Optimised landing pages

[tony data]

Hi,

Can anyone give me some pointers? I don't want to do anything to jeapordise what we have already as far as search engine results go!

In my industry, like many others I'm sure, people have been buying up domain names in order to counter our growth into new markets both domestically and internationally. The .com of our shop and site name has been bought and I cannot get anywhere near buying it back, countless attempts to make contact with the "owner" (The URL actually isn't even used for anything...?) have resulted in nothing. Following on from this we have now started to ship to Europe so my thoughts are a .com would be very helpful for organic listings in the European countries we ship to. We sell a number of different products servicing a few different markets, for example, we sell "everything" from www.oursitename.co.uk, this includes 7 different categories of goods. I have managed to get hold of .com URL's for our site name plus the category, eg www.oursitenamegardening.com, www.oursitenameinteriors.com, www.oursitenameexteriors.com and so on for all the categories we sell in. What I would like to do is create landing pages at these URL's that give people the opportunity to come to us via them.

We also have some in house brands that we have been developing. One in particular has built up quite a head of steam and is now actively searched for on the net as a brand name, we also receive a lot of questions on the different products from that brand that we struggle to give people info on as we don't want to associate the company with the brand, we want it to be it's own entity... Is there any problem with building a mini site for the brand that has a few links through to our main site where you can purchase the gear. The idea behind the mini site is to give people information not really to drive traffic, it will be rich in content and information. Can anyone see any problems with this as far as the search engines rules and regs are concerned?

Any help or guidance on these two points would be great!

[scrubs]

Hi,

In a nut shell it sounds like you want to create microsites for each of your topics. IMO this is dangerous ground as you don't want to be seen as spamming the topic with lots of domains.

Microsites work well if the topic/theme varies well and offer a genuine purpose to the end user, I would advise the following points:

1. Make sure each topic has enough content for the SE's to pick up
2. Do not duplicate content, offer structured content on each domain.

A prime example of successful microsites can be seen with Tesco's. They have a genuine reason for building different sites focused around: Finance, Insurance, Shopping, DVD Rental etc. This obviously works as each theme is unique and offers a service to the searcher.

I would suggest looking into each of the domains and compare whether they do actually vary in topic/theme enough to warrent its own domain. :)

If your theory is to drive traffic to one domain then I would suggest restructuring that domain, not look to other off page factors. Offer more content on the domain in question and make that more of a resource, rather then lots of individual domains.

[glengara]

One problem with the mini-site route is each domain will require links, and the danger is you'll be tempted to overdo the interlinking between them...

[tony data]

Hi Scrubs, thanks for your advice.

I am 100% certain that the seperate URL's are different enough to warrant being a domain.

What I'd like to do is try and get some good listings with slight variations of our brand name on a .com url as we now ship globally.

I'm not looking to create microsites (apart from the own brand site) just landing pages that offer some optimised content and a list of brand names we sell and then a link through to the main site.

I'm not lookig to drive traffic due to a poor performing main domain but more to get better listings globally.

[tony data]

Glengara, is there a fine line between under and over doing links? The plan is really to keep the links to a minimum, maybe one from the landing pages (www.oursitenamegardening.com) to the main site, a kind of doorway but with a .com url which will hopefully improve listing internationally and then perhaps maximum 2 or 3 from the micro site for the own brand.

[jsmm]

Were it my company, I would try to come up with a single, unique URL to act as the single company site. I might even try rebranding the company in the new market, or possibly for all markets.

Look at Amazon, for example. They have a single large site with lots of subcategories. Because it's an established brand, people know to visit the one main site, then can easily use the site's navigation to find products.

[scrubs]

Yes good point jsmm. It goes back to my original point about expanding the primary domain, I feel this is the best/quickest option. :)

Another important point to remember tony is that is you are launching with a new domain don't expect results over night. It may be over the course of a year until you expect to see results in the SERPs if you are in a competitive industry.

[tony data]

Scrubs/jsmm, Again, thanks for your points... If you had two sites one being www.oursite.co.uk and the other being www.oursite.com which of the two would you expect to rank higher as far as a url is concerned outside of the UK, i.e not just searching by uk results? Same site, just different url's.

[glengara]

*.. is there a fine line between under and over doing links? *

There is but it's almost impossible to discern, IMO it appears to be based on the "last straw" principle, cumulative indicators of a sites' linkage pattern, so can be crossed with what may seem a minor indiscretion.
Take interlinking domains, I haven't seen a site banned for doing this per se, but it is invariably a factor in a site that's been given a linkage-based ban.

The single Url is a good idea, and with some care in devising the internal linkage architecture you can get great benefits with minimal risk.

[pleeker]

Look at Amazon, for example.And someone like Home Depot -- they do gardening, interiors, exteriors, etc. But it's all off the main site.

[tony data]

Ok, scenario:

If Home Depot's main site is "www.homedepot.co.uk" with gardening, exteriors and interiors all as sub categories you can navigate to off it. It does well as far as UK search engine ranking is concerned, mainly for searches using it's name i.e "home depot" and not so well for similiar searches on European search engines like www.google.de, www.google.es etc. It also didn't do particularly well (not in top 5) for keywords, "gardening", "interiors", "exteriors" etc on any search engines UK or European...

Home Depot want to get good listings for these generic keywords globally so as well as optimising the main site (the .co.uk one) for these search terms it also bought domain names such as "www.homedepotgardening.com", "www.homedepotinteriors.com" and "www.homedepotexteriors.com" (they would have bought "www.homedepot.com" but someone had already bought it and refused to sell it to them or put a site there :mad: ) as they were now shipping to Europe and they felt having .com domains would help listings globally.

Their plan is to create static heavily branded landing pages (doorway? gateway?) with good content, category links to the main site as well as brand links they stock that also link back to the main commerce site at each .com domain they had bought "www.homedepotgardening.com", "www.homedepotinteriors.com" and "www.homedepotexteriors.com".

They also have the majority of their site www.homedepot.co.uk translated into all the languages of the countries they ship to so depending on where people came from the site would naturally translate to the spoken language of that search engines country.

Is this a viable plan?

Can they expect to enjoy better listings in Europe due to having .com domains?

Do you feel there is anything else they could do to gain better search listings in Europe for more generic keywords as the brand Home Depot was not widely known?

I also know it will not be an immediate thing but competition for "gardening", "exteriors" and "interiors" is fairly sparce and time is not a huge issue

I hope this makes sense! :confused:

[scrubs]

Hi Tony, OK this seems a little clearer now. Heres my thoughts..

My experience in this matter is that at UK hosted domain (.com) can influence google.com results. It is a very hit and miss scenario, out of choice if I was starting from scratch from domain I would make sure the .com is actually hosted in the US. This would only effect US results, and you would get a .co.uk for UK results. This is the way Google would like domains to be oraganised to get the best results, but as I said it doesn't always work like that.

If you can not get hold of the .com domain for the company name then your only option is to spread out and try alternatives for the US domain.

Your sample about HomeDepo would not launch those individual domains arround each topic, this would give a disjointed search marketing approach, IMO of course! :)

Give it a whirl using a .eu domain perhaps, concentrate on covering broad topics and do not break down the subjects into seperate domains. One domain will carry much more weight if you put all your efforts into that, rather then say 6 sub domains carrying watered down content.

Sorry if we've gone round the houses with this one but I think you may need to discuss in depth your marketing strategy and purely focus on domains that are available to you. In this case try putting all your eggs in one basket! :)

[tony data]

Scrubs, thanks, I hoped the example might make it clearer.

In answer to your questions:

We don't ship to the US and probably never will as the margins aren't there and the competition is BIG!

.eu domain has also gone...

Hindsight is great and if I'd been here to plan a longer term online marketing strategy I'd have all the domain names and alot more to boot... I'm just working with what I have and fighting fires...!

Would it be a better idea to get say, www.homedepot.es, www.homedepot.de, www.homedepot.nl for example and then host them in those countries....?

[scrubs]

No probs.

Yes thats the thing, you start looking at competition in the US and you can x your competitors by 10! :)

Yes I would target my domains like you said. I have a domain which is doing well in the UK now they want to target the Japanese market, we are in the process of setting this up.

I attended SES in London a couple of weeks ago and they mentioned about hosting in various countries, my theory is if it is not possible (i.e your spanish isn't too hot when looking for hosting packages) then try setting up a domain.es and get spanish links (a must!) into that domain and see how it goes, even if the domain is hosted in the UK.

Other members may have more experience in this matter of course.

[glengara]

*Is this a viable plan?*

Seems overly complicated/ambitious/a lot of work to me, think I'd only implement that if the Homedepot.co.uk site was banned, but use of the brand-name was mandatory.

*Would it be a better idea to get say, www.homedepot.es, www.homedepot.de, www.homedepot.nl for example and then host them in those countries....?*

As Scrubs suggests, definitely.