laptopmanpaul.co.uk

My radical change in web strategy - due to SEO

All change!

I’ve mentioned before in my posts that I’ve got far too many website projects on the go at once and I really ought to have started one, finished one rather than nudging so many different projects along step-by-step.

Remember that TV detective Petrocelli, who started and finished each episode building a house that never got finished? Well, that’s me and my websites … though I really do intend to start finishing them off now.

I’m just about to start the process of some serious search engine optimisation work (SEO) and having flicked through my text of choice Search Engine Optimisation for Dummies I’ve realised that there’s a lot of detailed, slow and quite tedious work to be done.

For that reason I’m changing my strategy for a while, so I can finish and optimise my most important sites, then having learnt about the process, apply it to the remaining sites.

The strategy

1) To focus entirely on the two sites which I specifically want to do well

2) To run all other sites on ‘low energy’ in the meantime so my focus can remain absolute on SEO

3) To remove  all distractions that take up my time until a point at which the sites are doing good and steady business:

- Disable the newsletters function, including links in my auto responders, to reduce time dealing with spam
- Disable all messageboards which will only be reinstated if sites are performing steadily

And then there were two …

I will now be working on two sites only having reduced the remaining eight to basic services only.

These eight sites can quite happily sit on the web, getting the occasional hit and bringing in the odd bit of ad revenue, but they’re going to have to wait until I’ve done my SEO work on my key sites.

laptopmanpaul.co.uk

For a site that’s only been going for three months, this has instantly become my most successful project.

Blogs really are the business, they’re much easier to get an audience for and generate an almost instant response.

I want to work on building this site and making it more successful, because it drives web users into all of my other projects.

However, I’ve realised that I should probably have given given it a more descriptive title, but at the time of starting it I didn’t really expect it to do anything or for me to stick with it.

So I’ll be building on this project, but possibly re-working it entirely to:

- give it a better title (’Website tips’, ‘Making websites’ or something similar)

- integrate it better with webcumbria.co.uk so I have one destination for all my web guides and site building info

- integrating it with an excellent domain/sitebuilder reseller package which I’ve just discovered and will cover in a future post

big-group-cottages.co.uk

This is likely to be my post profitable site if  I can make it make an impact in search engines.

At the moment, it’s doing nothing, it’s barely being found.

However, I took an £11 commission the other day simply for a click through to an affiliate website … that’s the equivalent of an awful lot of Google Adsense clicks … so I need to make sure people are finding this site and it has the potential to become a good revenue generator.

It really needs a good dose of SEO.

It will be very easy to maintain once people are finding it and should hopefully provide a steady source of ad revenue.

What happens to the rest?

My stats info tells me that scrap-yard.co.uk is getting a steady flow of business, but it’s caught in a ‘chicken and egg’ situation, as I am with your-local-shop.co.uk and doorstep-delivery.co.uk.

These sites need people to register for them to be useful, but until people find them they won’t register.

When people come across them in searches hoping to get information, they find there’s nothing there yet.

So, all these sites will need a bit of SEO eventually.

In the meantime, to allow them to offer at least a basic and useful function, I’ve ‘parked’ them by integrating a yell.com search box so they can find the information they’re looking for, and I take a small commission at least.

I’ve signed up to a new affiliate scheme which deals with yell.com, AffiliateWindow, which is a great source of some good advertisers if you want to add another to your list of affiliate schemes.

My other sites, castle-visits.co.uk, expatchat.co.uk and 80spoplover.co.uk were always intended to be low maintenance, low content ‘pass-through-and-click-on-an-ad’ sites, so all I’ve done with these is to remove newsletters and messageboards for the time being.

All these features will be reinstated to offer a comprehensive service if the sites respond well to SEO.

If they don’t, I’ll just let them sit there as they’re parked on multi-domain hosting and don’t directly cost me anything.

If they were individually hosted, I’d kill them off if they weren’t paying their way.

So expect to read much on SEO in these pages over the next few weeks and let’s hope I can start moving those two key websites higher up the search engines.