dcodes A Bloggin ExperimentI 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 :D

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.