It's been a long time since I've launched a new domain name. One of the first thinks I've noticed is watching the Search Engines scrape us. It's very clear who the leader is. Google is out in front in number of page scraped, followed by Yahoo, then Ask, then MSN...Yes I can't believe Ask is scraping us more than MSN. Where is all of that development money being spent?
We've seen an immediate pickup from the SEO work we've implemented. We're getting a handful of visits daily from Google on the pages index. I love seeing the index grow!
A couple SEO things we managed to hammer out in the 2 weeks include:
- Canonical URL (The same page for each search (If you search for 1996 Audi A4 vs Audi A4 1996 - this results in the same URL))
- Bread Crumbs (We created priorities of what the emphasis would be used based upon Keyword volumes using Google's Traffic Estimator)
- Friendly URLs (http://frugalmechanic.com/cars/1996-audi-a4 - which is important for hit highlighting that improves CTR in algo results - and some say increases pagerank/etc)
- SiteMap files - we generated sitemap files for all 4M pages we have on the site.
