Posts Tagged ‘link building’

I always here about people complaining that their newly developed minisites get no traffic. Well there are a couple of reasons why a minisite built on a domain that had no previous traffic gets no traffic. The main reason is that the domain itself completely sucks, i.e. Schools4You.com is not a great domain to make a minisite on and will require TONS of work to actually get traffic.

link-building

Some things you want to look at before you start developing a minisite on a domain names is to actually look at the domain itself. Look for the potential in search volume of the exact term and related terms. This in return will tell you the potential of what can be built on the site and what people are searching for.

For instance, i recently picked up MiniatureHorse.org. Yeah i know not the best domain in the world but i laughed when i saw it and i had to have it. Anyways by looking at the Google Keyword tool i typed in “Miniature Horse” and it gave me the exact result plus many other related searches. The exact term “Miniature Horse” gave me 14,800 EXACT global searches a month. Not bad, now compare that with “Miniature Horses” at 18,100. You can see where i am going with this. For SEO purposes check out other highly searched terms similar to what you domain is and that is what you should be writing about on the site along with those being your title tags. Judging by what i see and looking at my competition in the SERPS, with this domain name i can dominate the niche by producing a content rich and interactive minisite.

Now what i have said in the previous paragraph is just the foundation for a successful ministe. Its much more than just producing a great looking  and a content rich website. There are a couple things you have to do on a regular basis to get the site in to the eyes of the people looking for it. Just letting things go organic is not the way to go, you do not expect to walk in to the store and find a PS3 in the food isle, you look at signs to get to the electronics section.

First thing you need to look at is link building. Link building is a “sign” to let the search engines know that you are there and you are the authority in the niche of your site. Building up your links on other authority sites is a must. Check out your competitions link building strategies and match then plus going the extra mile. You can easily higher people to do this for you over a period of time or you can do this yourself.

Find similar sites or forums that you can leave comments or give informative posts about the niche your site is in. Make sure you leave a link back to your site to let people know where to find you. This builds trust up with people that frequent those types of sites and plants a seed in peoples minds.

Also do not forget to submit to directories. This allows your site to get crawled by search engines in more than one place. Not a highly effective strategy but gets your site out there in the beginning.

Next thing for link building and the minisite train of excitement is social bookmarking. I can not tell you how much traffic i get on my sites from just social bookmarking alone. Again just like directory submissions they do not help your rankings out much but they get your site out there. They allow other people the opportunity to SEE your site and possibly even bookmark the site themselves.

I think the most important thing besides letting the world know your site is alive is keeping fresh content up and going. I am not talking about RSS feeds but actual unique content that you write yourself or hire someone to do so. This way again you are building trust with the readers and showing the search engines that you are not a one hit wonder. This is what your site will give to people and search engines to feed on.

You do not need to keep your site updated everyday but go in once a week or at the very least and add something new. Make it a destination for people to come and get new information about whats going on in the niche. Along with that add a forum so people can make a place to converse. This in return can give you an idea of what you need on your site to keep the content fresh.

This is just the surface of what needs to be done to make sure you launch your ministie successfully. Check out this post by Darren at Problogger.net. There is a lot of great info in there that can help you get your site in the eyes of readers. I know it has to do with blog posts but the same can be done with minisites.