How many clicks average are people receiving on their BANS site? I have a new site up and running and wanted to gauge how my site is performing compared to others.
My 2 BANS sites are about 2 weeks old and are receiving about 10-15 clicks per day over the 2 sites. One domain is a few months old while the other is new.
usedmac, sorry to interrupt your thread, but i just want to leave one advice. At your site used mac/, don't use the typical bans layout, do some more work and create your own unique layout, add some more pages to it, some articles, and add a little of text to each category. Don't be just another typical bans store. That is a big big footprint and google soon or later will begin to deidenx that kind of bans stores, they call this store "no effort affiliate product stores", and they don't give value (good serps) to that. It happened in the past with many other affiliate scripts and will happen with bans, because is becoming to popular and with many similiar sites (shops).
Thanks for the tips! The store is new and has only been up for 2 days now. More pages and content are coming.
Just clicks in general for now. I just want to get a feel for how my site stands click wise compared to others. I guess a better question would be how many clicks/day versus traffic.
Part of this is true and part of this is not. The layout is much less of a deal than many people think. How many wordpress blogs use the same theme - Google doesn't penalise these blogs for using similar layouts. As for the BANS footprint the only thing which leads back to BANS - ie makes the store identifiable as having been built with BANS is the "powered by link" at the bottom which BANS users are free to remove from inside their admin panel. Once that's gone there's no difference between a BANS built store and an eBay affiliate store built with any other script - commercial or "home built" as you do yourself. What then distinguishes one eBay affiliate website from another is as you say the additional things you add to it which includes: - Keyword targeting pages - Title Tags and to a much lesser degree Meta Tags. - Adding content above your page listings - Adding new content pages Template modifications (either customizing a BANS layout or using a completely different theme) are for better matching your site design to your target market...Google does not reward you for colorful sites and banners. Adding content is for improving your SERPS. Kelvin
kelvin the layout is very important. There was many scripts before bans, and after some "THOUSANDS" of site, 90% of the users, allways use the default template that the script have. That you can believe, it's a BIG footprint.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I've never experienced the problems you have described in relation to templates and search engine rankings. I'm not negating the importance of templating changes in relation to matching your niche or for that matter the way it can help in some link building strategies (direct requests from related sites for example) where having a nicely designed unique looking site can increase your odds of getting an inbound link (which will indirectly affect your SERPs). However, these are different reasons to those you stated in your post which is why I commented. The good news is that we are already in the process of working on a new selection of BANS templates for BANS users...so the end result is the same regardless of reason...more variety!
As for the layout...I decided to keep the included layout without mush customization because it closely matched the site I used to have running on the same domain. Time will tell if it have been a good choice to leave the template alone.
Kelvin are you the bans creator? Because of this post, it seems so. If that is the case, just remember i'm not saying that bans is a bad software, not at all, and i recommend the software a LOT. I don't like to say that, but i'm a old year, almost since the beginning of the internet, and many scripts passed in my hands, and some were used by thousands and thousands of sites (i'm talking about automate affiliate scripts with a default layout), and lately in the last 2 years, when a script like that it's used by thousands of users and specially by thousands of sites, and when 80% of the users don't change almost nothing to the template, google penalize that, by deindexing (the ultimate action) or by penalizing rankings with a very very long sandbox effect. The bans script, i say again, is excellent, but it needs more default layouts, maybe 10 layouts with the possibility to change everything in each one (i know that the layout now can be costumized). I have the example of a friend that installed bans and only changed one colour and nothing more, even the images were strange. He didn't do a good job using bans, and for the worst part he used the site to sign for ebay affiliate. Has expected, ebay refuse him. I say again and again, bans it's very very good, but it's very important to tweak the layouts and add the rest that we said like content, etc. etc. In my country, onlye the amateurs use simple or ugly layouts, and when they try to use them for creating shops, pufff, no one gives them credit and the success is zero. But when they use a good professional layout, with every option in place, a very well done site, they have success. Over 13 years of internet use and internet programming and webdesign, i can tell with 100% sure, that tweaking a layout to make it unique it's one very important factor, not the only one, but one with great importance. Put a good layout, do some seo to the layout, add a couple of good content, and is almost sure that your site/shop will survive long.
I think we're in agreement over more things than our previous posts might suggest. I didn't interpret your comments as "BANS is bad" and I know you've said great things about it on other threads - thanks. My point was that I disagreed with you when you said you needed to "create your own unique layout" or your SERPs would be affected. I interpreted this comment as - you need to create a different template and not I would recommend modifying the template you have to make it unique. If it was the former then that is an option but in my opinion and experience it is not necessary. It is a choice based on design preferences rather than a must do. If you meant the latter then I agree that BANS users should customize their templates to match their niche and it's why we have made the 9 template layouts that come with BANS pretty much colorless so that they can be used as a platform to make their site niche specific by modifying them inside the admin panel. Like this one has: http://www.homegrownsushi.com Kelvin
I have just under 300 clicks at this stage over the 2 sites and have had 3 sales. These sales were quite puny only amounted to about 3 or so british pounds which is like $5 0r $6 US dollars I think (i am Aussie). Early days I guess......since the last few days I have actuallyl gone through every single page on my site and added Keywords and meta-crap and some content....took me hours and hours but I hope it will be worth it.
Just another tip (which is obvious I guess). For example I have a dog product site (Cheekywoof in my sig) and I have basically googled the word dog and gone to the top 50 or so sites in the results. I then asked all the webmasters if they could put my link on their sites, Surprisingly heaps have said yes. On another site of mine that is PR0 I have contacted webmasters to do the same I have done link swaps with PR3 plus websites just by asking. Old Site owners in certain niches sometimes don't know about Page Rankings etc and will do link swaps just because sites are of similar niche.
Let me know how adding keywords and content works out. I am just starting to add content to my site a few pages at a time. As you well know it is slow going.
Thanks noobie for the quick reply. Just to compare I am getting about 180+ clicks so far per day. The site I am running it on has been established for a few years now. It used to be a classifieds site where users could post their own ads. Now I am hoping BANS will work better than the classifieds did.