The use of mini websites (also known as portals) as a search engine placement tool is a hotly debated topic and one which is sure to bring up warnings of "spamming" and raise a few eyebrows at the legitimacy. Portals have, for too long, been used as an easy link- building tool offering nothing more than regurgitated information, sometimes vaguely reworded, for the sole purpose of building links to some central website.


The search engines themselves have long been aware of this tactic and have made every effort to hinder its usefulness. Looking for duplicate content, interlinking strategies, and an assortment of other similar indicators, search engines have generally managed to reduce the usefulness of portal websites as a link-building tactic to nothing.

Then have portal websites been rendered useless? The answer, a resounding "no".

A benefit to the actual visitor!

As with all website design, the best possible use of any tactic, including portals, is to help your visitors. If you make your information easy to find and relevant to what they are looking for, your visitors will stay for longer, view more pages, and perhaps even return. Portals are an excellent tool for consolidating information into smaller, more manageable sources of information.

Let us take for example a athletics information website. Being an excellent source of information for sports around the world, this site has it all. Basketball, Soccer, Hockey, Rugby, and on and on. The advantage for the website is that it has tons of great information on all the major sports, the disadvantage … it has TONS of information on ALL the major sports. So what can one do to help the visitor find the information that they are looking for?

The answer here … build portal websites. In the case of this athletic site it could be done by either region or by sport. Let's say that you choose to build portal sites by sport. What this would give the visitor is a much more specific site to navigated, dedicated to their area of interest. Most certainly you should carefully link this site to the other sports sites to insure that a visitor with multiple athletic interests can find all the information that they need but for the visitor only searching out information on one sport they will land on pages with tons on information on that sport dedicated to exactly what they are looking for.

Too often people optimizing websites focus on the spiders and forget about the visitors. The sites you are developing have to appeal to the visitors and provide them with the information that they're looking for or all you'll get at the end of the day is hosting bills and low conversion rates. Portal websites are a great tool for this in that they enable you to create a series of information resources giving full information on an area while structuring a network of information covering a much larger topic.


And more keywords too !

While the visitor is of very significant importance when building a website or, as we are discussing here, a network of sites – getting visitors to your site is of primary significance too. As we all know, there's no point in creating a beautiful website if no one's going to see it. Portal websites are a fantastic tool for increasing your online visibility and search engine exposure for a wide variety of reasons.

Perhaps the most significant of these reasons is the increase in keywords that you can target in a portal promotion. Rather than having one website with which to target a broad range of keywords you now have many websites with which you can target these same keywords (more effectively) and also add others. Rather than trying to target "super bowl" and "hockey history" on the same site you now have the opportunity to target them specifically on sites dedicated to the keywords for the sport in question.

To illustrate: on one page it is much easier to target the two keyword phrases "hockey playoffs" and "hockey scores" than "hockey playoffs" and "football rules". In the first example you are using one keyword for two searches and thus, make the job much easier that when you have two totally different keyword phrases. Targeting incompatible keyword phrases (i.e. ones that aren't based on the same main keyword) makes it harder to get the words in that you need to and still keep the content readable to the visitor.

Another related advantage to portal sites is based on the weight that many search engines give to home pages. For obvious reasons, some search engines put increased weight on home pages. With a portal promotion you have as many home pages as you do websites and thus, you have the advantage of increased weight being placed on pages directly relating to the searches your visitors are finding you with and by which you want them to find you. And when they get there they will find the exact information that they are looking for.

The added ability to list multiple websites on directories, and to build far more links to your network will also serve you well. With sites dedicated to specific areas (sports in this example) you can then go to a directory and list you hockey portal in it's category (Directory > Recreation > Sports > Hockey - in yahoo) and then move on to list your soccer portal at Directory > Recreation > Sports > Soccer. This gives you the ability to build far more links to your websites overall and to focus your search engine placement tactics. What I mean by focus is that you can determine (either through research or experience) which sports are of the greatest interest to your visitors and focus on placement for that sport. Rather than building links for one domain and relying on it to rank for often- unrelated keyword phrases, you can decide that soccer and tennis (for example) are the two sports whose visitors buy the most products from your site. You can then go on a large link-building mission for your soccer and tennis portals looking for links, not just sports-related, but soccer and tennis-related. This makes your incoming links far more relevant and also enables you to ask for links from sites that may not otherwise link to you. A site that reports scores on soccer in Europe is more likely to link to your soccer portal than to a site about sports in general. Or you can ask them for a link to both sites (your soccer portal and your main site) and kill two birds with one stone.

Conclusion

While the glory days of blatant link-farming are over, portal websites have never been more relevant. The ability to target a much broader range of keywords, to attain incoming links from a much larger base of websites, and to carefully link between these portals can take your site from 50 visitors/day to 5000 if done properly.

A word of caution: you are going to see these websites that you've created and you're going to want to maximize your link popularity – so what are you going to do. Well for one thing, you're not going to link all of your sites to all of the others with some link-farm footer at the bottom of every page. You're probably not going to want to even link all of them to the others on a "Links Page". What you will want to do is interlink them in an intelligent way. When there is a time when you may want your visitors to go to another of your sites (going from one sport to another), or where you may want them to have that choice, that's when to link … not just because you want to add more links.

As with most issues in web design, keep it friendly and attractive for your visitors. If what you are about to do to increase your search engine placement does not enhance the experience for your human visitors then it's probably a strategy that either won't work or which will be penalized down the road.