Let's say you're targeting "kids": - Kid furniture - Kid clothes - Kid ideas and so forth... you get the idea. For best + easiest SEO rankings, would it be better to buy: kid-furniture.com kid-clothes.com ..... or get something generic such as kids.com and create sub pages using the keywords? I've heard some people say the value is in the domain (better to get specific keyword packed ones) and others say build the 1 site and let its power pass through to the subpages... whats your opinion?
Assuming both is out of the picture? Tough call. If there's a lot of competition and not something you can resell other products to very easily, might be better off just with a selection of small sites. But if you're running it as a business, and might want to sell it later, a larger branded site could help with both sale price & increasing customer revenues.
in the short term, loads of small sites are easier. If you want to do it properly you should really have one huge site, the size of the site its self can solely help with rankings, plus if your home page gets a good page rank then it passes a good page rank onto internal pages. Either way the way you generate links will be the same, you want them to internal pages. I would want one big site though, everything is easier to manage!
Another method: Register kids.com and put a Wordpress blog on it linking to a growing number of subdomain sites like kidsclothing.kids,com, games.kids.com, homework.kids.com That gives you a lot of highly targeted mini-sites.
somethingunrelated.com/lets-stuff-some-keywords/ wouldn't hold as much value as: lets-stuff-some-keywords.com in my mind. As anyone, on an unrelated site, could make a subpage stuffed full of keywords (purely for SEO, no real content)... however if your URL is "some keywords" then your site would naturally be about "some keywords" and SE's would give it more weight as a "real result" and not "spam". IMO anyway
Where are your customers coming from? Primarily search engine traffic? PPC? Links and offline advertising? The answers determine, in part, how you should structure your site(s). If the answer above is "Primarily search engine traffic" then MAYBE the separate websites will work better in the short run. If the answer is anything else, then choose one big site. How do you go about branding a bunch of little sites? How do you get people to remember the names? How do you get any synergies? So, unless SEO is your overwhelming concern that eclipses all other marketing strategies, go with one website.
From my experience I would have to say just build one large website. This is for several reasons: -having many websites is a pain in the ass to manage...take everything you have to do for one website and multiply it by how many websites you have...that includes design, link building, updates, adding content, etc. With many websites you end up spending way too much time repeating everything. -by having one website, all of the links you build will go towards building a strong domain link profile....in other words each link helps all of your rankings a bit -when you have one website it becomes very easy to cross sell directly related and indirectly related products...this keeps them on your website longer and increases your profitability -in your link building you may find places where you can only get 1 link and you would be forced to decide which website needs that link the most -with one website you can just as easily do link building for each site section and build up rankings for those internal pages....an optimized page on a well established domain will usually rank above a moderately marketed homepage I made the mistake of making too many credit card websites. Now I have changed my strategy to only focus on a few of them and ignore the rest. If I had instead built up one huge quality website I would be in a much better position.
I guess it depends on your strategy. As vansterdam mentions, it requires doing the same thing over+over again for each site. If targeting long-tail keywords it may be better (the type where you basically rank because the search term is your domain and you have 10 backlinks ), then again how much competition must there be for that to happen? Another question then is if its that long-tail, will it generate enough visitors to make enough money to cover the domain reg + time spent? If it's just SEO traffic you wouldn't. It'd be basically 100% new visitors. Perhaps a mixture is best... instead of 1 massive site, or 100 small sites, 5 or so medium size sites would do better.