Advice on one or multi domains

Hello,

Let's assume we have X Company (software developer) with XCompany.com domain and this company creates 5 products (software):

Software1 (wwx.software1.com)
Software2 (wwx.software2.com)
Software3 (wwx.software3.com)
Software4 (wwx.software4.com)
Software5 (wwx.software5.com)

In each product site, the product is extensively presented. The good thing when you have different domains is that you can focus and present each software in a different way. Other product may have lot of information other not. In one product you may use bright colors and flash while in other product you may use dark colors and HTML.

On the other hand, what about google and ranking? Is it better to have one domain:

xcompany.com

and all products under this domain

xcompany.com/software1
xcompany.com/software2
...

or use seperate domains?

What is most important? Domain marketing or search engine optimization?

Please advice me.

Thanks

I would do both - all products on the company domain and seperate domains for the products. You will get more exposure for your products and you will have more linking power. It will take more time since you will have to do the linkbuilding and promotions for each campaign but results will be much better.

Huge and successful companies in the field of internet/information technology rarely has several websites representing each of their products.

Take a look at Google or Yahoo, they use sub-domains to represent major products, for example for Google docs, they have docs.google.com , so on and forth.

Other big companies like Microsoft uses only one domain. YOu can find all their products in their single website www.microsoft.com

SEO reasons , is that Google loves big websites in a way that you can provide more information than smaller sites. It is an easy way to become an authority and trusted in your own niche especially if you have compelling services.

Other reasons include efficiency and low cost. It is difficult to maintain several sites than to have only one.