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If you or you company are in the development stages of a start-up online business venture, you are probably amazed at the number of decisions that have to be make.  One you should not overlook in your business plan relates to website size.  Should you build a small website, a mini-site in the beginning, with the plan of building a portfolio of such sites?  Should you, alternatively, lay the foundation for a large website, although you would allow it to grow slowly?

I must stress that this topic is ultimately not related to how large you want the business to ultimately become.  Businesses that run a number of small sites can grow as well as those that concentrate on one major “money site.”  It also is not necessarily impacted your target niche.  The planned size of a website in the beginning can lead to ultimate growth and financial success of the business as a whole. 

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 two approaches call for different models of long term growth, although both may begin largely concentrating upon a relatively narrow slice of the market.  Businesses that begin with a large site as the eventual goal, with fully develop one small sub-niche, then gradually add new sections dedicated to other sub-niches onto their original site.  Those who initially built a small site, with intention of always leaving it small, will take a “duplication of success” approach, as they gradually add more an more individual sites to their virtual empire of tiny websites.  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.”

Positive cash flow can be established sooner with the small site approach.  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.

Let me move now to some of the important practical matters that are impacted by your decision on this important matter.

The first has to do with start up cost.  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.

A second practical difference pertains to your approach to keywords.  Any keyword research for a smaller site will be much more tightly focused upon the long-tail terms, especially those that show commercial intent (thus more likely to convert sooner rather than later).  With the large site plan, you will conduct your research with two focal points: the lower competition but more targeted long-tails and the highest level, most competitive short tails (which are less likely to convert immediately, but the users of which might be nurtured into eventually becoming customers.

The last practical ramification has to do with page rank.  Page rank is impacted by a number of variables in search engine algorithms (formulas), but one of those is the number of pages that a site has (assuming that the site has a search engine friendly linking structure).  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.

I trust that I have given you some things to think about and apply to your unique business situation, despite the fact that I have not provided any clear cut final decision with respect to which alternative is best for you.

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