Microsites can be immensely useful for generating additional traffic to your main web site. They can also help affiliates rank and even get around certain Google rules with no black hat SEO involved. But you have to know how to use them correctly to make this work. Keep reading to learn more.
In the past, microsites were not something many people knew about or used, and those that did use them, used them for completely different reasons than we do today.
If you were launching a new product or running a seasonal promotion, microsites were the way to accomplish this. If you had a need for an area separate from your public website, such as a secure area within your website, then a microsite sometimes on a subdomain was usually the way to go.
These days microsites have been re-purposed for many different things.
In my position at Stickyeyes, microsites have evolved into a blessing in disguise. You see, many corporate website owners, especially those in the banking and gaming industries, do not want any outside party to have access to their servers...for any reason. So microsites can be set up and full access given to agencies or affiliates to incorporate everything from search engine optimization to paid advertising, or to track an email campaign or offline advertising.
Microsites add tremendous functionality and opportunity to agencies, but they also offer a very under-utilized technique for affiliate marketers. In the United States, where I moved from last year, microsites on subdomains are used more heavily. Affiliates are beginning to understand the power of microsites. You can gain ground here in Europe!
Just a little while back, if you were an affiliate you had two choices; get a pre-made landing page from a vendor to send traffic to, or use an affiliate tracking code. Both of these options were unattractive because you had no control over the content (on or off page), and the tracking code option was not only easy to identify, but also unfriendly to the search engines. To top it off Google said that their algorithm will now be devaluing affiliate sites.
Can you guess how Google finds affiliate sites? I'll give you a hint: it's in the URL. At first they searched for "id=" within the URL string. In these days of mod rewrites, Google has become much more intelligent and looks for other elements like duplicate content.
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