Mini-Sites and Content Sites

There's quite a difference between traditional "content" sites (i.e., large, content-laden sites with little or no obvious sales material) and mini-sites, which many feel are the ideal sales vehicle. Some argue that search engine algorithms are written to show preference to content sites, on the assumption that most mini-sites are, indeed, little more than sales pages, or doorway pages designed to attract search engine traffic.

Mini-sites are, in fact, a staple of internet marketing and are often used by "super affiliates", who put up a mini-site designed to "pre-sell" a product. Veteran internet sales experts tend largely to favor these "sales letters" or "micro-sites" as the ideal sales vehicle. They argue that a good sales page leads the reader inevitably to the purchase link, with no distractions from additional pages or outside links.

Generally, the idea has been to use pay-per-click traffic for these sites, so their attractiveness to standard search engines was really not an issue. Recently, though, several people have demonstrated that mini-sites, and their tinier cousin, micro-sites, can in fact be optimized in such a way as to rank high with the traditional search engines.

Mini-sites and micro-sites differ primarily in the fact that "micro-site" is the term many people use for a one-page sales letter or doorway/gateway page. "Mini-site" more often refers to a site that contains several pages, and is a bit bigger, usually three to five pages.

A "themed" site is more or less a hybrid, a cross between the small size of a mini-site, and the informational qualities of a "content" site. For the purpose of this discussion, we'll use the term "content site" to refer to a fairly large, multi-page site that has a great deal of educational value to the visitor, with little or no direct selling, whereas a "themed" site refers to a mini-site whose pages stick closely to one concept or "theme".

The "themed" mini-site seems to be the best of all worlds. Still small and easily created, it contains enough pages, and enough quality content, that it can be optimized for one or several highly targeted key words and has the potential to become a search engine traffic magnet. If, as rumored, the search engines are moving more towards evaluating the overall theme of a site and somehow incorporating this into how individual pages are assigned search rankings, then it appears themed mini-sites will have an advantage over "content" sites.

Unlike a larger content site, which inevitably covers a wide variety of topics, the themed mini-site sticks closely to one concept, using only one or two key words or phrases, and each page can be fine-tuned as a micro-site within a mini-site. By following this tactic, we end up with a small site that keeps our visitor tightly focused on our product, but is still attractive to conventional search engines.

Since they can be tightly focused on one or a small group of highly related key words and phrases, mini-sites are seen by search engines as extremely relevant to those key words and thus the pages may tend to rank higher than those of a more broadly themed site.

Search engine experts indicate that the major engines are moving more and more towards examining the "theme" of an entire site, and ranking the pages according to that theme, as well as or instead of the individual page content. If, in fact, that happens, it would be a huge benefit to mini-sites over larger content sites. As it stands now, a large, diverse content site can have numerous properly optimized pages ranked highly for completely unrelated key words, but if pages were also ranked by the overall theme of the parent site, then mini-sites and "themed" content sites would have a big ranking advantage over large, diverse sites.

Perhaps most compelling about mini-sites is that if you run several, they can be used to boost each other's search engine rankings and/or drive traffic through cross-linking. Owners of larger sites can apply this same concept by breaking the large site into several smaller, tightly themed and cross-linking them.

To learn more about mini-sites, and/or pick up some reference e-books or mini-site creation software, visit Mini-Site-Power.Com