Microsites usually bloom around holiday time or around an occasion or celebration. Remember the ElfYourself campaign by OfficeMax that elfed-out everybody in America couple of years back? These handy web pockets can perform any function from carrying out a political campaign to assisting a corporate launch. Distinguished by the less pages (anything from 1-10) in a microsite, it is perfect if you are thinking of spending online marketing money for some exclusive branding. Many business websites also launch microsites that actually do not sell or feature their product or service, but provide information that is related to their products. This is a very subtle form of online marketing and one that has the potential to earn the company some brownie points in the authenticity department. Bran
Let's look at the statistics on the market share each search engine had back in 2002. Note that Overture is the only search engine still not around as an online destination since it is not Yahoo! Compare this to last year from a study by comScore in July of 2006 below.2006 Search Engine Market Share Comparison*Google - 43.7%Yahoo! - 28.8%MSN - 12.8%AOL - 5.9%Ask - 5.4%Others - 3.4%Top Search Engines 2002Google 29.2%Yahoo! 28.5%MSN 28.1%AOL.com 19.7%Ask Jeeves 10.3%Netscape 5.5%Overture 5.4%Lycos 4.4%Altavista 4.4%Looksmart 3.0%Demographics for Search in 2002Male 49%Female 58.2%Age2-11 3.9%12-17 11.8%18-24 8.6%25-34 17.5%35-49 31.5%45+ 37.0%55+ 17.3%65+ 6.6%Time on Search Engines 2002(in minutes per session)Google 24.1Altavista 18Ask Jeeves 16.2Yahoo! 10.7Lycos 7.6AT&T 7.5Netscape 7.3AOL.com 6.9iWon 6.9MSN 6U.S. Consumers OnlineJuly 02 July 01Online 177.2 mil 173.6 milSessions 36 32Hours 19.2 16.5Pageviews 1267 1114Sources: Comscore Media Metrix and Nielsen/Netratings * source comS
I was with a client today with whom we are working on a specific portal through which their customers can purchase products and services.
The question came up of whether to make a specific landing page or microsite (website). The answer most definitely here was a microsite because of the need to position a complete offer complete with decision making information, downloads and product sizing tools. This does not mean that the landing-page is specifically out of the question and we may use them specifically for targetted eshots to drive customers to the portal and microsite in the near future.
From a search engine optimisation viewpoint we have to take great care to avoid duplicate content on the microsite (and landing page) and will probably opt for using a NOINDEX command where appropriate (NOINDEX - tells the search engine spiders not to index the content and skip the page in question).
I was with a client today with whom we are working on a specific portal through which their customers can purchase products and services.
The question came up of whether to make a specific landing page or microsite (website). The answer most definitely here was a microsite because of the need to position a complete offer complete with decision making information, downloads and product sizing tools. This does not mean that the landing-page is specifically out of the question and we may use them specifically for targetted eshots to drive customers to the portal and microsite in the near future.
From a search engine optimisation viewpoint we have to take great care to avoid duplicate content on the microsite (and landing page) and will probably opt for using a NOINDEX command where appropriate (NOINDEX - tells the search engine spiders not to index the content and skip the page in question).
