Why have active domains?

"the people who are most likely to buy from you will find you at the top of their searches"

This article: http://www.47hats.com/2009/07/optimizing-search-engine-rankings-with-microsites/ shows a company in the software business experimenting with the employment of microsites to promote certain products specifically, with very positive results. Active domains allow non technical businesses to get the same ranking edge without incurring high costs.

"Active domains give you unique microsites, but without the high cost of many sites"

Why have microsites then?

1) Improve your main website ranking

Google loves to see sites being linked to. having microsites will mean that there will be other websites out there (under your control) that have relevant information on them that all link back to sites of your choice. This benefits both the main website and the microsites themselves.

2) Find the Customers who want to find you

Your Active sites will be specifically targeted to certain Customer locations, products, perhaps brands or any other 'dimension'. Because the home page of these sites, and the sub pages will be specifically related to these Customers, google will favour the sites when ordering search results. In short, the people who are most likely to buy from you will find you at the top of their searches.

3) Promote your dealers, contacts, affiliates

Active domains give your business the opportunity to promote related businesses in certain areas. For example, the domain 'wigsdurham.co.uk' is an active domain site for a wig manufacturer. The opportunity has been taken to promote the local reseller for these wigs, giving visiting customers the best local contact without having to trawl through lists. Active domains add value to your dealer or affiliate network, giving them more reasons to promote your products.

(extract from article mentioned above)

So how did it work out? At the time of writing this posting, both microsites rank (far) better than our main SmartInspect website for many keywords, including important keywords such as .NET logging and Java logging. This is especially surprising considering how many more links the SmartInspect websites has compared to the new microsites (the quality of the links to the SmartInspect website is also a lot better, with links coming from domains such as microsoft.com and other relevant websites).