Search Engine Optimization and Tweaking

[komodo]

If you guys don't care about web development, or the inner-workings of search engines, this post will probably be pretty boring, so go ahead and move on to the next thread. lol

Otherwise....

I just realized that when the search engines read car-wallpapers.net, the homepage has plenty of content to hit on, but each subpage looks nearly identical. The filenames of the pages are different (for different Makes), however the SE-readable content (non-images) is just a bunch of random resolutions. Then when you actually view the wallpaper, there's slight differences in the filenames, but overall, most of the text is the same. Granted the pictures are different everywhere, but I'm afraid of being penalized by a search engine because of this setup.

In my effort to diversify the subpage content, I added the original filesize to the view-wallpaper page. While this page has very little text to start with, adding another nearly-random number will mix it up a bit. The main search engine optimization upgrade I made though was to the browse pages (by make and by tag). It's a bit more server CPU intensive, but I think it's worth it. At the bottom of each browse page, it has a tag-dump of all the tags attached to all the wallpapers shown (that page only). This is great for search engines to pick up on because if the server name is car-wallpapers.net and the filename is browse-bmw.html, having text content with keywords like "wallpaper", "e36", "m3", etc. will direct the exact traffic we're looking for to us. It creates a dynamic (though tagging) search engine landing spot that sets us apart from the non-tag-enabled wallpaper galleries (the rest of the internet). For example, if someone searches for "e34 wallpaper" on Google, looking for just that, we are the ONLY wallpaper gallery that return a valid result. Actually, by that search United Bimmer's e34 forum is returned on the first page as well, which shows how SEO fine-tuned our forum is also, haha, but I digress. Most wallpaper galleries are setup to land search queries on the car make name (Subaru, BMW, Nissan, Ferrari, etc), and on rare occasion, you find them narrowing the pages down by model (M3, 350Z, etc), but with our innovating tagging system, we can narrow it down to every single detail... and now that our tags are integrated with the browse pages, this creates even more possibilities.

While car-wallpapers.net is still not very deep in Google, it's doing great in other search engines. And the fact that it's actually surfacing at all (especially Google, known for it's rigorous website acceptance levels), is quite impressive. Also, car-wallpapers.net has only been online for a little over one week, but is already receiving about 300 unique hits a day, with no advertising beyond a post in a few forums a week ago, and no backlinks besides the United Bimmer homepage (PR2, not to impressive).

And on another note, but the same topic, hot-car-sites.com is dominating MSN results. While Google strongly dislikes that site, look at some of it's MSN search query result placements:

#1 - hot car sites
#1 - hot car
#1 - hot car topsite
#1 - car topsite
#1 - car topsites
#1 - car rankings
#2 - car sites
#3 - top modified cars

Considering the site has been up for only a few weeks, that's very impressive. Granted those are not the most popular search queries, but it's definitely a start. All three sites (UB, car-wallpapers, and hot-car-sites) are also all hosted on different IP addresses, so the interlinking between them should be beneficial on the search engine front.

Another small search engine tweak I made today was on the United Bimmer homepage. I found the top-downloaded BMW wallpapers changed fairly infrequently, so I changed it to display random BMW wallpapers instead. This accomplishes two objectives. First of all it further diversifies the United Bimmer homepage. No one wants to see the same content (especially graphical like that) static for long periods of time (which is why we eliminated the old rarely-updated homepage). By mixing up the wallpapers, someone may see an image that catches their eye one day and download it. The second objective of the switch is for that of SEO. When Google crawls the car-wallpaper.net homepage, it's already pinging the most-downloaded images fairly constantly. To do the same from the UB homepage would bleed more PR to a select part of the site (only those 4-5 pages) and hurt the overall e-stickiness. By showing random samplings of BMW wallpapers from the more-frequently-crawled UB homepage, it exposes more of the insides and guts of car-wallpapers.net to the search engines, increasing the exposure of landing points. While those few pages might not return as often, it's a quantity over quality focus with a site of this dimension. In time, the entire site as a whole will increase in importance, rather than just a select few parts. This is better in the long run.

Now the only thing we have left to do is wait, which isn't very fun. hah


Trackback: http://komodo9.blogspot.com/2006/04/...ation-and.html

[komodo]

I'd like to add wide-screen support to car-wallpapers.net next also.

Does anyone have a list of all the wide-screen resolutions? Thanks

Also, do you think it'd be too much to add commenting support on wallpapers?

[drz]

Harry, I commend you on the work you have done on these sites. I think the netwrok will be very successful. Keep it up.

[94bmw325i]

What you are doing is remarkable. I'm just waiting on the web development lessons. Make me something like a video professor CD please haha.

[komodo]

Haha, thanks, but lets give it a month or so and see if the work actually pays off, or if it was such minute details that it was in vein (however I firmly believe it was worth while, or I wouldn't have done it obviously).

[doughboyea]

I don't know if this is along the same lines... but that link you have in your sig Harry... i found ub.c on thier listings, rightclicked, copied thier url and am using that link as my homepage... it doesn't effect my loading of the forum at all, so if it helps, good, if not, oh well.

Dough

[komodo]

Originally Posted by doughboyea

I don't know if this is along the same lines... but that link you have in your sig Harry... i found ub.c on thier listings, rightclicked, copied thier url and am using that link as my homepage... it doesn't effect my loading of the forum at all, so if it helps, good, if not, oh well.

Dough

Haha, cool, thanks. It doesn't help our ranking, only clicking that link in my sig does, however that does increase our outbound link count on their site, so others may see that and become interested.

Good thinking though. Nice.

[witeshark]

It's so awesome. Just doing things right

[craig]

you need to get a psp set up. that way i can get on ub with out having to SCROLL FOR HOURS to get to the other side of the picture. and thats just the signitures! lol

[komodo]

Originally Posted by craig

you need to get a psp set up. that way i can get on ub with out having to SCROLL FOR HOURS to get to the other side of the picture. and thats just the signitures! lol

Or you could try using a real computer. haha

[komodo]

Update: I finally just got my invitation to join Google Analytics / Urchin web stats tracking.



I just finished implementing it on a few different sites, including UB.

[94bmw325i]

ok so harry professor dvd?

[komodo]

Originally Posted by 94bmw325i

ok so harry professor dvd?

[94bmw325i]

you think im kidding too

[Rooz]

Originally Posted by komodo

Update: I finally just got my invitation to join Google Analytics / Urchin web stats tracking.



I just finished implementing it on a few different sites, including UB.

sweet

what is it good for though?