If you or you company are in the planning phase of a beginning online business venture, you are probably overwhelmed by the number of decisions that you must reach. One you should not fail to consider in your business plan relates to website size. Should you build a small website, a mini-site in the beginning, with the plan of building a portfolio of such sites? Should you, alternatively, build the structure for a large website, although you would allow it to grow slowly rather than starting off as a large site?

I should emphasize that this decision is not related to how large you want the business to ultimately become. Businesses that operate a number of small sites can grow as well as those that concentrate on one major “money site.” It also is not necessarily impacted your target niche. Both small sites and large sites can succeed in any niche.

I should alert you that reading this article will not automatically give you the right answer to this particular question of size. Instead, what I hope to provide is a set of some things for you to consider so that whether you build a small website immediately or lay the groundwork for a mega-site, you’ll understand that decision’s impact upon key variables now and in the future.

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 two approaches call for different models of long term growth, although both may begin largely concentrating upon a relatively narrow slice of the market. Businesses that begin with a large site as the eventual goal, with fully develop one small sub-niche, then gradually add new sections dedicated to other sub-niches onto their original site. Those who initially built a small site, with intention of always leaving it small, will take a “duplication of success” approach, as they gradually add more an more individual sites to their virtual empire of tiny websites. 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.”

Positive cash flow can be established sooner with the small site approach. Part of this is due to the larger site having to invest resources in chasing the higher level keywords, which the mini-site is likely to ignore. Conversely, the silo sites will take longer to mature, but they can eventually become competitive for the top level keywords as they simultaneously enter the fray for the more tightly targeted words and phrases. Eventually, the silo site might become recognized as an authority in the broader niche.

Let me move now to some of the important practical matters that are impacted by your decision on this important matter.

The first has to do with start up cost. 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.

A second practical difference pertains to your approach to keywords. The keyword research for a smaller site will be much more tightly focused upon the long-tail terms, especially those that show commercial intent (thus more likely to convert sooner rather than later). 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.

Issues pertaining to page rank is the third practical ramification of your large vs. small decision. The number of pages in a site is one of the variables that is part of the page rank algorithm, assuming the internal linking structure of the site is well optimized. Thus, it is more difficult to achieve a high page rank than it is for a large site because of its inherent value on that variable.

So I hope I have given you ideas to chew on, even though I haven’t provided an actual answer for you. Perhaps, though, these considerations give you an inclination as to which approach you should take given your own unique business circumstances.