TrailsNW is a fairly popular website, so recently when I created a system to search for backpacking related gear on the website, it was fairly easy for it to get noticed and gain a descent amount of traffic through search engines. This is because it resides on a website that is already popular (caused by a lot of other websites linking to TrailsNW), so the search engines place a higher value on all of the pages contained on TrailsNW, including my new little gear search tool.
I had previously tried to release the tool on its own domain, which was very unsuccessful. This was caused because the site was completely new to the internet, with no one linking to the site. Without the popularity, the search engines merely skipped over the website because it wasn't popular enough to get their attention.
This realization has led to a new strategy in my development of websites: create several, broad and popular websites, which can then be used as springboards for smaller niche websites. While I will still attempt to promote these smaller websites on existing, established websites, having several popular sites that I have full control over would definitely help to get the smaller websites a foothold amongst the collective mesh of noise known as the internet. Of course one or two popular websites controlled by me linking to a smaller site isn't going to be enough to make an enormous difference, but it definitely should help to get the ball rolling, which is always the most diffcult piece of the puzzle.
