Hi All @ WDF

 

Been a while since I jumped on here, but basically I'm looking to increase traffic to my site and I can't really work out how it's not doing better. The site is: http://universitycompare.com and has been running properly for 2 and half years. It's a UK based company targeting 16-24 year olds that are entering into Higher Education or going to university.

 

There is a lot going on and we've received significant press such as National news, etc and have some valuable back-links but still we are faced with only a page rank of 2 - so I have a few questions to pick some of your SEO Brains about?

 

- Would it matter if I changed the domain to a .co.uk? Would I get more hits that way?

- How would Increase my page rank? I've tried conventional methods just to get the ball rolling.

- Keywords, titles, etc are all within the right character limits and we have a strong social pull amongst all major networks.

 

Any advice would be perfect and the basics I've covered when it comes to SEO, I know about valuable back linking, steady content (33,000 pages of good up-to-date content), and I'm aware that I should have more hits, (won't reveal) but they are low at times.

 

Don't bother with page rank numbers. Don't focus on page rank to increase traffic. Look at ways of increasing traffic, to increase traffic.

 

How's your internal linking structure? 33,000 pages and I have a feeling there will be a lot of pages competing for relevancy. I've just checked your website for "what is clearing" and there are multiple pages all targeting that keyword. Why not move that to it's own landing page and was the question there? Point internal links at.

 

What about duplicated content? How are you managing those issues?

 

Targeted landing pages for big-hitting keywords?

 

Personally, there's a lot that can be done with your content approach. You have a great chance to answer questions here. I know you have landing pages already but make sure they're the focus, not a ton of articles

if you change the domain, you might loose all the backlinks, therefore, see that you analyse other things prior to that like checking the site speed, design, css coding issues or complexities etc.

Don't bother with page rank numbers. Don't focus on page rank to increase traffic. Look at ways of increasing traffic, to increase traffic.

 

How's your internal linking structure? 33,000 pages and I have a feeling there will be a lot of pages competing for relevancy. I've just checked your website for "what is clearing" and there are multiple pages all targeting that keyword. Why not move that to it's own landing page and was the question there? Point internal links at.

 

What about duplicated content? How are you managing those issues?

 

Targeted landing pages for big-hitting keywords?

 

Personally, there's a lot that can be done with your content approach. You have a great chance to answer questions here. I know you have landing pages already but make sure they're the focus, not a ton of articles

 

Hi Jason, thanks for the reply - I know page ranks are not necessarily a direct correlation on traffic but it just seems to be something to be pointing me in the direction.

 

A lot can be done with our content approach and we are trying to focus our energy in ensuring the pages that we supply are great for content and have great landing pages, but it's difficult to work out how or where to get.

 

So say we had 100 business courses, and then we had an internal page that all the business courses were pointing to: 'All Business Courses'. Would this work better in terms of SEO? Because currently they are stored inside each university? It's hard to work out where things should go or how they should be stored, but my linking structure is one of the things I've been meaning to change for a while now.

 

We currently don't really have much duplicate content, it's actually all personalised content but the headings of each page would be the same for each of these, would that count as duplicate content?

I have to ask why you want to increase traffic? What's wrong with the traffic you already have?

 

33k pages sounds better than it actually is, in reality you could probably delete 80% of those and no-one would notice. Part of the key for these sort of sites is to focus on key tasks, which in your case is providing a facility for candidates to find the best Uni for their needs.

 

For your courses data structure I would have though it would be logical to do this in 3 steps:

 

1. View courses hierarchy (eg top level categories/types)

2. List courses in a category or by type

3. View course detail, this page would then list Uni's where the course is available (as related data), along with calls to action for next steps

- the benefit of this approach is that you can then reverse relate course data for each Uni location using COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere)

 

Forget the "SEO" bit, concentrate on making the best possible experience for your visitors, if you achieve that then "SEO" will largely take care of itself.

Thanks for the awesome advice! We are running into the same conundrum. We built our own site and do our own SEO. So this is a HUGE head ache. But we are willing to learn as much as we can on our own! So it's great to see people who are learning just like we are. I have personally seen that creating a lot of Blog profiles and writing useful blogs can be really great for your website. Then I have also been told not to be too spammy. but it seems impossible when you are writing that blog to create traffic for the site!

Edited February 24, 201511 yr by webdesigner93
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The page rank is getting updated its more a year now. Google has stopped updating page rank. So forget about it. I see some issues of duplicate content. That seems to be a problem as your internal pages wont rank well in search engines..

i use the "clickondigital.com" service they give me weekly report and also advice me do change according to panda and penguin update and now my site's page rank is 3. best seo company.