Something which I’ve begun to look at lately is the concept of creating mini satellite sites on behalf of clients, who don’t always have a large website.

Let’s say for example, a hotel on the English Riviera in south Devon. They currently have a static 8 page website, with no new content coming onto that site.

Of course, each page of their current site is already optimised, hopefully, for a set number of keywords and long tailed keywords too, if they know anything about search engine optimisation. The trouble is often, that they are loathe to changing out these keywords and their respective content, for fear that their competition will overtake them in the search engine rankings and one can certainly empathise with this well founded fear of theirs.

My suggestion therefore is to create a number of satellite minisites for them, the ones I use are based on a WordPress blog theme. Each satellite minisite is targeted for no more than four long tailed keywords. The content I write myself of course paying particular attention to these keywords.

At the bottom of the content is a direct link to their main website, thereby the satellite minisites act as a funnel, driving the traffic from the satellite sites to the main website of the hotel or other business in question.

The rest of the pages on the satellite minisite are kept fully up to date with RSS aggregator feeds, the actual text residing in shadow boxes, so that it appears to Google that the satellite sites are indeed, WordPress blogs, which of course Google loves and ranks well.

This method increases the chances considerably of sending to the main website, plenty of new traffic based on the extra targeted four long tailed keywords. Typically, I’ll create about 10 satellite minisites which opens up the business to use an extra 40 long tailed keywords. And the original website of course, stays intact relieving the client of any fear of losing rank.

Hope all is well in your part of the world.

All the best!

Mark – http://www.iSpyWithMy.com

Hi Mark,

You bring up some interesting points. There are two schools of thought regarding minisites. Some people would suggest that you keep everything on one site and ethically this makes sense. In the example you provide another option would be to build extra pages for the client’s main site. That way you save on domain registration, hosting and you only have to spend time marketing one domain.

But, building extra sites can be a good way to generate links. For example, a lot of my clients have similar areas of business so we create industry theme blogs, for free, on wordpress (any other free blog platform would do). We populate these blogs with good quality industry related news, reviews etc. But we always try to make these blogs decent quality so they will attract natural links and interest. The blogs build PR and we have control of linking to whoever we want from them.  The advantage of doing it this way is you don’t have to reserve the site(s) purely for one client and any further links in that area are easily created. Happy days!

Not a lot of large on-line businesses have success with social media marketing, mainly due to the bitter taste they leave in the mouth of the average social media user. But with a scheme this wacky and plenty of TV coverage CompareTheMarket will probably do very well out of it! I’m writing about it now aren’t I?!

I’ve checked out the CompareTheMeerkat site from an SEO point of view and it’s linked like mad back to the main CompareTheMarket site so with all the viral linking the hoax site is sure to generate plenty of PR through anchor text with the word compare in. This is bound to have a knock-on effect!

The marketing team behind the campaign have also created a FaceBook and Twitter account for Aleksandr Orlov the Russian meerkat. The FaceBook account has so far massed 138,327 fans and no doubt it’s still growing!

One other aspect which now seems to be occurring, and what is a master stroke in my opinion is the Google result when you search for comparethemeerkat – a nice suggestion of your intended destination! It’s a shame it doesn’t do it when you search with spaces but there you go! EDIT: It seems to be a little erratic and doesnt always give you a suggestion!

So, has the cost been worth it to CompareTheMarket? Well the Alexa rankings would suggest so:

As well as book mark lists the Favicon is being implemented in other areas as well. Google have recently experimented with Favicons next to search results [http://www.marketingvox.com/google-tests-site-favicons-in-select-search-results-042938/]. I don’t see any reason for them not to implement this at some point so be prepared for Favicon fever as people explore the stats relating to how certain Favicons perform.

Or maybe not? Maybe the average searcher doesn’t give a damn about the Favicon and they base their decision entirely on the textual part of the listing? One thing is for sure, Google seems to be spending a bit of time considering the old Favicon! They’ve changed theirs again [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7839744.stm]. That coupled with the recent tests seems to show that Favicons are on an agenda somewhere. What a pity the Google logo has always been its name in the primary colour groups. There’s no way you’re going to fit that into a 16 by 16 pixel gap!

So what are the other Favicon options that Google could have explored? Well how about an animated Favicon? Something like this [http://www.couleur3.ch/] with the letters rotating would have been nice? Well that’s what I’d have gone for anyway!

There are some sites that don’t seem to be fussed about having a Favicon in place, or at least a unique one anyway! There are numerous forums programmed in the vb system that still have the standard forum logo ([http://www.webproworld.com/] and [http://www.seoworkers.net/] are two examples).

So if you want help creating a favicon it’s very easy. Check out this article:

[http://ma.tt/2003/11/how-to-create-a-favicon/]