What I am learning about Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is an important part of any organisations marketing mix, whether they realise this or not. Having recently started to learn about SEO for the sake of setting up a number of affiliate marketing websites, it has become something of an obsession as I learn how to improve the performance of my websites on search engines. 

One of my sites, Technology Deals, started about a month ago with me writing posts containing details about offers from UK retailers on laptops, PCs, digital cameras and more. I started sending out links to the posts to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. In addition, I installed a number of plugins to the blogging software (WordPress) which help my SEO by updating the search engines whenever something new went onto site.

Visitors started to grow steadily from 5 or 10 per day to its peak on 22nd November of 114 in a day. I was getting excited. Visitors were starting to click on the links and buy at the retailers with the offers.

But, on 23rd November something happened. My visitors numbers plummeted to 15 or 20 per day. Having been on a high, I suddenly felt really fed up. What had happened? Had Google dropped me?

After calming down, I started to think through what had happened in the few days before the drop in visitors. Firstly, I had stopped the updates to my personal social media accounts and had set up social media aliases specific to the website (e.g. @technodealsuk) which have far fewer followers on each than my personal accounts, so less eyeballs would see the links and click on them to go to the site. I had assumed that because I was getting so many more visitors sent to me from Google that I no longer needed my personal accounts.

I has set up my site to be monitored by the 'Google Webmaster Tools' service too and that was telling me that my pages were loading more slowly than 91% of all the other websites on the web. Furthermore, it suggested improving some of the HTML code on my website to improve its performance.

In addition, I read through some relevant parts of an SEO book I use (Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): An Hour a Day) that competitors might have seen my rise up the pages and thwarted my activities. Or, Google might have changed its search algorithm which had effected my visitor numbers. (It also warned about a type of person that obsesses over  the algorithm who is known as an 'algoholic'!).

I also looked at how long people spent on my site on each visit and how many people viewed more than one page on each visit (known as 'bounce') which indicates how much people value my content. The time spent on the site is low and three quarters or more of my visitors do not visit another page.

Therefore, some changes need to occur for me to gain more visitors who want to stay on the site and look for deals. I need to produce better content. I need to make it load faster and I need to make sure I don't obsess over the volume of visitors alone, and focus on making sure they get a good experience and feel like they want to come back and use my site to find them good deals.