Micro Sites

Micro sites are a common strategy to help with search engine rankings as you mention. They can be used to bump up the ranking of the 'mother site' and also to suck in traffic themselves to generate leads.

Having a range of sites also helps to spread the risk in case Google doesn't like any one site for some reason.

To give you an idea of how they work, we are currently engaged in creating 10 satellite sites to bring in traffic and boost the ranking of the main site.

Feel free to PM me or email nadeem AT azam.biz should I be able to help in any way

You might want to look at this article as well:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-rising-tide-lifts-all-ships

This basically cautions against spreading yourself too thinly. If you have too many mini-sites rather than one big one you're spreading your link value among many domains instead of directing it all to one site. So you have many sites with low link value rather than one site with higher link value. Keep that in mind as well.

I think micro sites can help if you have enough content.

However, you don't want to waste your good content on micro-sites because you don't want to get hit by duplicate content filters which will penalize both of the sites that you use the same content on.

I think in general it is a better strategy to focus hard on 1 really important domain and build many backlinks and do a ton of SEO for it rather than to get involved with making a number of sites which can be distracting.

However if you want to use some other novel promotion technique, you can do it on a separate domain and track the results from it and funnel the prospects to your main site.

Yes, and then you're spreading your time thinly over many sites rather than concentrating it on one. I've got 4 sites and I can't possibly spend a lot of time promoting any of them, so I spend a small amount of time on 3 (the 4th is doesn't get any attention at all).

We've all got limited resources - do you want 5 crappy sites or 1 good site? That's the trade-off.

Megan, I may be mistaken, but I think they are talking about having one main site, then having some very small sites with related content that basically are their just to lead people back to the bigger site.

It sounds like you are talking about just having micro sites without a main sites, and they aren't.

Of course, I could be mistaken. It's happened before.

I knew that, I was just saying that it's hard to successfully market more sites at one time, carrying on with what jesse was saying about getting distracted.