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You are a new online business owner, and the last thing that you need is another decision. I’m sorry, but I have one more thing for you to think about: What should be the size of your first website?

There are two competing views on this quandry and both have studies to support them. Obviously, if we automatically knew which was the preferred way to proceed, there wouldn’t be a choice to make.

Before I get into the pros and cons of each alternative, I should let you know what this decision is not. The question is not necessarily related to how big your business, itself, will ultimately become. Companies that follow either approach can both eventually become large and successful. Neither should your decision be based upon some preconceived notion of your target market or your niche. The planned size of a website in the beginning can lead to ultimate growth and financial success of the business as a whole.

In other words, the answer to the question is not automatic, and I’ll warn you right now that I’m not going to recommend the “one magical size fits all” approach.

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 growth models of the two are very different after each has satisfactorily mastered the beginning, narrow sub-niche. Those who have taken the mini-site approach, will begin to duplicate their success by building a new, small site in another sub-niche with a new set of long-tailed keywords. Large site businesses will instead build another section onto their growing original site. This new section, over time, is joined by others (think of new departments being added to a sporting goods store, for example). Each new section takes on a new sub-niche. 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.”

As a general rule, the mini-sites can establish positive cash flow more quickly. This is partly due to such a business not investing resources into those most competitive, high level keywords. In the long run however, over the course of many months or even years, the mega-sites can become competitive for the high traffic keywords and might even become recognized as an authority in the broadly based market.

I’ll point to three practical ramifications of how you decide to approach this business decision.

One of these pertains to the amount that needs to be invested into the site itself in the beginning. When you plan to build a large site, the architecture of the whole site (as it will eventually become) must be in place. 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. Mini-sites are much less expensive to build than it is to build the foundation for a larger business site.

The ways in which you think about your keywords is another important difference. The keyword research for a smaller site will be undertaken to locate a limited number of closely related long term keywords. Special attention will be given to those keywords that are likely to convert immediately (keywords that are sometimes said to have “commercial intent”) With the large site plan, you will conduct your research with two focal points: the lower competition but more targeted long-tails and the highest level, most competitive short tails (which are less likely to convert immediately, but the users of which might be nurtured into eventually becoming customers.

The last practical ramification has to do with page rank. Page rank is impacted by a number of variables in search engine algorithms (formulas), but one of those is the number of pages that a site has (assuming that the site has a search engine friendly linking structure). Consequently, it is easier for a large site to achieve a high page rank than for a small site, although you must remember that other variables are even more important in maximizing the total page rank.

I trust that I have given you some things to think about and apply to your unique business situation, even though I have not given you any clear cut final decision with respect to which alternative is best for you.

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