Yahoo Search Results Matter For My Minisites
I very seldom focus on checking my Yahoo search results for my various minisites and developed domains and spend the majority of my time verifying Google search results. I have found that recently Yahoo has been showing certain minsites of mine in the first page of their listings causing a measurable increase in traffic and revenue.
One example of this is my site PensacolaBeach.me . Pensacola Beach is a popular tourist destination in the Florida panhandle. I knew the SEO for anything related to it would be tough up front but have had some success with certain targeted terms but did not expect to rise to the front page of Google (or Yahoo for that matter) for quite some time for the term Pensacola Beach.
I had noticed that mid last week the traffic had went up and that revenue from Google Adsense was also increasing. I took a look through my Statpress statistics and also my Awstats details and figured out that the term Pensacola Beach had increased in the common keywords driving traffic. Looking at referrers Yahoo was now referring a solid amount of traffic. I then went to Yahoo (really cannot remember the last time I used Yahoo for a search) and found that indeed I was in the first page of listings for the term Pensacola Beach.
This is good news for a few reasons, the obvious is that the SEO work that has been done for long tail terms has also paid off for the primary term I expected to wait longer for results on (I just started the development in January). Also, for you .ME fans, with the results I have had so far I cannot complain about developing this on the .ME extension (more details coming on .ME and SEO in the interview I am posting Monday).
I know that it comes to no surprise to anyone that Yahoo matters, but as much time as I spend focusing on Google search results and placement I really found the amount of revenue and traffic increase I received interesting and actually worth spending sometime researching in future developments. For those that fall into the same camp as I have in checking Google only, you may find it worth the time to spend a portion of your effort verifying placement in Yahoo results as well.
On a side note, I am now only 2 sites away from having all my minisites moved over to my HostGator account. After much pain at my previous hosting provider (outages, changed configurations, DNS issues) all while paying for a VPS I have successfully moved to a HostGator reseller account and have had better performance and the support has been great.
Yes, anything ad you see on this site for HostGator is an affiliate but when it comes to hosting its gotta be right. If you are looking for a good provider or just starting from scratch you really cannot go wrong with them.
Wordpress Plug-Ins for Minisites
Wordpress is one of the most flexible and easily implemented tools for developing minisites for your keyword domains. Whether I am looking to develop a high traffic minisite or a more niche topic I can find ways to use Wordpress as the base for my site and use one of many free Wordpress themes to customize the look and feel.
Many webhosting providers provide point and click install of Wordpress through Cpanel and Fantastico which makes the process even faster.
Once up and running I have several Wordpress plug-ins I use to make the site more SEO friendly and make site more functional from both an admin and user perspective.
There are hundreds of Wordpress plug-ins, these are my goto plug-ins for vritually every site, some I recently started using and am moving back through my older sites to add:
Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Plug-In
This tool adds a button at the end of each post that allows the viewer to easily share your story on Digg, Facebook, and may other social news and network sites.
Google XML Sitemaps
To make sure your site is fully indexed and visible to Google (Yahoo and Microsoft as well) it is very important to create a compliant sitemap. This plug-in automatically creates the proper file and updates it as you add posts and pages. It is very configurable and allows automatic notifcation of sitemap updates to Google, Yahoo, and more.
All-In-One SEO Pack
The All-In-One SEO Pack makes it a snap to easily setup your post titles, meta tags, and other important SEO items in one spot. Where I really find this tool useful is on a per post basis you can configure description, keywords, etc.
Statpress
Statpress is a tool for viewing stats for your Wordpress blog, this allows for reporting based on last referrer, keyword referrals, and other areas of interest as well as tracking the top referrers and keywords. I still use Awstats but find myself referring to this frequently as well.
OK, a couple that I do not use on every site but have found useful too:
FeedWordpress
This plug-in allows for automatic posting of RSS feeds from other sites to yours. If you are wanting to setup a niche news aggregator using Wordpress this can be an quick and easy way to do that.
WP Super Cache
If your site gets frequent updates and high traffic this is a must, this plug-in creates cached files of frequently viewed pages of your site. I have a couple sites that this became a must on after traffic grew over 1000 uniques a day.
Twitter Tools
This one is a recent addition for me, this allows for your blog posts to be automatically fed to twitter or for your twitter posts to automatically generate blog posts on your Wordpress blog. I also use it to create an auto-updating "tweet view" on my right sidebar. Its a nice way for visitors to keep up and gives the site a more personal feel in my mind.
I am sure there are many more that can be pointed out that can be useful, feel free to leave a comment with plug-ins that you find useful as well.
