Here is how the right SEO change can do wonders for your blog
SEO, SEO, SEO. How we bloggers love and hate it at the same time, right? It’s THE tough nut to crack when it comes to driving traffic. But we are not dwelling on the morbid today. We have reasons to celebrate, and how! The last few months we have been telling you a lot about page speed, CDN, optimised websites, and generally how having a faster website can potentially give you more love from Google.
And now we have happy tidings because the persistence seems to have paid off!
Over the last couple of months we’ve pushed through a lot of those “small improvements” to the blogs. We are getting a bit technical here, so if you want more information, give us a shout on chef@cucumbertown.com. Here’s a gist of some of the things we were focussing on, which has led to a dramatic difference in the search traffic for our bloggers.
Blogs now are served from an https address — i.e. your blog has an SSL certificate. Most blogs are not served in the same way, and this gives websites a definite edge over others. Of course, it is possible to do this on your own, but when confronted with content, promotions, photography and a host of other things, such things become less of a priority.
Pages have be set to rel=canonical. Surprisingly we noticed a large number of unnoticed duplicate pages. Example” http://www.domain.com/page & http://domain.com/page were treated as two pages. And everyone knows how much damage duplicate content can cause.
We noticed quite a few broken internal links and notified the authors. This too is something that Google penalises you for. So it had to be fixed.
And of course page-speed. We’ve managed to bring down load time dramatically.
One thing to note here is that, the changes primarily impacted the bloggers with some existing search traffic. For the others who are still struggling with search traffic, do not despair, it will happen with time and effort. So hang in there, and who knows, we could be writing about you in a few months!
Here’s Nandita Iyer’s popular blog, Saffron Trail. The search traffic has gone up by 4 times in a month’s time!
This is just hallelujah for us. We have to be honest here, even we did not think it would be this good. Of course, a number of factors would have gone into this dramatic increase including and not restricted to the popularity of certain recipes at this time of the year, writing for a niche and so on. But the heartening thing is that she is not the only example.
Mareena’s Recipe Collections saw an increase of over 25% in search traffic in the last two months.
This is just the kind of thing that gives Cucumbertown bloggers an edge. Despite the fact that we had a lot of people wondering why we were so obsessed with the minor stuff, we knew we had to pursue it. Because at the end of the day, we needed to be doing what was best for the bloggers.
And it is not just a simple case of traffic increasing. The overall efficiency with which your blog runs is improved vastly with this kind of optimization. A direct example of this, an increase in pages/session and consequently a decrease in bounce rate as illustrated in the graph below:
Marc Matsumoto’s No Recipes saw the page speed gradually increasing since he moved to Cucumbertown. Average load time was down 70% when comparing Dec 2015-Jan 2016 vs Dec 2014-Jan 2015. The cumulative effect of this is great news for a blogger, because it means you are engaging your users more than ever before. And all of us can agree that having a website that loads fast is a pretty good incentive for people to want to stay on it, provided the content is good. But if you have a website that is loading at a snail pace, no matter how good the content, frustration will catch up at some point. No Recipes is serving ad filled pages at close to 7 seconds. This is as good as it can get!
While it has never been the intention of Cucumbertown to increase traffic for bloggers or do the promotions, it is extremely gratifying to see our bloggers and their dreams grow like this. We want to take care of all the systemic fixes — like ensuring you webpages are best optimized, they are best designed for mobile, all the html marks ups are right etc., so that you can feel motivated to create the best kind of content out there. It also makes our bloggers feel safe, that someone is looking after their cherished blogs.
We realise there’s a huge cost to managing these technical issues and the cost to do so over a period of time is substantial. And not just in terms of money. For instance, when you mess with ‘minor’ errors , you’ll most often not even notice how it has impacted your blog immediately. And finally when you do notice it after 6 months, it would have already been too late to fix the ‘minor’ issue, which of course by then, is a major issue. This is why we had insisted on putting in the time and effort to have our websites completely optimised.
And this is not the end of things. There are lot of minor improvements we are working on even now. We will keep you updated on the progress as we go along.
If you have noticed anything exciting about the fast CT blogs, let us know what you think. And if you think there are areas we should pick our socks up on, let us know. More in months to come..
