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Currently i have a bit of an unusual set-up with the websites for my business and hopefully you can help me decide what the best solution is for the future.
I have a content rich information style site on one domain that ranks position 5-8 on page 1 of google for my most important 2 word keyword (and this keyword brings 6 to 8 times more searches than the next best.
I then have a shopping cart (it also has enough content to stand on its own as a fully fledged website) that directly relates to the content site (there are links in the nav bar and other places throughout the content site) that sits on another domain.
This ranks page 7 (up from page 15 after some minor SEO work by a company) for the same important keyword but also ranks page 1 or 2 for many other niche keywords and apart from the main keyword i concentrate on, it holds its own against the content site and does bring a bit of traffic.
Do you think i should burn the rankings on the shopping cart and move it onto the same domain as the content site, 301 redirect the domain to the content site domain and hopefully then increase my page 1 rankings for that content site?
Or do you think i would be better off keeping it as it is and Just work on getting the shopping cart rankings up for my main keyword and continuing to try and improve the content site so it remains on page 1 or hopefully climbs higher? Which is what i really want to do, try and break into the top 3 or 4.
Google returns 2.2 million results for the important 2 word keyword so i guess it isn't an ultra competitive keyword phrase but it isn't a walk over that's for sure.
I'm rebuilding my shopping cart regardless so if i am going to do this now would be the time to do it.
I'm just not sure if i am wasting my time trying to get 2 sites in the top ten for this keyword phrase and I'm not sure if bringing them together will have much effect on the rankings of my content site.
I'd really appreciate your advice on what would be the best path to take. Thank you very much in advance for your help and apologies for the long post
It is best to keep two web sites and I'll tell you why. Google and the other major search engines rank web sites based on both on-site and off-site factors. On-site factors mostly include the actual content (text and images usually) and the optimizable web page components (Title, meta, headings, emphasizing, logical naming conventions etc.). Off-site factors refer to incoming links.
Having two web sites gives you the advantage of generating your own off-site factors by cross linking, when appropriate. If you concentrate on working the on-site factors of both while naturally linking one to the other you essentially are working both your on-site and off-site factors simultaneously. This will save you much annoyance by not having to go beg, borrow, dump, swap or otherwise implement a link building scheme. You get to stand on your own two feet rather than rely on external influences to make your webpages appear important.
Would love to hear from a few others to get a clearer picture of what would be best to do.
Thanks in advance, much appreciated!
