Where I should put my products?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Danielle Chan: If I have multiple product lines, is it better to have all the products under one website or have each product line with its own website? The goal is to increase leads/clicks to the website. So which option would be better for SEO? I need a quick answer with a few bullet points to support your stance. Thank you in advance!
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  Greg Baka: It depends on how closely related the product lines are.....
   ; ; If they are reasonably close, like handbags & belts & scarves then they can easily go on one website like FashionAccessories(dot)com
   ; ; If they quite different, like handbags & skillets & toothbrushes then multiple websites should be used.
  
  The reasoning is that your site will rank better if it has a cohesive theme - if the products and posts all relate to each other.
  
  For example, I run two ecommerce sites: one is all garden tools, the other is all laundry gear. ; They each do very well as separate sites - each with it's own blog and how-to articles that relate either to gardening or to homemaking.
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  Danielle Chan: Thanks for the response Greg. That all makes sense to me! Laundry and gardening are definitely quite different! :)
  
  For my situation, we have 4 communities that my company builds and sells. These communities all have condos and townhomes. However, they are located in different areas of New Jersey. We currently have separate websites for each of them. But we received some recommendations to move those websites under our company website to get more out of SEO. We also received some pushback on that as well. So I'm looking to see what other people have done. ;
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  Greg Baka: +Danielle Chan ; ; Are the current 4 websites considered "temporary" - meaning that once the community is built and sold that the websites will no longer be needed?
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  Danielle Chan: +Greg Baka ;Yes that is correct.
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  Greg Baka: That is a tough one. It takes awhile for a site to gather enough links, history, and credibility to consistently rank well. So unless these communities take a few years to approve, build, and sell all the units you may be struggling to rank well right up until it is time to retire the sites.
   ; ; ; Which would make a decent case for picking a nice general URL like NewHomesNewJersey and create a sub domain or a sub folder for each new development project. So if the development was called "Brookside" you would ; have pages like Brookside.NewHomesNewJersey(dot)com/prices.html or NewHomesNewJersey(dot)com/Brookside/prices.html
  and the advantage would be that the domain keeps collecting links and history. Also when a development project is closed out the links can be salvaged by 301 redirecting the old closed subdomain or subfolder to one for a new project.
   ; ; ; The more I write, the better this scenario sounds to me...
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  Danielle Chan: +Greg Baka all good info. Thanks so much for your great responses. I am leaning towards not having them on separate sites. 
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  Athanasios Giannias: +Greg Baka​ I have a website concerning bikes, accessories and parts, all under one site. What would you consider a good title for the home page and for the bike category from an SEO point of view? I have concluded from various blogs that having similar SEO title tags is not SEO beneficial. How does one overcome this problem when having an ecommerce site? 
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  Greg Baka: Hi +Athanasios Giannias - there is some variety of opinion on this, but I have found that it is best to strive for getting important product pages to rank, rather than category or home pages.
   ; ; ; So I would suggest working backwards from the product pages and making category and home pages progressively more general.
   ; ; For example:
  Product page for Schwinn Model 789 has title like "Schwinn 789 | Sturdy commuter bicycle | 15% discount | Ready to ride! ;
  Category page for bikes has title like "Wide variety of great bikes | Schwinn, Trek, Moulton, KHS, more"
  Home page has title like "Full line of bicycles, accessories, gear, and parts | Athens | GianniasBikes.com
  
  Does that help?
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  Athanasios Giannias: Perfect +Greg Baka​. I understand. Do you think its important to keep the company's name in the title? If a user knows the name, he types the URL straight up. Why dilute the the keywords ftom an SEO point of view? Also, should the keywords be correctly spelled, even though keyword planner shows a higher volume for the misspelled? 
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  Greg Baka: Glad it helped +Athanasios Giannias ; - ; I put the company name in the Home page title by habit. That is the page you want to rank #1 when people search your business name or URL. At least in the US, many users google business names or urls then click the result, rather than type the url into the address space - I do not know why...
  
  Nothing wrong with using a common mis-spelling IF google doesn't auto-correct it anyways when people search it. For example, here if you search POTATOE google shows results for POTATO instead and tells you so at the top of the page. ;
   ; ; ; I think targeting mis-spellings used to more appropriate to PPC campaigns back when Adwords had a strict "exact match" option.
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  Athanasios Giannias: thank you +Greg Baka ;, you have been very helpful. ;