Hi there! I've decided to finally come out of the shadows after reading this forum with much interest over the last month or so - i've been very impressed at the way people have been running tests in order to determine the importance of various aspects of SEO. Now, forgive me if i'm way off mark here, but I was wondering if I could ask you for a little bit of help. I'm a student in the uk, and I run a uk charity fundraising site at http://www.giveasyouget.net The site acts as a price comparison search, but all the commissions i earn from sales made is donated to charity (minus 8% for costs) so it's not for profit Basically I get 1500 odd uv/day from the product pages in google, (mainly from the Amazon script's pages - for some reason despite devouring my sitemap Google doesn't want to pick up more than 6000 odd price comparison product pages) and things are going pretty well. However I believe it could be doing a lot better, and ideally i'd like to get it within the top ten results for "compare prices" and/or "compare prices uk" Which are, obviously, pretty competitive. Now since it's all for charity I was wondering if anyone could give me any tips on the best way to achieve this - take a look at my front page etc - or even, perhaps, if you guys feel like a challenge, putting your skills to work? I've had a few thoughts, and wonder what you may think of them: * I could produce a specific price comparison page, without news, features etc, so I can focus on the SEO, and start building links specifically to this page * I could put all my energies into building links, despite the last 140 odd emails I sent out not having had any response * I could spend the little money I have buying a high pr, keyword targetted link somewhere * I could build a 'supporters' reciprocal link directory and try and get the submit a site page ranked highly for terms like "add url" and get the "compare price" links to come to me. * I could ignore the competitive keyword and instead work on getting the 500,000 odd other price comparison pages into google, giving more chances for more people to find me and hopefully * I could start running a 2:1 banner exchange serving charity banners as the filler, so webmasters can raise money for charity and get more traffic to their sites, and add a small 10-20 px high bar to the bottom of the banner (a la http://www.impressions.co.uk ) with a link to me so I increase backlinks at the same time as serving more banners any thoughts would be welcome - not only is it summer so i now need to write lots of essays and exams but it's also too damn nice to sit indoors long enough to achieve all of them!
Ok, if I was forced to choose one or two of the suggestions you have, I'd say to go with: "I could ignore the competitive keyword and instead work on getting the 500,000 odd other price comparison pages into google, giving more chances for more people to find me and hopefully" and "I could put all my energies into building links, despite the last 140 odd emails I sent out not having had any response" Links are always of utmost importance, so there's just no getting away from it. Maybe you should rethink your emails. Perhaps they are worded badly. And I would definitely SEO the 5000 product pages and attempt to get those listed rather than the one big generic term. I think you'll get much more bang for the buck that way
Cheers dazzlindonna, it's much appreciated! Going on the forum signature theme, do you think there's much leverage in just chatting on a wide range of forums (not spamming, obviously) with a nicely targetted signature?
Hi there. I know this is an old thread, but I stumbled on it and thought you might appreciate an opinion. I wouldn't say that forum signature links will really help much. The value of sig links has gone down significantlly over the last few months. You could pay for links. I wouldn't pay for the PR especially (If you could pay 100 different sites with a PR1/2 for cheap links, then you'll be laughing) but it could be worth your while. I don't knowwhat kind of budget you have to play around with so maybe buying large quantities of links is not the way to go. I would agree with dazzlindonna though. If you could get the other 500,000 pages of the site indexed, that would do you the world of good. SEO on every page and you'd be laughing. Back to the links. It might be a good idea to get links pointing to each main category of the site, using the appropriate (sp?!?!) anchor text. So 10 links to the Jewlery section, using the anchor text "Jewellery" (Or a dirivative like "Jewellery Store" or "Jewellry prices". That way you can try to target the content of those subsections. BTW, you have to take that add off of the front page. I can't work out how to get rid of it. I'm viewind with FireFox and there doesn't seem to be a 'close' button.
What's up with this though? It was in the footer of the electronics section That could get you in trouble. Not good SEO. Also, I notice that you have a PR0 on the subdomain pages. How long have you had the site running like that? Personally, I would think that subdirectories instead of subdomains would work better in terms of SEO though.