Category: 
Tuesday, 20 November 2007 @ 1:22 pm (Chris Frost)
I have decided to run a little experiment in order to find out just how good Wordpress is, and how it can be manipulated to produce a search engine friendly website. As a few know, I had a CMS built by a company in Scotland earlier this year, to manage a Discount Code website of mine which didn’t do too well in terms of SEO. After a bit of tinkering with the design, I have seen it climb steadily in the past few weeks to an acceptable level, meaning my PPC bills are decreasing a little each day.
Originally, the Discount Code site was a simple, nasty looking, Wordpress blog that didn’t do a great deal in the search engines, mainly due to my laziness and lack of enthusiasm and although making me some money, was costing £k’s each month to PPC. I have decided to review what Wordpress is capable of, created another website absed on exactly the same theme and this time I am making use of all the plugins available such as SEO, Rating, Email to Friend and Newsletter to name a few.
After 1 week of the website going live (Shopping Discount) and being regularly updated, already the initial SEO results are looking good as it’s appearing in the first page for certain keywords and phrases on Goolge and Yahoo and has generated sales 10 x the initial cost of the domain 
I plan to keep both sites running side by side, adding the same offers where possible but using different content to ensure that no dupe problems occur. My original site, Discount Codes, will continue in SEO and PPC terms, and the new site, Shopping Discount, will not be PPC’d at all. Hopefully both will be busy over the Christmas season :)
Will the new site generate anywhere near as much as the original CMS?
How will it rank in Search Engines?
Will functionality like Newsletters and Email To A Friend increase user stickability?
These are the questions I hope to be able to answer early next year.
Horaayy..there are 10 comment(s) for me so far ;)
Very, very interesting Chris. I’ve just started a wordpress blog site myself, and I’m using a lot of the plugins you’ve mentioned. It’s only got 12 pages so far and it’s already ranking nicely. The SEO title tag did break for a week and resulted in my rankings shooting through the floor. Just goes to show how important good titles are!
Indeed. Infact I am kind of running a few experiments all at once… all nothing….
The new site, as I say, will be purely SEO and not a penny spent on link building, ppc, advertising… absolutely nothing. The existing site will continue to hammer PPC but I am also trying, for the first time, some offline advertising to see how this goes. Should be a an interesting few weeks ahead.
The Wordpress pluggins really do help, and there are a few manual adjustments that can also be made, to further help with titles and such like.
Keep us posted on how your Wordpress site goes over the next 6 weeks or so.
Chris,
I am an Italian reader of yours.
I would like to start a similar blog to your shopping one.
I have just one question, how can I get discount codes?
Sorry for the silly question.
If you want reply to my email, s.francesco@email.it
Thanks,
Francesco
Now here you see, this I don’t get.
You set up a site and it’s making sales on natural search in a week.
Our longest-standing site, mybathroomfinder.com, is 11 months old and we jump around for joy if it makes two sales in a month.
Sometimes I suspect there’s an ‘on’ switch in my webhosting control panel that I forgot to flip…
*scratches head and wanders off again looking puzzled*
Wordpress is an awesome bit of kit and can easily be turned into a powerful CMS. Good luck with it Frostie!
Andy
I noticed that your website is also a wordpress blog so you should have any problem with attarcting visitors. As for sales then a number of factors creep into play such as prices, seasonal changes etc etc.
If you aren’t getting many visitors then checkout additional ways of improving your SEO such as making use of a pluggin called “All in One SEO Plugin”.
Also, when you write posts (more regular the better) who do you ping to tell them your website is up to date? Might be worth looking at James Littles post;
http://www.3wdl.co.uk/2007/01/22/wordpress-seo-tips/
Another addition I would make would be to create a sitemap.xml that can then be used by search engines to help spider your site.
HTH
Guadagnare
All discount codes are obtained from Affiliate Networks, Agencies or the Merchants directly. Not to sure about the Italian market but suspect there are a few Affiliate Networks out there that could help you.
Hi Chris, many thanks for your words of advice.
I do use the SEO plugin on all the other WP installations on all my other sites but had overlooked rolling it out to this one - it was my first WP-reskinning effort and frankly the template files are a bit of a mare under the bonnet compared to my newer sites, so plugins are a lot harder to use. Actually, very little of the site is run through WP, only the news section - the static pages are hand-coded and the XML site map is therefore also handwritten and probably out of date… damn. Bit of work to do there, methinks!
Pinging I rather thought could be left to WP’s own automatic function - currently have that configured to pingomatic and Google blog search. Will go and read the article you mention.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Chris. Am I going mad? I can’t see your list of recommended plugins!
Is this what you are after;
http://www.webaffiliate.co.uk/blog/seo/blogging-necessities.html
It was compiled way back in March and since then a lot has changed. You’re question has prompted me to update so this weekend I will release a new one.