I have a personal finance site at http://www.financenewstoday.com that launched in Jan. 2006. The site has RSS feeds that have been submited to various RSS directories, a forum which launched in May, and a blog (subdomain) that launched in June. Site is crawled daily by all the major search engines. Backlinks: Google: 1190 Yahoo: 27113 MSN:16262 The site is updated regularly and about to go to daily article postings. Traffic, although light, has been increasing by 500-700 unique visitors a month and is on track to reach 4000 unique visitors this month. Most of the traffic - about 85% - is coming from backlinks, postings, etc. and only about 15% from search engines. I am ranking for smaller search terms. I know more prominent search terms take a while to rank for, but I would think I would at least be in the top 300 or so for the prominent terms. I don't expect top 10 out of the gate. I am about to go to posting new content on a daily basis. What else SEO wise does anyone see that I should do differently that could boost the rankings.
If you're posting new content on a regular basis and have optimized all your pages, as well as continually trying to get incoming links and making your pages "link worthy", then their is really nothing more you can do. Yahoo! and MSN are probably providing you with most of your search engine traffic and it will continue that way until Google feels your site is worthy to be excluded from the sandbox. I always stress to web owners to build a site into a community. Give people a reason to come back to your site. Update your content is another. Getting people to make discussions is another. There are lots of methods, you just need to utilize them so your not dependant on the SE's for traffic.
Yeah, I agree with you. I am hoping the forum will serve as a way for people to ask questions and discuss their experiences together. I have kind of brought in to the theory that if you continually build pages your site will have a better chance to rank and get good traffic, even if the homepage doesn't reach the top 10. Any other thoughts?
Perhaps the first thought for me was - that is a lot of diverse information. Indeed - all financial - but still, that covers a lot of ground. Perhaps you could set up some sub-domains for more focused categories. How many keyword phrases are you targeting? Are you getting links to internal pages?
I know it is a lot of diverse info, but it gives me plenty of info to write about as the site grows. I do not like niche sites. I feel if you focus in to much on one thing you are setting yourself up for a roadblock in the future. I have looked at the structure of other sites like money.com, kiplingers.com etc. and I like their setup. Now I know they have seemingly unlimited resorces to promote their sites and an army to do it with, but I feel it is doable over time. I am developing links to internal pages. I have been doing that from the beginning. And I continue to do so. It is just going to take some time. I will be adding more categories as I see the need to. In act I have some internal pages rankig better than the homepage.
Yeah - me too - it kills me! It seems your best bet is to keep creating content and getting links to that content (the internal pages). Otherwise, it seems you are pretty well set already.
Well I am presently writing and buying 700-1000 word articles, spliting them into 2 and 3 pages in the site, and posting an excerpt / announcement about the article in my blog (subdomain of site). My goal is to create between the articles and the forum posts between 4000-6000 new pages a year.
You should be fine then. As long as you're getting unique articles, those pages will rank for various searches. It's a good goal and I'd wish more people would do it.