« Monetizing a travel web site with Google Adsense, continued »

Helping a visitor turn their vacation site around

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 of 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 appropriate, 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.

You would, of course, take the opportunity to rename all the pages to reflect the individual content which, with users if not (always) the whims of search engine algorithms, can again improve your traffic.

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 more 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.

On web site valuation

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.