At Orchid Box we pride ourselves on being able to optimise sites and increase traffic as quickly as possible, so we decided to set ourselves a challenge. We wanted to see if we could create an SEO friendly site that would also be able to gain large numbers of traffic and low bounce rates – and complete this site within a day.
The result was purehairstyle.com – a fully working site set up in well under 24 hours.
KEYWORD OPTIMISATION AND USER INTERFACE
The basic site idea is based around highly searched keywords on search engines, particularly within the female market – such as celebrity, style and hair type – prominent phrases and words that are regularly searched on Google. SEO is generally a male dominated world, and thus a lot of sites that are created for advertising largely focus on men – we hope this site has targeted a potential niche in the SEO world by going against this trend. It might not necessarily be a subject that we are experts on at Orchid Box, but if people are interested in it, so are we!
The interface is created using WordPress in order to enable a quick development turnaround, but within the WordPress framework we have adapted and adjusted to create a more attractive and user-friendly site. The site navigation and structure is created to be highly SEO friendly, so there are our specified hairstyle keywords prominent for the search engines at every important level. Every URL is optimised for the search engines (as well as being friendly for the users), including every image from the multiple galleries, the metadata is highly SEO friendly throughout the site and the headers are all keywords we want to target with the search engines.
We also have our own search within the site so people do not need to trawl through many pages to find what they want (a surefire way of increasing your bounce rate), which also helps make our hair site a lot more user-friendly. If a user has success and finds what they want on the site, they are a lot more likely to return in the future.
LINKBUILDING AND PROMOTION
Unfortunately, a new site will always struggle initially to gain visits through organic links – that is to say through people searching on search engines, not least because it takes a significant period of time to increase your Google PageRank or equivalent. One thing you can do to boost your site in its early weeks is Linkbuilding. This is an important side of SEO that is often disregarded as ‘Spamming’ but done effectively and professionally it can be a very important source of both traffic and brand-building. This is the next phase for purehairstyle.com as we need to build up the traffic and spread the name amongst sites full of users who might be interested in our topics.
The latest web-craze in the social networking field is obviously Twitter – you can’t get away from it in today’s internet world. It was also important for purehairstyle.com to have an active presence on the site to promote itself – it is surprisingly quick and easy to build up a following and spread your links using Twitter, and as long as you keep posting interesting things people will always want to keep up-to-date with your page.
GALLERIES AND PAGE IMPRESSIONS
So once we have the clicks onto the site from the search engines, it is very important to have an interface which people will want to click lots of links – ideally hyperlinks that loop round and encourage the user click on further. We wanted to optimise both our ‘bounce rate’ (the percentage of users that click on your site and then leave) and the pages per visit, as this increases the page impressions and makes the site more profitable for advertising. Due to the site content, an excellent way to do this was through the medium of galleries – many series of pictures of a similar nature that users will want to view more of, rather than just have them all on one page so there are limited page impressions available.
ADSENSE
With the Adsense toolbars added to Purehairstyle we increase the likelihood of a user clicking one of the links and earning money through advertising – the more users and the more page impressions, the better the profitability. These ad banners are not just on the homepage, but all over our site so you have the opportunity to click wheverever you are, ideal for us as the part beneficaries of any clicks.
SUCCESS!
So with the site successfully completed and looking good for both users and search engines, we achieved our goal in good time – now it’s about linkbuilding and advertising to promote the site and increase the traffic. It’s only a matter of time before Purehairstyle.com begins to rise up the web rankings!
