You all are, by far, the best resource out there, so I'm hoping you can help with this question! I am looking for opinions on best practice for SEO in web design. You have a corporate site and multiple communities. Do you have one domain for the main corporate site with internal pages for each community or do you have domain names for each of the individual communities. Schools of thought?
I say you go for one domain with internal pages. Its clean and more content the better under one domain.
Thanks for the quick replies, you all! Anybody want to offer the opposite point of view? Are there any benefits to having a different website for each community? I had assumed that you could do some strong cross linking with keywords important to apartment communities (i.e., "Houston Apartments") by doing multiple websites, but maybe that's not the best way after all, huh?
I work in the hospitality SEO industry, and I work with companies that use both options. I've seen better success with the internal linking option but the alternative also works - with less success in SEO. One of the few advantages of having a different domain per community is company branding. The individual communities get to brand themselves apart from the head company. But I still strongly recommend one big domain with all the communities.
One domain.....there is no need to make an entire website for each community! That would take far too much effort, time and money. Especially since there will ne no competition for these community keyword phrases!