It is no secret that one of the most effective ways to optimize a website is to include your targeted keyword in your site's domain name. For example, if one of your business' targeted keywords is "accounting software," you may want to have www.accountingsoftwaresolutions.com as your domain (by the way, I just checked and this URL has expired so you could grab it now if you are quick enough).

Unfortunately, most of us do not have the luxury of re-naming our websites just to target one keyword, no matter how valuable that specific keyword may be. Most businesses either already have a website or they must target other keywords.

But if I were in the accounting software business, I would still be very interested in grabbing such a domain name because there has to be a lot of people who log into Google and type in "accounting software" as their query.

The solution, is to set up mini-sites, or as a recent article on Dosh Dosh calls them, "Mini-Funnel" Websites. These Mini Funnel sites are actually "slave sites" that exist to answer a single, specific question and feed search engine traffic to a master site.

They get searchers because these mini sites are set up to grab one keyword and then re-direct these visitors to another site that may target many other –related- keywords.

Maki (the author of the Dosh Dosh article) uses an interesting example a site called, Is Barack Obama a Muslim. This site is a one-page site that has the word "NO" printed in big black letters against a stark white background. Visitors who click the word "NO" are directed to an article on www.barackobama.com that addresses smear email campaigns.

The article, How ‘Mini-Funnel’ Websites Can Help You Increase Traffic, Generate Leads and Build Exposure, also points out an interesting twist. The Obama team has also set up companion mini-funnel sites that offer different phrases and even allow for misspellings by searchers.

For example, the site Is Barack Obama Muslim, which leaves out the word "a," has produced even better results than the previous example:

"This particular one ranks the highest on both Yahoo and Google for the ‘is barack obama muslim‘ phrase, taking the no. 1 spot and even outranking Obama’s own official website. This appears to be the most established version of the three; Yahoo site explorer shows that it has 10,762 incoming links."

There is even a version of the site that uses the word "muslin" instead of "Muslim," to accommodate people who may misspell the word when they type in their search engine query.

The lesson here is that mini sites, which target single keywords, can drive massive traffic to your main website. Look for search terms related to your business and set up one-page sites that answer the visitor's question and then provide a link for more information to your main site.

This will allow you to benefit from traffic coming in from many, many different search terms.


COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown
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