Home » 2008 » March » Increasing AdSense Revenue: Making Large Sites look Like Minisites
Increasing AdSense Revenue: Making Large Sites look Like Minisites
We all know that in the long-run a large 'authority' site will always beat a small 'minisite' in terms of gaining links and page rank. But what if you have a large site good PR, but you're still not getting enough clicks or ad revenue? This is where you have to make your site look like a collection of minisites.
Undoubtedly, if you have a large site it's much easier to get it good PR (pagerank) as all your link-building efforts are going to supporting a single site. But your site's visitors may still miss things that are buried deep within your site or you just may not be getting the search engines to delve deeply enough into your site's contents.
This is where you need to take a long, hard look at your site... How easy is it to navigate. How many different ways are there into the contents of your site? I came across this problem recently with my own Celtnet Recipes site, which though it had a database of over 3000 recipes covering all aspects of cookery, was getting only 10 000 hits every day. I knew that really wasn't enough, given the effort I'd put in to the site overall. There was something desperately wrong with the design and the execution of the site.
In the end it came down to three factors and most of these were due to the site having grown organically over the years:
1. The main recipe pages didn't have the recipe's description and methods at the top of the page. I'd made the mistake of having a 1, 2, 3 layout for the page's contents (ie left side-bearging, contents, right side-bearing). Search engine spiders expect the main content of the page to come first in the page (after the header) so my pages simply weren't getting indexed accurately. As far as the search engines were concerned I just had 3000 pages containing the same, or variants of the same, left sidebearing. This was very bad SEO and something I had to fix quickly.
2. Because the site had grown organically from static pages to a database-driven design and had grown from 500 recipes to 3000 (and is still growing) those few pages where I did have lists of recipes were monolithic, with several hundred recipes to a page. The indexing engines were simply indexing the first hundred or so links and ignored the rest (which is how they work). So all the latest recipes I was adding simply weren't getting indexed at all!
3. People search for recipes in all kinds of ways and recipes can fall into different categories dependent on the ingredients, where they come from and the method of cooking. I simply didn't have enough different ways for people to find the recipes they were looking for! This was a major omission and comes to the main problem that many large sites have - how to let people find what they're looking for. This is where you have to have themed 'portals' into your site. Which, ideally, should be no more than two clicks away from your home page. You build your site like a portal. The home page links to all the important sections of your site and those sections link to 'portal' pages that contain themed collections of links to the important information your site has. Don't forget to put some real information on the portal pages as well. So, for example my Wild Foods Recipes page has a little information about wild foods and foraging as well as having links to all the wild food recipes on my site. Moreover I have no more than 100 links on the page and all subsequent links are listed on the following pages. This makes the entire page far more SEO and search engine spider friendly and makes it far more likely that it will be indexed. By providing lots of these little collections of links and pages your are giving the search engines what they want (content) whilst allowing them and your users to find what you have to offer far more easily.
This technique (and a few others) has led to a doubling of my traffic over the past month and it's also significantly increased the length of time that my site's visitors spend on my site. The best part is that it's all automated. As soon as I've set-up a portal page it builds itself from my database. So as soon as I add new recipes or new content they're automatically added to the portal pages as well.
Do good SEO, but be smart with it!
About The Author
Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Articles site where you can submit free articles. If you truly are serious about your site's rankings and your links then you must sign-up for the free How to Maximize your Web Traffic eCourse.
Previously on SearchEngineChannel
- What Does SEO Have in Common With the Wizard of Oz?
- Pretty Sites are Good for SEO
- 4 Web Site Optimization Tips You Can Implement Right Away
- Top 5 Advantages of SEO Over Traditional Advertising
- SEO, the HTML Source Code and Competition
- Link Popularity, Link Reputation & PageRank
- 5 Tips to Improve Search Rank
- 7 Winning Search Engine Optimization Tactics
- Web Traffic: Is Using Google Adwords The Right Way?
- Social media optimization : A new theme for publicity
