Should I Build One Large Website or a Number of Smaller Ones
When you start out its difficult to determine what the best structure allows you to best take advantage of the home based business opportunities you wish to promote.
One question almost everyone works through is the number and size of the web sites that you put together.
Here are some notes from my experience which I hope will help you when the time arrives for you to answer this yourself.
The lower the competition the smaller the website can be.
We have a small site we put together for a member of the family. They sell a real world niche product. There is almost no competition for this product in their geographic area (or indeed in New Zealand as a whole). A small website with a few links, the right page titles, page urls and H1 tags has been enough to keep them close to the top of the first page of Google for as long as it has been up.
I did some paid SEO work for an associate in a similar situation with similar results.
Where there is little competion a simple site a little tweaked for the search engines, appears to perform very well. In this case there is little need for regular updates, sitemapes etc etc. In other words this is set and forget stuff.
Age of the site is also not too much of an issue. A brand new site will rank quite well for less competitive terms.
For heavily competitive niches its quite a different story.
Sites seem to need to be of a reasonable size (more than fifty pages), need to be well SEO’ed, have a steady stream of fresh new links pointing at them and need to have regular content updates.
To get decent rankings for a competitive term it usually takes six months to a year until the point is reached that the size of the traffic stream is enough to justify all the investment which has gone into it. The age of the site does seem to affect its ability to rank. The older the better.
Content update is especially important if you use social networking to attract visitors. Traffic does rise and fall with update frequency.
Maybe we leave a lot of money on the table, but we are more and more focussing on using passive traffic generation (natural search) for the majority of my traffic. Two reasons for this. Firstly we aim to build online sites which mave minimal maintenace so we are free to develop more sites. Secondly, natural search has converted a lot better for me than other traffic generation techniques.
You can sometimes get a fresh site to rank for keywords with medium competition. However I’ve found that they will jump up the rankings, then if they dont get regular links and fresh unique content they drop right back down again and the ongoing traffic is minimal.
For competitive words you really need a big site which has thousands of links scattered across the net. Directories, Articles, Social Media, YouTube, Images, Blog Comments, Technorati Favorites, Press Releases – you name it you need links in all these places.
There is another phenomena which others have commented upon and which I’ve observed myself. After a certain point a good site will become almost self sustaining. The site is large enough to attract new links just because its there. Search engine rankings become quite stable and ranking for new terms of medium competition (long tail and a bit above) becomes relatively easy.
Trouble is this point is a bit like a stock market bottom – no one rings a bell when your there. I was once told that when you get over 400 visitors per day on a regular basis your site has become established. That seems to be close to the mark for competitive terms.
In Summary
Your site strategy needs to match the competitiveness of your keywords. Highly competitive keywords need big sites, less competitive terms don’t need anything fancy at all.
What you target is really a matter of what fits your style. Our preference is to target competitive terms, take time to develop the site knowing that there is a high probability of success and that once established the site will remain strong or quite some time.
One last observation. The rumours are true. Sites with high content (unique written material) seem to do better that those with flash graphics. In fact some of the most profitable sites we have looked at have had the simplest of layouts.
Filed under: Notes
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I started with a small niche sites. They have their advantages in that they are small and very targeted. I think their disadvantage is that they may have limited upside being so targeted. If you go small, you will need alot of niche sites.
hi, each have their own advantages………I think so, its because, if there are less targeted users then its better to build small website. But its good if we have more websites rather than one because there will be wide range of people coming to your sites.
It’s nice to have many blogs to maintain, with proper maintenance of a number of sites, the more profitable it would be for the blog owner. Still, if you concentrate on a single blog, I believe the quality will be much better because you are focus on this one blog, unlike with multiple blog where in your efforts and attention are divided.
Another benefit of lots of little sites is that you can try many different concepts and strategies.
instead of building so many sites plan one good website which is powerful and very impressive
I think it is far better to concentrate on one website alone until you’ve built it up to the point where it is self sustaining momentum wise. The alternative is to get nowhere despite a lot of input simply because of a dilution of your focus (speaking from experience).
There’re simply too many online promotional parameters requiring implementation these days for a one-man project to focus on multiple sites and hope to gain traction. Look at social media strategies…one has to admit it requires a fair amount of input at the beginning.
Oh I also agree with your comment about passive (organic) search…that too is where my concentration is. I still believe it is the most targeted and has the best ROI (oh and it is also self sustaining once your site is up there).
The thing about social media traffic is that it really doesn’t convert that well with respect to the numbers involved, but its sheer magnitude certainly boosts a sites search engine optimization efforts!
My strategy seems to be different than most who have commented so far. I have a small farm of niche sites that do fairly well. I don’t need to pay daily attention to each, but I give them each the love they need. I feel that my multiple sites and multiple streams of income diversifies my risk. Maybe one day I’ll focus on a larger, single site to add to my collection.
I am very glad to have come across this entry and the comments from others. My goal is to build a large enough site that has authority with the search engines and require minimal maintenace so that I can move on to other ventures.
But there were always nagging doubts if this is the right path to take. Well, my conviction is stronger now and I’ll set a target of 400 daily visitors from organic search.
Whether the site is large or a small, it doesn’t matter, but it should be optimized carefully. And it must contain unique content on it instead of large graphic stuff. Because search engine love content. And one more thing if your site contains flash or larger images it take so much time to load.
building a big website is much better as compared to smaller ones
it’s more efficient and you can demand more money from advertisers
Hey Brian, I thought this was a very good post. I agree with you that I think every keyword/site and situation is different in how you should go about setting up a different site or adding links to the same site with same anchor text.
To me it just depends on how much you want to risk/gamble and work on getting up a new site and how long you can wait before you achieve the necessary results!
I think small sites are easy to maintain than large sites. In large sites you have to maintain a huge number of keywords and keep updating them.
would not start a new site until my original one was making a profit. If you spread you investment to wide none of you sites will do well.
I agree but I would also say that individual pages on a more established site also can rank well. Eg. if you had a large family site and made a page about the new baby, that page I reckon would have as much a chance of ranking as a whole new site for it.
I have given a great deal of thought on this. The information you provided is very helpful.
I have a 80 page site in a very competitive theme. I have considered getting another site but realizing what it took to make my current site succeed I have decided to put more in to it, rather than do something new especially after reading this blog post.
Thanks for the info. After reading you post I am sticking to staying focused on my present site.
This has been my problem for the past few weeks. I think I’ll just stick to a few small, simple websites. Thanks for the info.
It is better to have single big website for general topics. In long run you can build strong foot with it.