Question

Hi there,

Just a quick question. I am looking into starting a business selling products online. I am going to start of with only 1 or 2 products and then build it from there. I was wondering, with relation to SEO, would it be more effective in generating traffic by having seperate websites for each product, or one single website with multiple pages for various products.

Could you please let me know? Any advice would be genuinely appreciated

Thankyou kindly,

Michael

Answer 1

My gut feeling says a single site would be more suitable.
Could not find good references along the questions.
However this might be good reading: Guide to Building a Web Site That Sells

Running a single site would,

• be easier to manage, maintain
• give better pricing
• attract prospective customers to the site based on any of your products
  • helpful if your products are related
• give your site cumulative ranking on search engines like Google

You could (in future) consider replicating the site on multiple servers easily.
That will give you better up-time, geographical access advantage and possibility of localization (if you need that).

Answer 2

I'd take the opposite view to nik -- and strongly suggest building a product specific website, and branding around that product.

I suspect you've only got time to build one good product, and that you'll be diluting your success by building a brand identity and a product identity at the same time.

Answer 3

Thanks so much Nik, Jeremy and Leon...

I think youve pretty much hit the nail on the head about having a product specific website. The more I think and research it, the more it makes sense.

Youre help has been verrrrry much appreciated.

Thanks guys,

Michael.

Answer 4

SEO advice comes in two types.

• Best practice
• Snake oil

Unfortunately it is difficult to tell the difference a lot of the time (even when giving it). Google webmaster tools contains a lot of tools and information for budding webmasters so is probably worth looking at.

In regards to your question. I believe that a website can accrue "google juce" which will support any pages on it. So if you have a site for each product they will have to stand alone, where as if you have a good site with many products on in they will support each other a little in terms of page rank. (This is a very hazy area but from my experience seems to be true.)

For example once there are lots of inbound links and content on SuperUser new pages will need less inbound links to get a high page rank because they are on this site. An identical page on another site with the same number of inbound links would not score so highly.

So I would suggest that one site would be better from a SEO point of view.

But to start with I would worry most about the basics, having SEO friendly HTML, a navigable site and lots of good unique content.

Answer 5

SEO is all about decent content relative to good titles and decent coding. When your site has something to offer, is relevant to what it is being found for, than your SEO scores will go up. Generating traffic is not cruciul, however, generating traffic from the people you want is!

If I where you I would discuss this with a good SEO specialist since there is a lot more to it than I am now willing to type! :)