Re: Explanation of traffic drop

From: Don Makoviney <don_at_maksys.com>
Date: Tue 11 Jun 2002 15:00:28 -0500

You said:
"Sales/traffic were great for about two weeks
after the launch and have trailed off since. Would
search engine optimization help? I was told search
engine spiders do not pick up site done in asp. Is this
correct? Are there any ways of getting around this? Are
there any recommended solutions for a site with a limited
advertising budget. Any help is appreciated."

There are probably a million reasons why, but I'll take a stab at a couple.
Bear in mind that any of these points may or may not be true:

First, if the site was COMPLETELY moved over to ASP, then did you make sure
to take your top entry pages and redirect them to similar pages on the NEW
site? Or at the very least, to the homepage? If you didn't, people may be
finding FILE NOT FOUND errors and are just giving up. There are still many
many people who don't understand the concept of "whacking" the end of a URL
off to get to the main page. I have run into this problem with my first
couple of site redesigns.

Second, Search Engine promotion may be a good option, however you failed to
specify if you had any previous search engine rankings in the first place.
If you did, those are probably no longer any good (again, unless you
provided redirectors from your most popularly linked pages. The reason why
is that many search engines base rankings on link popularity. If you have a
new site, no one has probably linked to the new pages.

Third, with ASP (or any/most db-driven web apps) Search Engines are
basically hit-and-miss. The guys that promote db sites may be able to give
you better numbers, but some search engines do index them, while others may
not. If it is a popularly linked dynamic page, some crawlers will pick up on
it.

If you want more suggesstions, I would suggest posting some traffic numbers
to the list, biggest referrers, your peak search engine rankings, and your
online marketing strategy-to-date before you made the switch to a db-driven
site - and what your online marketing strategy is now.

>From that point we can probably give you better suggestions.

Hope that helps,

Don Makoviney

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Received on Tue Jun 11 2002 - 15:00:28 CDT