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If you or you company are in the development stages of a beginning online business venture, you are probably overwhelmed by the number of decisions that you must reach.  One you should not overlook in your business plan has to do with website size.  Should you create a small website, a mini-site in the beginning, with the plan of building a virtual empire of such sites?  Should you, instead, lay the foundation for a large website, although you would allow it to grow slowly rather than starting off as a large site?

I should stress that this issue is not related to the size that you want the business to ultimately become.  Businesses that operate a number of tiny sites can grow as well as those that concentrate on one major “money site.”  Neither should your decision be based upon some preconceived notion of your target market or your niche.  Both small sites and large sites can succeed in any niche. 

I should alert you that reading this article will not automatically give you the right answer to this particular question of size.  Instead, what I hope to provide is a set of some things for you to consider so that whether you build a small website immediately or lay the groundwork for a mega-site, you’ll understand that decision’s impact upon key variables now and in the future.

Small websites should be concentrated on a narrow sub-niche built around a cohesive, limited set of relatively long-tail keywords.  Sites that are designed to become quite large eventually will develop most of their content in the same focused way, but they will also begin search engine optimization on the shorter, very high competition keywords at the same time.

The growth models of the two are very different after each has satisfactorily mastered the beginning, narrow sub-niche.  Those who have taken the mini-site approach, will begin to duplicate their success by building a new, small site in another sub-niche with a new set of long-tailed keywords.  Large site businesses will instead build another section onto their growing original site.  This new section, over time, is joined by others (think of new departments being added to a sporting goods store, for example).  Each new section takes on a new sub-niche.  So, as the big sites grow ever larger with more and more categories, departments or silos, the business with mini-sites might create twenty or fifty or a hundred individual “storefronts.”

As a general rule, the mini-sites can establish positive cash flow more quickly.  This is partly due to such a business not investing resources into those most competitive, high level keywords.  In the long run however, over the course of many months or even years, the mega-sites can become competitive for the high traffic keywords and might even become recognized as an authority in the broadly based market.

I’ll point to three practical ramifications of how you decide to approach this business decision.

One of these pertains to the amount that needs to be invested into the site itself in the beginning.  When you plan to build a large site, the architecture of the whole site (as it will eventually become) must be in place.  Consequently, although the mini-site and the eventual mega-site may be the same size at launch, the model for the larger site costs more at start-up.  Mini-sites are much less expensive to build than it is to build the foundation for a larger business site.

The ways in which you think about your keywords is another important difference.  Any keyword research for a mini-site will be undertaken to locate a limited number of closely related long term keywords.  Special attention will be given to those keywords that are likely to convert immediately (keywords that are sometimes said to have “commercial intent”)  If you opt for the silo site, you will be splitting the focus of your keyword research.  In one way, you will be imitating the search of your small site competitors by looking for those longer tails that are higher converting, but you must also identify all of the high traffic keywords so that you can begin to attract visitors who are gathering information rather than ready to make a decision to buy or sign a contract.

The last practical ramification has to do with page rank.  The number of pages in a site is one of the variables that is part of the page rank algorithm, assuming the internal linking structure of the site is well optimized.  Thus, it is more difficult to achieve a high page rank than it is for a large site because of its inherent value on that variable.

So I hope I have given you some food for thought, even though I haven’t provided an actual answer for you.  Perhaps, though, these ideas provide you with an inclination as to which approach you should take given your own unique business circumstances.

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