Feb
10
SEO Thoughts
February 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, must be a pre-occupation of quite a few webmasters and it is probably something that might even, from time to time, keep them awake at night.
SEO, for the uninitiated, is the process by which websites are configured and designed in order to be “attractive” to search-engines, such as Google or Bing, or more specifically to the search-engine spiders which routinely look at web-sites and take note of the site’s content, links, title etc in order to decide the ranking of the aforesaid website.
It goes without saying that the ranking awarded by Google or Bing or anyone else is very important in determining whether users of the vast universe of the internet actually find the website or not. After all, there are millions of websites out there, what makes yours so compelling?
However, there is more to SEO than search-engines and that is the actual design of the website. How it is laid out? What colours are used? Is it visually appealing and attractive or does it resemble an abstract piece of modern art with no discernable function or indeed form?
Webmasters are constantly, so I read, striving to make their site better, more usable, more attractive etc in the hopes of increasing the number of visitors who find the site and more importantly, the number of return visitors.
Which brings me to me. I modified the layout of my web site, www.ordersofbattle.com (sorry, shameless plug there!) a few months ago and I noticed that the number of page impressions in Adsense started to increase quite nicely, as did the monthly income.
Bingo! I thought, I am on the road to internet glory!!Â
Not so fast, Trigger!
What was in fact happening was that Adsense was counting each page two or three times because I had adsense ads in inline frames, so to Google they were separate pages.
No wonder my figures went up!!
It took me some time to notice because the ads still seemed pretty relevant. This was because they were using the other content in the frames to drive the ads.
It finally dawned on me what I had done, so I modified the site to use DIVs instead of FRAMES. I also took the opportunity to add a nice graphic as a banner, add a site Title, sign up to the Google Affiliate Network and add some nice colourful ads for various things such as books and I also signed up with Amazon.com as an Associate and added some book ads that were relevant (Military History since you ask).
I then updated the web server and sat back waiting for the money to flow in to my coffers.
Cue, disappointment!
No money flowed into my coffers, my adsense clicks declined massively as did my page impressions!!
What had I done?
I re-arranged things a few times and things recovered a bit but not much. Hardly anyone clicked on my affiliates, no one bought any books and my adsense clicks stayed on the low side.
This became an object lesson in how to screw up a good thing and go backwards. Obviously my visitors were voting with their feet. Either that, or somehow nobody wanted to look at my site in February!!
Time to do research!!
Well, after a bit of digging, I discovered that Affiliates and Adsense may not be ideal partners on the same website. People click on the affiliates rather than adsense; perhaps all the ads were putting people off as my site was obviously far too serious to have all these ads ruining it.
So, now I have removed all the affiliate ads and re-arranged the site and I will put another version live to see if anything improves.
It just goes to show that webmasters must be very careful in what they change. Change things slowly bit by bit rather than wholesale and think very carefully of the possible downside as well as the potential upside before doing anything!!
Here endeth the lesson for today!Â
