I’ve touched on microsites before, but lets go a bit more into the concept. The idea is essentially this, build seperate, small websites that are good for several reasons:

• Being Separate from your mainsite has its advantages. You can be more specific, where you couldnt build a 5 page detailed look at one product easily on your oscommerce you can on a seperate site. Also by being seperate you can highly target your seo more blatently without worrying about jeperdising your main branding. Similarly you can express other thoughts on a topic, for keyword placement and to attract different end users only to lead them to your main site.
• A setup microsite can act as a bridge drawing people to your main site.
• A setup microsite can feed PR to your main site (hosted with a seperate company)
• Quick to set up
• Done correctly it can provide free advertising, free customers to your site, free PR boost for your site and even create a revenue.

Effectively you decide on your main site, 2 sites or small network of sites - your flagship big push project/s and then build a network of smaller, supportive ‘pusher’ microsites to aid the growth of your main site. They are designed to be left alone with little to none maintenance post development (which should only be a day or so) and self sufficient, paying their own way.

Here’s a few steps I would advise you read before proceeding with developing a good microsite network as a base to a main site.

Steps:

1. Get a different host - Hosting accounts are key to making use of microsites. It is probably not nescessary to have a different host for each site - maybe 2 microsites per hosting account in different niches. This is because each different hosting account will have different IP (shared hosting might have a load on one ip.) Different IP’s will help defuse your spread to the search engines. (it will help but I am sure google is not stupid to this!)
2. Get a good keyword relative domain - “candle-wax.com” would fit a candle wax subsite.
3. Go Niche - Choose an absolute niche - go niche and then niche of that niche. The better the niche the more chance your microsite has - if you sell a range of candles, make a microsite about candle wax types.
4. Build around a main site - using the previous example if you ran an online candle shop you could build microsites on: candle wax, bees wax, candle products, candle gallery, homemade candles, original candles, world candle records.
5. Time Manage microsite production - Limit your time on each project - I tend to allow a day every few weeks to building a microsite. Its not always constrained to a day, and doesnt always take a day - but don’t waste years making it stunning, stick to the basics - good original content, good link structure and clean code.
6. 1-15 pages - its only a microsite, start it as a microsite, plan how many pages you are going to have and fill them with good original content.
7. Links - Stealth links work - make it a ‘fake’ online shop that when the person clicks ‘add to cart’ it sends them to your main site, its also a great chance to get some real contextual links to your main site. Use words that are what the pages they are linking too.
8. Monetize - I will explain further down but done well will actually make money as well as helping your main site.

So if you manage the above you should be able to create 1 microsite in a day, 1 effective, targetted, long tail niche micro site in around 8 hours. Then what? Well then you push it - as you would any other site - but provided you have chosen your niche well and seo’d your pages this shouldnt be too hard. Strategic linking of your microsites together can help although you want google to think them as different as possible so use different sources for linkage, dont typically link them all together and try and differentiate them all from each other. Also do not use your main site to help them - this is not benificial. Use the microsites to boost your main site not the other way round!!

Monetizing your microsites should more than cover the costs associated with setting them up, therefor allowing you a free place to advertise, draw customers and further dominate your niche.

First things first stick some pay per click or similar on there - although typically you are trying to get people to your main site - so not over the top otherwise you might loose customers for only a few pennies. Using Matched.co.uk you should be able to make a minimum of £15 per month, unless your site is badly designed and poorly linked too (and you don’t have 5 good pages on it). You give them 5 urls that you will stick links on and they will approve/not approve you and give you a bit of code. Having this ad on your site will then get you £3 a month. Not much but 5 of them and you get £180 a year - that should more than cover hosting and registration fees . You are limited to 5 sites with each account on matched though (each with 5 pages = £75 a month)

Kindly use this link if you are going to use Matched so we can all benefit

Further monetization with amazon affiliates, Commision junction or ebay auctions is all good progress but as the site is so niche you are not likely to get huge returns on the effort. Personally I keep it reasonably simple but I have got a few micro sites running all of the aforementioned.

So try it out - microsites as a base for a larger web project! - If you require further consultation regarding seo powered by creative microsites then let me know

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It seems the pagerank update is completed - I have seen an increase in all of my sites and a fair few others:

criTix (this wonderful business blog) - 0 (I never used it) to 3 (pretty good)

Several of my affiliate sites went up - 0 to 2/3

Wheels-Near-U - 0 to 3

RankRace.com - 0 to 4 (anyone want a pr 4 domain/site?)

Several web design projects I expected to remain on 1 forever went up also to 2’s and 3’s.

Seems to me that this update has been very favourable - what I thought was going to be a complete stampede of minus’s worked out ok.

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 Read more brilliant business blogging:

• 3p adword clicks - chasing the long tail monster
• Pagex - Bolt on SEO tools
• Planning web dev centralisation - making your files, classes etc centralised for ease of use

…ok so the title is a little over dramatic, it is probably not the case that google is completely dropping pagerank. The word on the line is that a large number of websites are experiencing drops in their google pagerank, as if a pr update is in progress, however I am yet to hear of any pagerank increments so I am doubtful that a full update is taking place.

Personally it does make me think that perhaps google are up to something, I mean for example raising the bar? Perhaps in the coming weeks/months/days google will announce a new bar so as web people everywhere can discuss and aim for it. This would fit with the mass consensus of page rank drops without any increases, although as much as hinting a higher bar of entry it could also mark the beginning in the decline in the use of page rank.

After all pagerank is unfortunately used a lot by people buying and selling links to gauge the quality of the link for sale, so I could see google saying ‘abuse it and loose it’. It isn’t a defining factor in buying and selling links but I can see it would be one way they could combat it slightly.

In the end its unknown really how much google are willing to do to combat people selling links, scrapping page rank could just be the start…..not that that’s what’s necessarily happening - no doubt there will be a post from someone victorious as the first raised pr in no time at all.

…lets just hope its me