Website architecture and microsite strategy

The aim of splitting a site into microsites is to ensure there is a tightly themed area, where the theme and its corresponding keywords (or search phrases) are easily identifiable by the search engines. At Fuse we believe that getting the website architecture right through good microsite structures based on thorough keyword research, is crucial to the long-term aims of our clients websites.

In a perfect world we would be involved in the initial design and build of the site, ensuring that the architecture is in place even before any of the search engine bots have visited the site. However, often we are asked to optimise a website years after the initial launch and find the content badly organized or worse still, not organized in any recognizable way at all.

We have been developing our microsite (silo) strategy for five years and have found it especially useful in gaining rankings for our client’s generic keywords as well as very specific revenue-earning phrases.

We believe it is necessary to be extremely cautious about linking out from a microsite, as it can ruin the integrity or theme of that microsite. Wherever possible, all pages in the microsite link to each other and the index page of the microsite only. The only exceptions are the site’s navigation links which appear on each page in the header, footer, sidebar or all three. There is evidence that search engines can identify parts of a page which are repeated throughout the site, allowing them to focus on the unique body content of each page instead.

Some interesting reading on the subject
Layering content to maximise visibility
Bruce Clay - Revisiting silos