Should You Set Up One Website or Many?
October 28, 2009On one of the forums that I participate in, a member asked this question:
“I was wondering if it is better to have multiple websites optimised for 1 or 2 keywords or 1 website per product that you optimise for as many keywords as possible?”
As this may be a question that readers of this blog would also have, I’ve copied my response below:
If you want to get a lot of free SEO traffic then it is best to optimize your site for one particular keyword phrase.
Register a .com, .net or .org domain with the exact keyword phrase or if they are not available, a domain name which includes the keyword phrase (unbroken).
Create at least one page with content based on that keyword. Also create other pages with content based on similar keyword phrases.
Before doing any of the above, make sure that the keyword phrase you are targeting is not too competitive but at the same time gets lots of daily searches. To find out how competitive the phrase is, go to Google.com and type in the phrase with quotes (“keyword phrase”) and see how many competing sites there are. The more sites, the harder it will be to get free SEO traffic. Anything under 100,000 is not too competitive.
To find out how many monthly searches a keyword phrase gets, use the free Google Keyword Tool. When you do report for your keyword phrase, it will reveal how many monthly searches it gets. You’d want to make sure that your keyword phrase is getting at least a few thousand searches per month to make it worthwhile.
Once you have done all the above (what they call on-page optimization), you then need to get quality backlinks to your site for it to rank well in the search engines. Look for websites that have a high page rank that you can leave your links on like article directories, blogs, forums and web 2.0 sites (e.g. Squidoo). Make sure that you link back to your site with your keyword phrase as the anchor text.
Mix it up a little though, it will look suspicious to the search engines if every backlink is with the same anchor text. Use other similar keyword phrases as the anchor text as well. Also, don’t set up a whole bunch of backlinks on one day. Do about three a day consistently and before long you’ll have a heap of backlinks, great search engine position, and a lot of free traffic!
I absolutely agree with your point on concentrating on one keyword per site. Some do not realize that mistake they’re doing. You can branch out to sub-keywords but still they should be directly connected to your main.