Well-managed microsites 'can boost SEO'

08/09/2008

Creating well thought-out microsites can do much for a company's search marketing campaign, according to MarketingSherpa.

The website said that it is possible to give search engine rankings a significant boost through unifying multiple microsites instead of managing a host of websites that appear to have little connection to each other.

In one case study, building products firm Johns Manville increased traffic from search by 83 per cent by adopting a number of tactics, including analysing existing sites to see which content could be kept and scrapped and which keywords worked best overall.

The company then opted for one of its existing URLs to host the new unified website, as search engines tend to favour addresses with a history behind them, MarketingSherpa noted.

It then indexed the pages to be used in the new site and created a map, going on to create new content to fill the gaps between the old microsites.

"Some of these microsites were only getting 100 visitors a month, because they had very specific content. Now that we've broadened the audience were talking to, we're getting thousands of people looking at the site," commented Joelle Patten of Johns Manville.

According to Stephan Spencer of Search Engine Land, microsites developed in the style of a blog may be more likely to be linked to by other sites - and thus boost search engine optimisation - than more conventional content.