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1) Do you have enough content for each keyword and topic to support this domain?
If the answer to question to #1 is Yes, then I would suggest that you build out another site to focus soley on this keyword. The more targeted your are the better.
2) How competitive are the keywords?
If the keywords are highly competitive than you will have to build out another site to target each keyword seperately as you will be competing with many other sites that will be targeting that one keyword as their main focus. If the keywords are not highly competitive than it becomes feasible to effectively optimize for the two keyword variations within the same site.
If you were going to target "blue widgets" and "red widgets", you would need to use these words in the copy, title, and everywhere else exactly as they are displayed, as word order comes into play. For ranking under keyword variations it is always good to mix up the keyword phrases occasionally, but you need to keep them in their original form in more instances.
As for the Meta Keywords tag, this can become tricky as you need to have both sets (blue and red) in for each keyword target. Instead of having your Meta Keywords tag look like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="blue widgets,red widgets,wet blue widgets,wet red widgets,dry blue widgets,dry red widgets,tall blue widgets,tall red widgets">
....you should have different pages for each. Have a page that targets the "dry" keywords, one for the "wet keywords, one for the "tall" keywords, etc.
One option that you may want to look into is sub-domains. For your goals, this may be one of the better options to run with. You could then the sites set up as follows:
- root website - widgets.com
- subdomain 1 - blue.widgets.com
- subdomain 2 - red.widgets.com
You could then interlink these with no problem as they are viewed as part of the root, but in most cases are treated as seperate sites.
Now that said, here are the reasons that I discourage folks from using multiple sites.
1.) You have to put the time and expense into building, maintaining and hosting two separate sites. This means that you have to make MORE money to meet your initial costs...puts you at a disadvantage from the beginning.
2.) You run the risk of being identified as a spammer by some of the engines and directories. If you sell blue widgets on Site A and red widgets on Site B, it's highly likely that directories like DMOZ and Yahoo will now allow both sites to be listed. (This will depend on how different the content is.)
3.) You are suddenly spreading any link popularity between two different sites. Thus...it takes more time and more effort to build up a strong page rank. This can have an impact on Google rankings, which in turn impacts your overall traffic. If you have ONE site, you put in less effort to gain more PR rewards.
4.) Branding. If you have two sites, the folks that shop at site A, might not recognize you as being the same people at Site B. It's the reason that McDonalds doesn't name every store something different. They want you to recognize them as a leader in their market. They want you to be comfortable and familiar with them.
5.) Upselling and Cross selling. If you have two sites with slightly different offerings...your customers may not realize your full listing of services. Let's say that you are a bank. You offer mortgages. You also offering personal financial investment serviecs. If you build a separate site for each of these services, the individual that comes to you for her mortgage may not realize that you also offer personal financial investment services. Even though she LOVED the service she got on her mortgage and would be happy to give you her financial investment business...she simply doesn't realize that you offer that service...so she starts her search from scratch and ends up at a competitor.
To sum it up? Multiple sites for the same company with slightly different offerings often leads to quiet a bit more work, with not as much result.
