« Monetising a travel web site with Google Adsense »

Helping a visitor turn their site around

Original question

Hello Paul

I've acquired a large site (500,000 monthly) built in Frontpage. Will it be difficult to optimize for AdSense? Any Frontpage templates? or consultants you recommend? Or do you?

Thank you. L.

First answer:

Hi L,

It depends on if you are asking me whenever I can suggest legitimate - Google approved - ways to optimise you Adsense code to maximise click-thru rate or if I can clean up the Frontpage code for better SEO and, accordingly, possible better, more focused Adsense generations etc.

The first is easy.

The second, well only used Frontpage once or twice before choking after seeing the raw code…
*Shudders*

The answer to both is of course yes, but you'll need to give me a clue about where the site is if you want a more definitive answer. 500,000 uniques a month is pretty healthy mind, you need to make changes carefully to avoidable beggering up something that obviously seems to work.

Get back to me and I'll take a proper look.

~ Paul

Travel site detailed

Thanks Paul.

The site is (travel site). Owned by a friend, I am helping her consider monitizing options. Curious what you think the site could be generating for income if maximized - a conservative estimate not pie in the sky. Also not doing anything that would get her thrown off Google. Site has 5,000 articles, gets 500,000 unique visitors a month, and 4,000,000 hits. Question is how much you think it "should" be bringing in, and then whether that can be done in Frontpage. Appreciate your thoughts on this.

L.

Detailed answer and look at the holiday destination reviews site

Hi

Honest truth? , you're not doing yourself any favour with that code! *Shudder*

Fixing the code etc will VASTLY improve your search engine optimisation and for that Google - all the search engines - will thank you. May or may not improve your page rank but I can guarantee you a few associated things, if fixed:

1. Pages will load faster
   
   
2. Your bandwidth usage at your host will reduce up to 20%
   
   
3. Subsequent redesign will be much, much easier. Take a look at this site ( CSS Zen Garden), have a play and see what I mean. The only that that changes is the CSS script! The bugs theme is a favourite of mine, but for all 1,000 designs the only thing that changes is this one layout page.
   
   

Really not big on fixed width pages either myself. Making them fluid (set by the width of the browser window) improves everything too - including CTR.

Now to the big question. And, umm, I can't give you a perfect answer because I don't know the travel industry, but, if I was to give you an educated guess, just blending the Google code better could double the amount you take from Google - literally overnight.

Fixing /everything/ between five and tenfold increase overall. Hard to say, but yes, a vast increase is probable.

Despite the high traffic, I'd hazard a guess that many are just hitting the back button and virtually no-one is looking at more than 2 pages before leaving - your navigation just isn't up to it.
(As is born out by your page stats, I notice)

You don't need to answer this, but what is she earning now, $250 a month, $300?

For that traffic, given 12 years online, you should have a page rank of 6, probably 7 for the home page, Adsense revenue upwards of $3 to $5,000 a month and substantial additional revenue from paid / sponsored links and adverts. It could well be a lot more, but for 500,000 unique a month for a travel I'd be a bit miffed if I was getting anything less - to say the least.

I am assuming here that you are talking a Google count of 500,000 page impressions a months.
Bear in mind that 'hits' are page calls. A page with 999 holiday pictures would count as at least 1,000 'hits' but is still only one lonely page view. Big difference!

Scale your current and projected Adsense revenue accordingly up or down.

Sorting the atrocious code and navigation (or lack thereof) would have a correspondingly positive effect.

Hard not knowing the travel industry, but if I compared it to a highly optimised site for perhaps health or a few other sectors, maybe with a CTR of 8% give or take, then allowed for 500k impressions a month, that would make a realistic Adsense revenue of $25,000 a month.

And yes, that is a real estimate - not pie in the sky - that is based on purely tidying the underlying code - no additional advertising, no blackhat, just pure, 100% Google approved - and Google recommended improvements.

Played a bit more and frankly, if you'll pardon the French, it's blimmin' ugly, almost as if several people were writing the pages (and none of them knew about web design). I don't know what she is taking now, but I can tell you straight, she could - and should - be taking a LOT more.

However - and this will make a huge difference - bear in mind factors like these:

Top 10 entry point pages (first pages viewed):
(1).htm with 4229 page views
(2).htm with 2757 page views
(3).htm with 2727 page views
(4).htm with 1611 page views
(5).htm with 1457 page views

Top 10 exit point pages (last pages viewed):
(1).htm with 4208 page views
(3).htm with 2724 page views
(2).htm with 2623 page views
(4).htm with 1536 page views
(5).htm with 1401 page views

Top 10 pages which were the only page viewed:
(1).htm with 3958 page views
(3).htm with 2397 page views
(2).htm with 2387 page views
(5).htm with 1283 page views
(4).htm with 1266 page views

See you where I am going with this… A lot of the traffic isn't exactly family with two kids looking for a holiday in Florida.
As you can see just by (1.htm) almost all your traffic is coming in, taking one look and leaving, you have virtually no conversions. Some people would be happy with 15,000 visitors a month - for the right niche site that would be highly lucractive. Yet you are haemorrhaging visitors at a staggering rate!

Actually, Googles' terms and conditions are VERY clear on serving up that type of content, however innocent the writers intent. If you fix the site their admin will look when they see the inevitable spike in revenue, and if they see it's all from the above she'll loose her Adsense account instantly - forever. They are a bit firm on this point. And you have 82 pages just on the term ''.

Just as an aside, as I'm pedantic like that, who does this web site belong too? In the first email you said I've acquired a large site in the second Owned by a friend, I am helping her…

Finally, when considering the potential earnings figures I've given you, bear in mind that removing any and all pages likely to offend Google is highly likely to cause a substantial drop in traffic. There's no reason you couldn't move sensitive content to another site, one without Google Adsense. On the plus side, building up more genuine traffic could prove better in the long run, but that's not my call to make.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Regards

~ Paul

Continuing on
One followup question, Paul. I assume such work is what you do. If so, can you give me (1) a very rough estimate (I won't hold you to it in any way) of hours and cost to rebuilt this site to a better code (Expression web has been mentioned. Familiar with it? Or the code you mentioned using.) or (2) just consult with me to the point that I can have the current webmaster, who built it in Front page but is willing to change it, complete the time-intensive bulk of the work? I'm assuming that rebuilding the whole site might not even be something you are interested in if it involves 5000 page re-dos. Thank you. L.

Hi,

Hopefully parts of this won't be too technical for you, I've tried to keep it simple.

Before I answer, Google 'French Apartment' …

Somewhere in the top ten with be frenchapartment.org - where it's been for the last year, invariably on the first or second postion. That's out of 4.5 million results for the terms.

If you try mini-pets or minipets (or a number of other key words), there's Ackadia, position one, has been since I wrote the page, almost. I cannot guarantee nor promise such goods results for your site - no-one can. But I can guarantee that fixing your code (whether I do it or anyone else) will greatly improve your chances of such a high rankings.

Rough estimate on time and cost is easy, sorting 5 pages an hour (working fast) gives you about 1,000 man hours, give or take, which at the industry average of $30 an hour gives you a makeover cost of $30,000.

By the way, CSS isn't a code as such, just a way of defining how pages will look. Whether you hand code like I prefer, use Expression Web, or Dreamweaver or any of a number of other packages, you use style sheets to add unity and consistancy to the pages.

Simplest example, on your home page you have this:

<a href="path/path2/file.html"> <span style="font-size: 9pt; font-weight: 700">Some interesting page about vacations abroad</span></a>

Instead you'd move that to your style to another page so this becomes something like:

<a class="boldlink" href=""path/path2/file.html">Some interesting page about vacations abroad</span></a>

Already, with just one change you've made your page over a dozen lines or code shorter. Good for bandwidth, for page load times and especially for search engines that find this junk akin to walking through knee deep maple syrup.

Naturally this change - and every other like it on the page - is multiple 5,000 fold across your web site.

Now for the clever / fun part: In the style sheet we (now) find this:

/* Bolder headline link */

.nlink a { text-align: center; font: 1.2em/3em Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; background: transparent; color: #800000; font-weight: 700; } /* maroon */

If you change the font now - size, colour, padding, borders, whatever - every link on every page is updated with the new design.

Now for the monetizing tip, or one at least.
Match the fonts and design on the links match the Google Ads, blending the two together, moving the Adsense as appropriape, your click thru rate should rocket up, for pages that are seeing genuine traffic, naturally.

My personal preference is for hand written .php pages, but you can have similar results or even edit it thus with Dreamweaver etc. However you look at is, .asp done using Microsoft's Web Expression, .xml, .php realistically you are going to loose backlinks on every single page, though the effect can be minimised with a custom 404/redirect page. I suspect many of the backlinks of internal though.

Using CyberWyre's calculator to look at your links we have:

• Yahoo: 20,500
  
  
• Altavista: 5,660
  
  
• All the Web: 4,900
  
  
• At 126,000 you have a good Alexa rank, for what that's worth.
  
  

Incidentally, searching Google ( linkto: www.yourholidaysite.com ) give a move realistic 500+ results.

The final consideration is how the site is written and maintained, both now and in the future. Who's doing the web editting and uploads, just one person ? Also, as an option, have to looked at or considered content management systems ? There are several, many - like Drupal and the better know Wordpress - being free.

Get back to me when you've considered all this,

Regards,

~ Paul

To be continued, perhaps.

As an aside, Cwire's website value calculator valued this same site - based on linkage and ranking - at just over $9,000. Go and see what your site or blog is worth, it might just surprise you.

It gave YouTube and MySpace valuations around a staggering $975,000,000 with monthly revenue over $20 million.

Conversely, it valued one of my sites at just $125 with a whopping $1 a month revenue. *cough* That's what you get for having an Alexa rank of 0. A little out on the worth of that particular niche site.

As a vague guide it really is a neat little tool, though it has a few fundamental flaws:

For a start, Alexa's ranking can easily be manipulated, at least up to around the x00,000 mark, after which, naturally, it gets exponentially harder to improve upon. There is another flaw with Alexa, or two actually. Unlike the Google toolbar - and despite being owned by Amazon - the thing is uncomfortably close to malware/spyware and is generally detected as such. Secondly, as these things are measured, it's only really installed by webmasters and the like interested in pushing / showing off a rank that has a range of millions instead of just 10.

Yahoo is just puddled as it tends to count your own links within a site, distorting the link count.

On more concrete grounds, it depends on the size of your audience. For instance a niche medical site could easily be worth far more than a generic blog with ten or even fifty times the traffic and linkage.

Which brings us nicely to the point of actual traffic, real footfall, which the tool does not and cannot monitor. This too greatly affects the value of a site, as does intangiables like the longevity of it, the loyalty of it's visitors, and so forth.

Notice that I said 'real footfall' i.e. targetted audience. No use attracting a million visitors to a site on vacation resorts if they arrive expecting to see 'widgets' - as it the case with the site I looked at.