New Site SEO Time VS Content

The understanding of how much time a new site needs VS how much good content in what time period that has been on my mind for months. Here are a few experiments that I have been working with.

Experiment One:

A site with user generated profiles, with some data that is duplicative and some sections of data that a user will have to type something in. Only 25% of the users who signed up filled this out. It has taken well over a year, without linking and alternative marketing to get any rankings at all in Google. This is not the way to go.

Experiment Two:

Building a site with somewhat unique content. This content was taken from product data found on the manufacturer’s site and slightly massaged. In this case it was my Billiard site. Site showed up very quickly in the SERP’s with fairly poor placement, the more time I spent on each product trying to write compelling content made the site move up in the SERP’s very quickly. This seems to be a valid way to go.

These experiments have given me a little insight to what Google is looking for, and it is a difficult science to manipulate. How do you launch a site where in which you can get the users to do all the work for you? If you can figure this part out, you will never have to worry about linking or building content ever again.

There are other factors that I have experimented with.

1). Mod rewrite on URL’s: Without a doubt one of the best things you can do to optimize your site. See my post on rewriting URL’s for SEO.

2). Site performance: How long does it take for you pages to show up? Server Latency and File Size seem to be a huge factor. Keeping your pages light and easy to load seem to make a big difference, in experiment one my pages are large and heavy and may have played a huge part in its poor rankings.

3). Flattening the site: How many clicks do your users need to perform to find the content that they are looking for. Sure you could depend on Google for that right? Not a great idea, Google takes into account the usability of your site from the perspective of the click navigation. If the user where to start at your homepage how far would they need to go?

New Site SEO Time VS Content

The understanding of how much time a new site needs VS how much good content in what time period that has been on my mind for months. Here are a few experiments that I have been working with.

Experiment One:

A site with user generated profiles, with some data that is duplicative and some sections of data that a user will have to type something in. Only 25% of the users who signed up filled this out. It has taken well over a year, without linking and alternative marketing to get any rankings at all in Google. This is not the way to go.

Experiment Two:

Building a site with somewhat unique content. This content was taken from product data found on the manufacturer’s site and slightly massaged. In this case it was my Billiard site. Site showed up very quickly in the SERP’s with fairly poor placement, the more time I spent on each product trying to write compelling content made the site move up in the SERP’s very quickly. This seems to be a valid way to go.

These experiments have given me a little insight to what Google is looking for, and it is a difficult science to manipulate. How do you launch a site where in which you can get the users to do all the work for you? If you can figure this part out, you will never have to worry about linking or building content ever again.

There are other factors that I have experimented with.

1). Mod rewrite on URL’s: Without a doubt one of the best things you can do to optimize your site. See my post on rewriting URL’s for SEO.

2). Site performance: How long does it take for you pages to show up? Server Latency and File Size seem to be a huge factor. Keeping your pages light and easy to load seem to make a big difference, in experiment one my pages are large and heavy and may have played a huge part in its poor rankings.

3). Flattening the site: How many clicks do your users need to perform to find the content that they are looking for. Sure you could depend on Google for that right? Not a great idea, Google takes into account the usability of your site from the perspective of the click navigation. If the user where to start at your homepage how far would they need to go?

Rewriting your URL’s for SEO

I am constantly asked how to re-write URL’s to make them search engine friendly. I know this seems complicated, but if you think about it very carefully it's actually very easy. Here are a few examples of how you can re-write your URL’s.

This example is only good for apache

1). You must have the module: mod_rewrite installed on apache

2). You need to use a .htaccess file to build the functions, if you don’t have one don’t worry. Just create a text file with this content and upload it.

First line, turn on the engine

RewriteEngine on

Second line, tell the engine where it needs to work

RewriteBase /

Now you can specify your re-writes, here are 3 examples.

1). Your URL looks like this? http://www.mysite.com/index.php?page=privacy <- This suck for SEO right?
So your rewrite rule would be,

RewriteRule ^privacy.html$ index.php?page=privacy

Now you can change your anchor link to http://www.mysite.com/privacy.html

2). If your URL looks this? http://www.mysite.com/index.php?page=story&storyid=66 Wow this really sucks for SEO!
This re-write is a little more complicated, you need to match the numbers.

RewriteRule ^story([^/]+).htm$ index.php?page=showstory&storyid=$1

Now you can point your links to http://www.mysite.com/story66.htm This will really help!

3). If your URL looks like this? http://www.mysite.com/user.php?username=myuserid This can be very difficult, because now you have a possibility of non Alpha Numeric lettering. So we need a string that can handle all of them.

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ showprofile.php?username=$1 [QSA,L]

Now you can point your links to http://www.mysite.com/myuserid

Personally I like usernames, not to have an extension on them for easy tracking. But you can easily add a .htm to the end by just changing it to.

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+).htm$ showprofile.php?username=$1 [QSA,L]

Now I cannot easily tell you how to fix your links in your code, since every site is a little different but give it a shot. You can always post questions here in the comments section of this post.