Mini-net site building for easier niche domination

This post is about dominating the SERPs in some niches with less link building by using a min-net, mini-sites approach for easier niche domination

• Most of the reports I read about keyword research focus on generating keyword lists to build one site
• Some guides and reports mention optimizing each piece of content for X number of terms
• The min-net, mini-sites approach does something similar, and is a bit of a hybrid approach.

Some questions and points being addressed in this post:

1. How many keywords should I generate for my niche site?
2. If I want to dominate a niche should I just focus on one big site? (you’re about to learn why you might not want to do that )
3. If I write keyword-targeted/optimized content, should I optimize posts and articles for more than 3-4 terms?

#1 – How many keywords should I generate for my niche site?

As many as are relevant to your content, but write these keyword-targeting, keyword-optimized content pieces in a natural way and consider following a story-line approach to building your websites.  What I mean by story-line approaches to building content for your sites is to have a reason to follow up on previous articles with future articles and create a need to refer back to the previous articles from the future ones.  It just makes for good interlinking and creates a longer-time-spent-on-site statistic for you.

#2 – If I write keyword-targeted/optimized content, should I optimize posts and articles for more than 3-4 terms?

Yes, you should but you should take a few things int consideration

1- Whatever words are used most frequently should be tagged or meta-tagged or whatever

2- Your content titles should be optimized for traffic terms that get more searches

3- The body of your content should be optimized for long-tail associative keywords (if I did this for this post I would make either “niche domination” or “min-net site” the main keywords for the article and then find associative keywords to sprinkle throughout the content, to pick up the extra traffic gleaned from long-tail traffic terms the post will be found for.

So now that we know that optimizing a content piece for the “long-tail means more traffic for each new content piece added, we need to get into how to build sites that will rank well for these terms.

The normal standard approach for building niche sites from keyword lists:

• Start with a main keyword
• Dig down to find all the relevant high traffic terms
• Find variants of the sub-main keywords and dig down some more
• Then organize your site into categories using the heavier traffic terms as your categories if there are plenty of associative keywords for them in your keywords list.
• You also want to optimize your site main keywords for the heaviest search volume terms, too so main domain url ranks well for these terms at some point

#3- If I want to dominate a niche should I just focus on one big site? (you’re about to learn why you might not want to do that )

The mini-net, mini-sites approach might be new for this blog and maybe even new to you but this is old school SEO here, and a strategy I recommend to the few SEO clients I’ve tolerated long enough for me to set them up with some effective campaigns.

The mini-net, mini-sites approach means creating a mini network of sites whose main focus and design is like that of much bigger sites, but have more easily achieved goals which, when achieved lend themselves towards the higher goal of total niche domination.

The idea and method all stem from a keywords list you’d generate.

It’s accepted standard SEO truth that a keyword-optimized domain name is probably the easiest way to rank for a certain term, so it stands to reason that you will rank for more terms with less effort merely by buying some some keyword-optimized domain names.

How to design websites categories based off keyword lists search volume numbers:

Instead of making categories for your sub-main keywords, and instead of optimizing just ONE site for these main traffic terms, you’ll want to buy more domain names based upon criteria of search volume and high traffic.  If the terms are going to be competitive, or just have high traffic volume, then you might want to get domain names for those terms and building mini-sites around those terms.

So, we build mini-sites that focus on sub-main keywords but they’re also associative (relevant-to-each-other)

Here’s An Example niche:  Saving Money – very general niche

Google Keyword Tool results:

The main terms here according to Google are: saving money and money saving expert

Namecheap registrar search: Some of the main keywords for this niche are available as domain names

• moneysaving.mobi is available
• moneysavingexpertS.net is available
• howtosavemoney.mobi is available
• savingmoneytips.us and savingmoneytips.mobi are available

So let’s enter money saving expert in as a keyword to see what results show:

Namecheap domain registrar has these available domain names:

• savingmoneyexpert.net >> Available
• savingoneyexpert.org >>Available
• savingmoneyexpert.us >> Available

So we know we can lock up this niche by buying up some domain names that are supposedly getting good traffic because the main keywords and sub-main keywords are available as domain names.

The next step is to use the KW research tool to tell you what associative/related keywords should be used on a mini-net, mini-site devoted to ranking well for one term and several of its related terms.

So let’s say we decide we want to dominate the “saving money niche” using a mini- net strategy, what exactly do we do here?

#1- get a mother ship domain name, which means you need to find a domain name that has the main keywords in the name, and what your main keywords are is determined purely by the alleged traffic volume numbers.

NOTE: If you don’t want to dominate a niche and want to be a sniper, not a traffic force, then focus on buying keywords as a priority for keyword and domain name selection.

#2- After you get the mother ship domain name start getting your sub-main kws domain names. You’ll be amazed at what’s available for the sub-keywords that aren’t @1 on your list but allegedly getting a lot of searches.  You’ll also be amazed at what’s available in .net. .org, .mobi, tld, and even the  .com TLDs when you use plurals.  Plurals get treated the same as singular keywords do (test this out by doing some searches).

#3- Build your sites up and out.   Do some keywords-list generation for your sub keywords that you bought domain names for and plan your writing (not that I do this, I’m too impulsive of a writer). Optimize your posts for several long tail terms but focus on the higher traffic terms in title,tags, article body etc…

Write 2 articles for each of the main keywords being targeted and link them to each other.  This will get you indented listings.

I think that’s enough info on how and why you’d want to do build a mini-net to dominate your niche, so the next step would be how to link from your mini-net sites to your main mother ship site to get it to rank well for those terms, too.