable way to bring it to your site. For a lot of marketers and small companies, the search engines remain one of the most cost-effective sources of traffic available. That’s because the people who visit your site from the engines already know what they want. They’ve qualified themselves by their searches. By the time many of them arrive, they’re ready to read, buy, or sign-up.

Now, what if you could leverage the traffic volume you receive from the search engines? There is a way – and it’s one of the most neglected SEO tactics that work.

Today, we’re going to talk about using microsites to drive multiple streams of traffic to your flagship site. I’ll define them, explain how to get them ranked, and give you a few suggestions that will make them more effective.

What Are Microsites?

Microsites are small websites. They are built on their own domain and consist of no more than a few pages. They focus on a single niche topic rather than following a silo structure with several categories.

There are a lot of ways to use these sites. For example, you can use one to launch a product that you eventually plan to sell off. Or, you can publish a piece of niche content that has little to do with your main product of service. And of course, you can use them to drive a lot of traffic to your flagship site.

You could use blogger.com, wordpress.com for all my flagship sites, you could even use weebly.com and wetpaint to launch content and get some high pr links pointing back to your site. But that is another story.

For more information on link building please read my 5000 backlinks review.

Ranking Your Microsites And Building Traffic

Because you’ll be launching these tiny sites from scratch, they’ll lack the age, authority, and link profiles of older sites. The good news is, you can often snag high rankings without the benefit of those things. To explain how, let’s back up a bit.

One of the key criteria that Google uses to rank sites are the keywords within your domain name. For example, if you were to search Google for “search engine history,” you would find SearchEngineHistory.com in the top spot (by the way, this is an excellent example of a microsite). Part of that site’s ranking authority is due to the keywords in the domain. Another part is due to the inbound links, which have accumulated over time.

You can use this same strategy in building your network of microsites. For example, suppose your flagship site sells replacement parts for Toyota vehicles. To capture targeted traffic, you might reserve UsedToyotaTacoma.com, UsedToyotaRAV4.com, UsedToyotaCamry.com, and so forth. Each would be a separate microsite. Each would draw keyword-based traffic from the search engines. The goal is not to sell parts for each vehicle on their respective microsites. The goal is to funnel that targeted traffic to your flagship site.

As a side note, I would suggest you avoid using a trademark name in your domains. I’m merely using Toyota as an example.

Tips For Making Your Microsites Work

Getting these sites to rank in the short run is made simpler by focusing on specific keywords in the domains. But, you can create them in such a way that they attract inbound links and authority over the long run. With time, their positions in the natural listings can become practically bulletproof.

First, provide plenty of detail about the niche topic you’re covering. SearchEngineHistory.com is a perfect example. The more comprehensive the content, the more likely others will link to your site.

Second, keep your microsites focused on a single topic. You’ll be tempted to stray to related topics. Resist the urge. If a related topic receives searches, build a separate microsite for it.

Third, don’t sell. If you’re using these sites to funnel traffic, any type of selling – even asking for an email address – is a distraction from your goal.

Fourth, keep the design simple in order to make it instantly consumable to your visitors. That means limiting yourself to text and photos (if appropriate); no Flash, no AJAX, no Web 2.0.

If you’re not using microsites to draw in targeted, keyword-based traffic, you might be overlooking a powerful SEO strategy. There are a few logistics that need to be addressed to make this network of sites even more formidable. We’ll explore those in a future post.

P.S. I suggest you read my Post on how to increase Your Ad Revenue it will give more ideas about to using microsites for ad revenue.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 9:17 pm and is filed under microsites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.