I am hoping to find some "official" answer to this question that keeps coming up on a project I am currently working on. In terms of pure SEO for a BRAND NEW eCommerce store website, is it better to create a large store with a wide variety of products, or create a separate site for each niche of product? I thought I read somewhere that sticking to a single topic is better for a new website that is starting out trying to get search results across that niche, but adding categories of new topics on an existing website with good rankings is OK. However, I am unable to find very much evidence of either argument now. Which direction did you go, and did it work well or not? Please site your source of information if you have one.
if you are interested in doing SEO on your site, then stick with a single category but can have several products under that. for example, if you select headache, then products tylenon, advil, aspirin, all fall under the same category as they all painkillers. site with lots of unrelated products is harder to SEO.
When it comes to store, it has to have everything (It is different matter that you chose to go for single topic). My pointer is to go for single topic, lets say, for example 'Gadgets'. Now allot single, dedicated and highly optimized page to mobile, ipod etc. In other words you should go tree wise, where root is no top.
If you have a large variety of products on different topics, then the smartest thing to do is to brand your site as a general shop, and have different sections in your site, each for every category. and promote each section as if it was a different site all by itself and the other thing you should do, is optimize your pages for long tail keywords, and create a nice landing page for each of your content. if you will aim for the big words, such as, general store, or general category. not only that you will have a very strong competition, but when people are actually looking to buy stuff, they never use these keywords. they use more specific terms so my advice to you, if you are in the retailing business, is to optimize for each product, while getting quality linking for your main page so it will pass it's page rank to your products pages and help them rank high for your long tail keywords search terms you can also look for other threads about this subject, you can learn a lot of interesting stuff
So in other words, what you are saying is that if you have limited resources, it is better to start out with a single or a few niches than to add a bunch of unrelated crap to your site. Promoting each niche requires a lot of work, and if your competition has more resources than you it puts you at a significant disadvantage to build a "mulitple niche" store from day 1. Still I believe it is better to be on page 1 for a single niche than it is to be on page 9 for several. Agree or disagree? By the way, while the "long tail keyword" advice is best for most industries, I have found the opposite to be true in my case. The reason is because I need to hook the customers at the beginning of their "search" by sending them color samples. If I wait until they are "ready to buy", I have already lost the sale to someone else. Many of my customers take several months to decide if they are going to buy and if I am not in the first few searches they do, I am not in the short list of companies they are deciding to buy from when they finally make the transaction. In addition, there are only a few dozen sites competing for the same keywords as me and most of them are ignorant about SEO.
Ok, so maybe in your case it's will be better your way If the competition is weak (and you should have mentioned it before), then go for the main word! but usualy customers that come from the main wordare not converting as well as customers that used the longtail But I don't know what kind of buisness you are dealing, so sorry if my advice didn't help you so much There is also a very nice thread about it, read it, you might get some ideas http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=622210