If you or you company are in the development stages of a beginning online business venture, you are probably amazed at the number of decisions that you must reach.  One you should not overlook in your business plan relates to website size.  Should you build a small website, a mini-site in the beginning, with the plan of building a portfolio of such sites?  Should you, alternatively, build the structure for a large website, although you would allow it to grow slowly?

Before I get into the pros and cons of each side of this dilemma, I should let you know what this decision is not.  The question is not related to how big your business, itself, will ultimately become.  Businesses that operate a number of small sites can grow as well as those that concentrate on one major “money site.”  It also is not necessarily impacted your target niche.  The planned size of a website in the beginning can lead to ultimate growth and financial success of the business as a whole. 

I should alert you that reading this article will not automatically give you the right answer to this particular question of size.  Instead, what I hope to provide is a set of some things for you to consider so that whether you build a small website immediately or lay the groundwork for a mega-site, you’ll understand that decision’s impact upon key variables now and in the future.

Small websites should be concentrated on a narrow sub-niche built around a cohesive, limited set of relatively long-tail keywords.  Sites that are designed to become quite large eventually will develop most of their content in the same focused way, but they will also begin search engine optimization on the shorter, very high competition keywords at the same time.

The two approaches call for different models of long term growth, although both may begin largely concentrating upon a relatively narrow slice of the market.  Businesses that begin with a large site as the eventual goal, with fully develop one small sub-niche, then gradually add new sections dedicated to other sub-niches onto their original site.  Those who initially built a small site, with intention of always leaving it small, will take a “duplication of success” approach, as they gradually add more an more individual sites to their virtual empire of tiny websites.  So, as the big sites grow ever larger with more and more categories, departments or silos, the business with mini-sites might create twenty or fifty or a hundred individual “storefronts.”

Positive cash flow can be established sooner with the small site approach.  Part of this is due to the larger site having to invest resources in chasing the higher level keywords, which the  mini-site is likely to ignore.  Conversely, the silo sites will take longer to mature, but they can eventually become competitive for the top level keywords as they simultaneously enter the fray for the more tightly targeted words and phrases.  Eventually, the silo site might become recognized as an authority in the broader niche.

Let me move now to some of the important practical matters that are impacted by your decision on this important matter.

One of these pertains to the amount that needs to be invested into the site itself in the beginning.  Although you’re still beginning relatively small with the site that you plan to become large, the foundation for a larger site must be laid.  That means that the site’s eventual architecture must be created and the systems put in place that will eventuall become necessary for operation.  Consequently, although the mini-site and the eventual mega-site may be the same size at launch, the model for the larger site costs more at start-up.  Laying the foundation for silo sites is inherently costlier than the smaller, less expensive mini-site.

A second practical difference pertains to your approach to keywords.  Any keyword research for a smaller site will be much more tightly focused upon the long-tail terms, especially those that show commercial intent (thus more likely to convert sooner rather than later).  If you opt for the silo site, you will be splitting the focus of your keyword research.  In one way, you will be imitating the search of your small site competitors by looking for those longer tails that are higher converting, but you must also identify all of the high traffic keywords so that you can begin to attract visitors who are gathering information rather than ready to make a decision to buy or sign a contract.

The last practical ramification has to do with page rank.  The number of pages in a site is one of the variables that is part of the page rank algorithm, assuming the internal linking structure of the site is well optimized.  Thus, it is more difficult to achieve a high page rank than it is for a large site because of its inherent value on that variable.

So I hope I have given you some food for thought, even though I haven’t provided a clear cut answer to you.  Perhaps, though, these ideas provide you with an inclination as to which approach you should take considering your own unique business circumstances.