A mini site is a website by which companies offer information about one specific product or product group often used as part of a SEO campaign or web marketing mix.

Using a mini site you could create a few pages that specialise in a specific product or brand. This could be a new product line or one that needs to promote. The URL would be specific to the product that is being promoted as would all the page titles and text. A specific blog or news section on the site could be developed which could possibly be fed from a main blog. Content could include reviews, history, competitions and information. All of which would link back to the main site.

Creating a mini site offers many benefits:

• SEO for very specific keyword phrases. E.g. the URL of the site could be something that is not performing on your main site, a brand name or a particular product.
• Specialized development away from your main site. A simpler site that can be developed by none specialist web designers without effecting or endangering the main site.
• Extra landing pages for a company’s products
• Incoming links to the company’s main site from an extremely relevant sites with very relevant anchor text
• Attract customers who may be put off by a obvious e-commerce site

Guidelines to follow when creating mini sites include:

• Don’t register the Mini Site as an existing URL under the main website that it will point to. If the IP address is the same for the mini site and the main site, it will reduce the value of the links. It might save you money to add a URL onto your existing hosting plan but it can be worth it to pay the extra fees to host the mini site differently.
• Keyword optimise your URL and your page naming. Search engines look at various factors when categorising the value of inbound links and domain name keyword relevancy does help!
• Optimise every page. Do some keyword research; optimise meta tags, images, and the page content with quality and keyword dense articles.
• The more pages, the better. Don’t just do a one pager. Consider several articles and maybe even a blog page so that the website doesn’t stay static.
• Consider adding some news feeds related to your topic for high quality content for your readers and for SEO.
• Link to authority websites with a high page rank as well as your own main sales site. This can help you bump up your site’s relevancy.
• Link to your mini site from blogs and social marketing pages. It wouldn’t even hurt to do some article marketing and submit an e-zine article or two and point to your mini site in the resource box.