Mini-Sites, Micro Sites and Themed Sites

Mini, micro, and themed, what's the difference? Not much, really, but these terms can be confusing to those just starting out, and the different sites DO serve different purposes.

Mini-sites and micro-sites differ primarily in the fact that "micro-site" is the term many people use for a one-page sales letter or doorway/gateway page. "Mini-site" more often refers to a site that contains several pages, and is a bit bigger.

A "themed" site is more or less a hybrid, a cross between the small size of a mini-site, and the informational qualities of a "content" site. For the purpose of this discussion, we'll use the term "content site" to refer to a fairly large, multi-page site that has a great deal of educational value to the visitor, with little or no direct selling.

Conventional wisdom from search engine experts tells us that mini-sites, and especially micro-sites, are unlikely to attain high rankings, because of their relative lack of content, and thus are best suited for use with "pay per click" search engines, which generate traffic based upon how much you bid for a given key word or phrase, rather than how much content your site has.

This notion has recently been challenged, though, by Jay Stockwell's success in getting top search engine rankings using micro-sites. It seems after all that a properly optimized mini-site or micro-site can be used to draw traffic from the big search engines.

The "themed" mini-site seems to me to be the best of all worlds. Still small and easily created, it contains enough pages, and enough quality content, that it can be optimized for one or several highly targeted key words and has the potential to become a search engine traffic magnet. If, as rumored, the search engines are moving more towards evaluating the overall theme of a site and somehow incorporating this into how individual pages are assigned search rankings, then it appears themed mini-sites will have an advantage over "content" sites.

Unlike a larger content site, which inevitably covers a wide variety of topics, the themed mini-site sticks closely to one concept, using only one or two key words or phrases, and each page can be fine-tuned as a micro-site within a mini-site. By following this tactic, we end up with a relatively compact site that is attractive to conventional search engines, but still suitable for submission to pay per clicks.