SEO Best Practice for web design

I am looking for opinions on best practice for SEO in web design. You have a corporate site and multiple communities. Do you have one domain for the main corporate site with internal pages for each community or do you have domain names for each of the individual communities. Schools of thought?

thanks!

Hi there!

I think in your case you'd want to have individual domains for each community.

I'm making some assumptions here but here's my reasoning:

I'm assuming that people would be more likely to search for your communities' names than your main corporate identity. In that case, having the community name as the actual domain name would be quite powerful. Also, you could register each community (domain) with services like Google's Local Business tools and increase their chances of having a website show up on that map when people use queries like "cityName apartments" or some other local, geo-related search.

Now that you have all those community websites set up, you can use links to the main corporate domain to boost that domain's inbound link total.

There'll likely be other opinions but, from my experience, a small site with the exact search phrase as the domain name will often rank pretty well.

Thanks for the input. That makes a lot of sense.

I would agree with that. You want each property to have its own identity. Think of everything from the 'user' standpoint. What would a renter likely do? In fact, they could probably care less who the management company is (most of the time) That is the direction you go since they are your target audience.

Ed Blinn
Apartment Association of Tarrant County

Hey Everybody,
I think that this is a GREAT question. Although we have a fair amount of SEO success here at MFI, I am no SEO expert. So I went and asked the DigitalPoint Forums, which have a ton of SEO knowledge. There were six responses and all of them said use one domain. Keep in mind that they were referring to the SEO aspect ONLY, so there might be other non-SEO reasons to have multiple domains. Also, here was an interesting response.

I work in the hospitality SEO industry, and I work with companies that use both options. I've seen better success with the internal linking option but the alternative also works - with less success in SEO. One of the few advantages of having a different domain per community is company branding. The individual communities get to brand themselves apart from the head company. But I still strongly recommend one big domain with all the communities.

I hope that helps!

Hi Brent!

I can't say I understand the reasoning in the explanation quoted from the DigitalPoint forum.

For most websites, I too recommend keeping things in one domain to prevent the dilution of domain authority. However, I don't believe that makes sense in EVERY case...including this one.

If the company's goal is to rank for the individual communities, it seems like they'd be passing on too much opportunity by not creating a domain for each. I'm talking about having the community name in the domain name (powerful) and being able to register each domain with Google Local Business.

Plus, creating the individual domains doesn't mean they can't still create pages for them on their corporate domain. Right? Why not do both and try to rank twice? Just make sure the content isn't exactly the same and your good to go.

Once again, I'm basing my advice on assumptions I'm making about their company's goals...but I must respectfully disagree with the DigitalPoint forum.

Thanks for the comment, and I can't say that you are wrong on this one. I'm just a messenger on this topic, so I can't really say one way or the other. However, I actually tended to think like you before I posed the question...

All evidence in my experience suggests you should do both and that is what our web clients are having us do. Having your content in more than one place gives you more than one change to show up in search engines and optimize for additional long tail phrases. Plus you never know where Google's algo is going to go and you might be better off having smaller authority sites in the future. A number of the ILSs have multiple sites and/or affiliate programs. We are already putting your content out there in multiple forums, so why shouldn't you?

If you find the right developer and set up your system correctly, it will be inexpensive up front and your only cost should be a small incremental increase in your hosting cost.

I just wanted to send out a big thank you to all who responded. It was all very helpful! THANKS!

I mostly agree with Do Both. Ideally, you would own the domains for each property name and host individual sites on each of those domains. You would also have a unique page for each property on the management company's page, with all of the individual property sites linking back to the main site. I also think there's something to be said for cross-linking individual property sites in the same geographic region. You're building inbound links, and you can offer other options to the prospect if they decide that property isn't for them.

The search algorithms are always changing, but I don't see any reason why any of the engines would want to return results for "smaller authority sites" (assuming that other factors like keywords and the user's search history aren't skewing the results) - I would always want find ways to build my site's authority, particularly through inbound links.

There's a third option that I think not enough companies are trying - the keyword-targeted microsite. If you have multiple properties in one neighborhood or region, why not add another site with a domain like "apartments-in-downtown-houston.com," which could have information about People are much more likely to search by location before they search using any names of individual properties or management compaines, so create content that best matches the terms your prospects are using. Link they all together, keep adding content regularly through a blog if you can, and you should be good.

I was the person who answered Do Both but I was a knucklehead and didn't log in.

Like I have said in other posts, let your search results do the talking. Do a search for sterling apartments in Google. This is an AIMCO property that is based in Philly. What comes up first? At least in my browser, their property site, not their page on the corporate site.

Because we started as a regional ILS, we still have a lot of "micro sites." I can tell you from experience that sometimes pages on these sites come up and sometimes the ones on the national site do.

We recently modified our core multifamily website technology so we can drive corporate, mobile and property websites all from the same database. We did this because our website development customers asked us the same question, and we answered if you could build and maintain a separate site for 3 years for the cost of one month of advertising in a print publication, why wouldn't you where there is so much upside?

I think it greatly depends on how closely related each of the communities are. It may not be relevant to have each one of them on one domain. Are the communities large enough to warrant their own domains.

For example if each community includes a very close variation of the main domain then I would recommend just sticking to one domain.

I personally use the term SEO best practice loosely as each situation differs so much, since I've been in the business the one thing that's amazed me is just how different each day and each problem to overcome can be.