In the world of search engine optimisation there is always a choice to make. Do I optimise the site I have now, or do I create a purpose-built micro-site? The eighth tip in our guide may help you decide.

8. My site or Microsite?

As always, it depends. If the Client's site is a dedicated, transaction-based e-commerce website, then it often makes sense to do the marketing outside that, which gives us a lot of flexibility.

For example, let’s take ACME Widgets again. They are launching a new range of low cost widgets. We are going to achieve a lot more success by creating a microsite on a url of say, www.cheapestwidgets.com with all the titles, links and content nice and consistent to the keyword which, of course, we have already established is a high-traffic-low-competition keyword.

The microsite will look exactly the same as the main site and the visitor probably won’t even notice or care that the url is different. But the colours, branding and style can be in line with the main site, and of course all the calls-to-action will link into the relevant action pages of the main site. This is a great illustration of how search engine optimisation can work without making changes to your existing website.

Also, your own website probably serves different constituencies. Employees, customer support area, investors, and people just trying to find the phone number or directions to the office. A microsite is a pure sales vehicle.

An analogy of all of this is a factory ship, on the surface of the ocean, processing the fish that are being caught. Very often the ship itself is really quite impressive. And very often there is the equivalent of one guy standing at the back of the ship with a rod. What should be happening is that unseen on the surface there is an elaborate system of netting capturing fish of just the right size and extending several miles around the vessel.

That whole process of locating large concentrations of fish and catching the right ones, processing them quickly and converting them into money is the same kind of management challenge.

And for us the interesting bit is creating the effective system of netting that keeps the ship flat out busy.

So, back on dry land now, with our search engine optimisation hat on, we typically need an elaborate and carefully crafted acquisition method which is often more easily achieved through a network of microsites than through the client's own website.