Pro's & Con's of a main landing page for all websites

[Spirits High]

I"l try and make a bit more sense if the heading is a bit confusing!

Basically what I'm asking is what are the ads and disads of having all traffic come to one page and then go to the individual site the client wants?

So in essence for eg you'd go to the Spirits High group. Com and on there there would be redirects to Spirits High, postbox for my wedding, James bond theme nights, sweetstand and the Giant Party games sites.

If any of the web gurus could say yes or no or offer some advice that would be great.

Thanks in advance.

[Solitaire Events Ltd]

I'd be very interested in this too as this is my plan as well.

[Vectis]

It would be fine as a "go-to" URL for giving out to prospective clients, but don't expect such a page to do particularly well organic SEO-wise as there would be no depth of content. Unless of course you develop the landing URL into a fully-fledged site of its own with rich content. In which case you'll be competing against yourself for keywords unless you have clear demarkation between sites (i.e. each site has its own unique keyword sets), in which case you might end up with brand confusion!

If it were me wanting a "Group" landing page, I'd deliberately try to stop it ranking in its own right unless it had its own unique keywords set. But as a shop window, great idea.

[Spirits High]

I'd be very interested in this too as this is my plan as well.

To me it makes sense but will obviously listen to web gurus on this.

We wait with baited breath ;)


And there we go!

Thanks for that. Food for thought just need to see which of the domains I own to use.

[Marc J]

Throw it up, won't do any harm :D

As Martin says, don't try too hard to make it compete in it's own right, have it as a landing page for your brand and nothing more. If you want to exclude it from searches (as Martin suggests) you could do that with a noindex meta tag or exclusion via robots.txt, but I personally wouldn't go that far as it won't do any harm even if they are indexed (just be careful with page titles / heading tags / content so that searches will always favour the actual sites, not the brand landing page).

If you do publish it as your "go to" URL, remember to do whatever you need to in your site analytics so that you don't lose referrers in the process of routing visitors through your landing page (should be as easy as using the same GA for them all, maybe with a few parameters added).

BTW Paul, your site still thinks I'm using IE6 (I'm not) and displays an annoying banner right across every page.

[Leicester Ben]

Why don't you just have a new domain name to give to clients which covers everything and the have your normal sites linking from that. It's what I do www.premier-ltd.com

Does not affect seo.

[SC Events]

This is what i've done. It's fairly basic and needs tweaking, but does the job for now:

www.sc-events.co.uk

[Crown Jules]

From a recent SEO presentation from one of the world's biggest website builders, the very strong message that I came away with, was to organise the website re the users you wish to target.

For instance, if you wish to strongly market weddings, and then sell all other services off the back of that, then target SEO on weddings in the geographical area and/or market segment that you wish for.

However, if you sell all services independently, and want enquiries for each service then you may run into issues as the site Title SEO runs from the Home Page, and how can that embrace all that you do? Your website SEO will be in competition for search ranking with specialists and their ranking may well be higher as their SEO will likely be strong if well done. If all is grouped under the Spirits High umbrella then it is the brand that is to the fore i.e. you want people to find your company first and foremost.

I am not an expert but this message was conveyed strongly for small business companies. For larger enterprises with large budgets then SEO can be exploited in great depth, but of course only if there are mega bucks to be earnt....pots of gold in the Peaks?

And of course SEO is only one way of marketing. If you have a few preferred/sole supplier deals then maybe it doesn't matter so much in the bigger picture as against a mobile operator relying heavily on new enquiries from the public.

I'd be interested to know any counterpoint to this, as I have plenty to learn on this still!