Microsites can be helpful or not-so-helpful to your main website’s search engine ranking and traffic-building efforts, depending on how you use them. In some cases, creating a new microsite instead of adding content to your main website may be more beneficial in the long run. You must take a wide range of factors into consideration before deciding whether to expand your current site or create a microsite.

There is a Time and a Place for Microsites

Many webmasters build microsites to house blog posts and content for the sake of attracting links from webmasters and bloggers, who are more likely to link to a blog or content-driven site rather than content located on a company’s website. However, that means your microsite rather than your main website is earning a diversity of backlinks. Webmasters try to remedy this by linking to their main site on their microsite with anchor text containing target keywords. In terms of SEO, this can have limited benefits because the link juice becomes a lot weaker once passed through an intermediary source. Your main website will only be earning backlinks from ONE website (your microsite), whereas your microsite will be earning backlinks from a diversity of sources. If feasible, it’s recommended to have great content hosted on your main website so it receives backlinks from several sources.

Another issue with microsites is that they cannot ride on the coattails of your main website, which is located on an aged domain and has established trust, authority, and history. A microsite on a new domain could be absent from the search engines for months. That being said however, microsites do pose a number of benefits. Depending on what niche you are in, a microsite could get a lot more link love than your main “corporate” website. Furthermore, if you are at a large company, you won’t have to worry about overcoming any legal or PR department hurdles by building a microsite apart from the main domain. In addition, microsites can be extremely helpful in generating traffic to your main website if you include links in the content.

The Benefits of Microsites for Affiliate Marketers

In the past, affiliates only had two choices for building affiliate sites: get a landing page provided by the vendor and drive traffic to it or use an affiliate tracking code. These options were not appealing because affiliate tracking codes are not SEO-friendly and because affiliates did not have control over the content with either option. Now affiliate marketers have the option of building and creating content for their very own microsites, which are very SEO-friendly.

How to Find a Domain for Your Microsite

When purchasing a domain name for your microsite, look for one that is aged and that preferably had a site running on it for a while. Then you just have to change the domain registration information slowly to prevent the website’s page rank from being reset to zero. You can also add a couple of pages of new content to the domain immediately upon purchasing it and then accumulate backlinks to those pages. This should be done as far in advance of the site’s launch as possible. Wordpress is a great content management system to use for microsites because of its powerful features.

So there you have it. Microsites have their ups and downs but all in all, they can serve as powerful tools to build search engine ranking and increase traffic if they are used correctly. If you are an affiliate marketer or you think that people would be more likely to link to your content if it was on a separate domain, consider creating a microsite for your content.

Labels: blogging, link_building, seo_guide