16th Jul 2007
Monitoring your Classified Site’s Search Strategy
Most websites today depend on search engine traffic and monitoring your search engine strategy can be a complicated process. For classified sites it can be even more difficult since they cover a wide variety of merchandise and search keywords. There are 5 basic steps you can take to ensure you’re aware of your search engine status:
- Focus your effort
- Search for Items
- Links are your friends
- Indexed Pages
- Invite the spiders
Depending on your geographic region its also important to understand the dominate search site. For example Google in Canada has nearly 60% of all search engine traffic so your focus for a Canadian Classified site should be on Google. You can use your sites traffic logs as an indicator but a better strategy would be to find a broader outlook that covers many web sites in your region.
One easy way to measure your Classified site is to search for items typically found in your ads. This will give you an accurate measure of how the search site is seeing your ad content. If you’re site doesn’t rank highly on the search results, you have work to do. One common mistake is to search for your company name and assuming everything is good with your strategy. This not an accurate test as most companies will rank high for the name but this won’t help you for users that don’t your company.
A good way to think of links as a vote for your site. The most votes you have the higher your regard with most search sites. You can monitor the number of links your have with most major search engines.
Content is king with search sites and one of the easy ways to measure your search success is the number of pages captured or indexed by the search site. You can measure pages indexed against the number of Classified ads or the number of pages your site contains. When doing this comparison besure to include dynamically generator pages like search result pages.
Classified sites are in a continual change as new ads are added and removed. It you to be that you had to wait for the search spiders to visit your site, Today most search sites provide the ability to submit an XML sitemap showing all the webpages you want the spiders to visit. The XML sitemap can also contain the priority of pages that you want the spiders to visit. The Google sitemap interface also provides a number of tools to monitor your site, see error messages from the spiders and how often they are visiting your site.
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