Authority Sites or Mini Sites – Which Should You Focus on?
Whether to build a minisite or authority website all depends on what you want to accomplish with it. One thing to keep in mind is search engines naturally want to give their users good content. While all business owners will do what they basically want to do, it is understandable that an owner will follow their marketing instincts and goals. We would not suggest, or recommend, that anybody base their entire business model on mini sites alone. You will find that authority sites are perceived with much more regard than minisites, and that carries certain benefits for the owner. The minisites do have their benefits, so it really a choice between liking apples or oranges. It’s also important to keep in mind that solid hosting is definitely a must. We use and recommend HostGator, be sure to read our Host Gator reviews.
Sometimes people only want to get involved with one particular aspect of a market. This is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Sometimes you’re only interested in that very thin slice of the market known as a micro-niche. For these very targeted marketers, mini sites perform much better than authority sites. Mini sites are excellent for taking one or two very focused keywords and dominating the search engine results for those keywords. Assuming of course that the competition for these two keywords isn’t too fierce. To be fair, you can also target the same micro-niche within an authority site. If you aren’t at all interested in this, then mini sites are probably the way to go for you.
When it comes to Google’s algorithms, these are updated every so often, and reflect what the search engine does and doesn’t want to encourage. Mini sites, or sites without much content, are definitely going down in popularity with Google, which, in 2010, has been favoring authority sites. As with Adwords,, your quality score goes down the less valuable your site is deemed. This means that SEO with mini sites will now be quite a bit harder than it used to be if you want to rank well. When it comes to ranking or getting traffic to your mini site, your SEO efforts will not get you the kind of traffic they would have even a year ago. These are the standards Google is using, and if you do SEO, you have to consider this.
One benefit of authority sites that you do not see often concerns ranking for other keyword phrases. Eventually you may learn that your site is ranking for synonyms of your original keywords. Once you notice that happening, then that will or could give you more possibilities. Analyze the stats for those synonyms, but also try to determine whether you can expand on them to create other keyword phrases to help your rankings. This can happen to many established authority sites relatively easily. Once again, something like this takes time to develop.
Mini site and authority sites, then, each have their advantages and disadvantages. It can be tempting to make all your internet marketing decisions based on Google’s preferences. Of course we also understand that line of thinking, but we would suggest that you diversify your marketing and avoid living your business life according to Google’s terms. When it comes down to it, you have to devise your own marketing plan based on your needs and goals. Last but not least, don’t forget to check to see if there are any new HostGator coupon codes.