This has been on my ideas-list for soooo long: Building some microsites that target specific keywords, for both SEO and PPC purposes. But I finally found the time to actually work on it and my first microsite is now live: www.musicdatabase.com.

This is a domain I purchased years ago and I have always been redirecting it to my Music Collector product page on the Collectorz.com website. But now I have created a one-page website for it, with its own content, targeting the keyword “music database“.

Search Engine Optimization

The keyword “music database” is a tough one to optimize for. My Music Collector product page is currently ranking on position 17 in the organic results at google.com. But the power of the keyword-rich domain and the fact that it already has a PageRank of 4 has helped to get my new microsite at position 4.

Here’s a couple of on-page optimizations I did:

• Include keywords in headline (h1 tag)
• Include keywords in bullets
• Include keywords in product description body
• Link to relevant websites
• List relevant testimonials that include the keyword
• Make sure the content is updated automatically and regulary. This is done using the “Most popular CDs” list at the bottom and the automatically updating list of testimonials.
• And last but not least, write unique content that does not appear anywhere else.

Pay Per Click

Having your keyword in your domain name can also have advantages for PPC advertising. If you can use the domain of your microsite as your Display URL, it can make your ad look more relevant. Which can help generate a higher click-through rate (CTR).

I am currently trying to test the effect of this. Which isn’t easy because Adwords doesn’t let you A/B test multiple ads with different target domains within the same ad group:

Oh well, I will have to run one after the other for about a week. Or maybe run them against each other in different campaigns.

Future plans

I am planning to create more of these microsites, for my most important keywords. I have already registered and purchased relevant domains for these. However, I want to be careful and not release them all too fast. I don’t want to be penalized by Google for spamming.
So each site will have to have unique and relevant content for the keywords it targets.

Next to that, the plan is to build these sites into real microsites (as opposed to just one-page sites). It would be good if each of them would have about 3 to 5 pages of relevant, and more importantly, unique content.

A lot of work, but hopefully worth it. I will let you know how it all works out.