In an earlier post on Domain Flipping, I mentioned some tweaks I was doing to help increase it’s accessibility and subsequent search engine rankings for a domain I purchased to flip for profit. Here is a summary of what changes I have made:
- CSS-based layout (needs fixing up, few tables to remove)
- XHTML Transitional validated on all pages
- CSS has been validated
- 301 redirects from .htaccess (will replace at server level)
- Template-based (few tweaks such as including page titles)
- Added titles/alt texts where they were missing
- Changed titles to H1 and H2’s
I released these changes on Sunday, May 27th and almost immediately started seeing results of those efforts which makes me feel it was worth the hours it took me to complete. Prior to these changes, I was averaging 0-5 unique visitors per day. Since the changeover, that has increased by 2-3x to 5-15+ uniques per day. Peanuts I know compared to most websites out there but the important part is that the websites traffic is increasing!
Upcoming tweaks to increase accessiblity and search engine rankings:
- keyword/phrase research and implementation
- add robots.txt
- move 301 redirect to server level (from .htaccess)
- add a sitemap
- update meta keywords, description, etc.
- add titles for pages
- keyword links in footer
You might wonder why I didn’t do this all in one swoop. The first push was getting it from the wretchedly written source code to templates and changing the non-descriptive filenames to get them into the search engines sooner then later. Now that the canvas is somewhat clean, I can start to paint!
Considering I have no idea what if any value my blog provides to anyone, until I start seeing comments on my blog, I won’t release more details about the niche of the projects I’m working on. If you enjoy my blog, please considering signing up and commenting on my posts.
