More tyro experiments - revamping mature pages

[Chabrenas]

Since I have a couple of mature sites that get less than 100 UVs a day, I thought it would be a good learning exercise to revamp old posts and pages to try to attract traffic, as well as creating new material with a careful eye on keywords. France for Freebooters has a page about one of the major walking trails in France - GR7000, known as La Régordane or the Route de Saint Gilles. The page hasn't been visited for at least a year, as far as I can see - which is a waste, since I believe it's quite a good article and one that will not date.

The first lesson I learned is that since no-one advertises using the phrase 'la Régordane', Adwords Keyword Tool says it has zero search volume. I wonder if that is true: for a start, there is a hotel that carries the name of the trail, whose website occupies two places on page 1 of nearly 2,000 pages of search results, followed by a tripadvisor link for the hotel, as well as results for tourist info about the trail.

Eventually, I found a couple of keyphrases that I could use instead of 'la Régordane' which was the beginning of the original title of the article, then I edited the title and the opening paragraph to include them. Since the original title puts me on page 1 for 'la Régordane', I have retained that phrase, but lengthened the title to incorporate two more words that actually get AW ads. Now I'll wait a few weeks and see whether I get any visits.

I'll also work on a Ezinearticles article - and if I feel really inspired and energetic I'll do a Squidoo Lens about whole set of Grandes Randonnées trails. Yhat will be a bigger challenge - I have not got past handful of WIPs so far. I have to get the knack, and practice is the only way.

[crabfoot]

Perhaps it is a bit obvious, but I would have thought that a primary objective would be to rank for "le chemin de Saint Gilles" - or if the page is in English, Saint Giles' Way.

Did anyone ever tell you that St Giles is the patron saint of vagabonds and beggars? For that reason, the parish of St Giles in the West End of London was referred to as "the holy ground" by the shiftier elements of Victorian society.

[rob]

Likely to be unrelated and Clinton will hate this post - however St Giles is the name of the church in Wrexham, which is one of the 7 wonders of Wales http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Giles'_Church,_Wrexham Elihu Yale is buried in the grounds, the bloke who Yale Uni in USA is named after. There is also a copy of the tower on the USA campus! /OfftopicTruFact

[Clinton]

Chabenas, if people aren't searching for that particular term, what are they searching for that makes your page a good result? Put that in your title. "A Fantastic Undiscovered Trail", "Off the beaten track" "Secrets of ___" ...

You could ask questions in the title that the target reader would be asking himself. Start the article with those questions and show why they aren't easily answered. Then answer the question for them and mention La Régordane as the "solution". The title should help get you on SERPS for the keywords that are being searched ... and should be crafted to attract readers to click. The content on the page itself should contain words that attract the right contextual ads (if you've got Adsense). The main focus of the page now - La Régordane - could drop to lower down the page.

[Chabrenas]

Thanks for all the pertinent advice.

crabfoot: I did pick up 'Saint Gilles' in the new and rather long title: "Walking France's Voie Régordane - GR7000, the Route de St Gilles, is older than mankind". The change isn't showing up yet in G searches, so perhaps I should follow Alasdairs' hint from another thread and Tweet the URL.

rob: ... and there's another St Giles right in the middle of Edinburgh that is a cathedral and Mother Kirk

Clinton: I went part way - 'Walking France' and a couple of variations on that theme were the first payers I found. But your advice implies that it would be better to go up one level looking for a better-paying more generic title, and use h2 or just the opening paragraph to cover the more specific phrases.

At present, the site has no ads. Its traffic has been climbing nicely since last November. Jan had 1500UVs and Feb already has 1350, so I thought I'd set myself a goal of 5,000 UVs/month before deciding how to monetise.

[crabfoot]

crabfoot: I did pick up 'Saint Gilles' in the new and rather long title: "Walking France's Voie Régordane - GR7000, the Route de St Gilles, is older than mankind".

That's not what I was getting at - le chemin or les chemins de Saint Gilles are commoner expressions than la route de Saint Gilles.

I would be running a clumsy looking line in the footer reading
"VoieRégordane - RégordaneWay leCheminDeSaintGilles lesCheminsDeSaintGilles - ThePathsOfSaintGiles RouteDeStGilles"
in very small type. Anything in a "foreign tongue" in the footer is magnetic to spiders.

rob: ... and there's another St Giles right in the middle of Edinburgh that is a cathedral and Mother Kirk

I think he might have noticed that, as a consequence of living in Edinburgh ...

Chabenas, if people aren't searching for that particular term, what are they searching for that makes your page a good result? Put that in your title. "A Fantastic Undiscovered Trail", "Off the beaten track" "Secrets of ___" ...

Wot? It's got a French Government issued number - about as secret as The Pennine Way, as undiscovered as Kensington High Steet.

You're getting as bad as Chabrenas

the Route de St Gilles, is older than mankind".

So what made the road if man didn't? The dinosaurs, perhaps? Little blue men?

[Chabrenas]

Thanks again, crabfoot. I learn in little steps, but I'm beginning to get the concept. I'll start putting them into practice. Wait: can I pick up on one point. You stated that Chemin de Saint Gilles, etc., were commoner expressions than Route de Saint Gilles, etc., How did you measure this? Certainly there are more than twice as many results returned if you do a search, but Adwords keyword tool returns zero search volume for both.

I'm wondering whether I should leave out GR7000, or do something cleverer with it. A fair proportion of the results point to a wireless broadband router rather than a Grande Randonnée.

Thanks, I've now tracked Rob to his Twitter address - but still found no hint of Edinburgh origins. Are you sure that's not classified info? Or maybe my new glasses are even worse than they seem.

[crabfoot]

Edinburgh origins

He's Welsh! That's why he likes Wrexham (I quite like Wrexham, but it rains a lot). There's no law against Welsh people living anywhere they like, unlike Scots, who have to be very careful on the Isle of Man ...

Are you sure that's not classified info?

It's not out there, but people talk, yknow ...

That's another phrase you could concatenate to avoid the confusion - try "Grande-Randonnée-GR7000" . I know a lot of concatenations look fugly on the page, but people do read around them and the spiders pick them up easier as keyphrases.

[Chabrenas]

He's Welsh! That's why he likes Wrexham (I quite like Wrexham, but it rains a lot). There's no law against Welsh people living anywhere they like, unlike Scots, who have to be very careful on the Isle of Man ...

It's not out there, but people talk, yknow ...

Only man I know with that surname is Irish.

I'm ignorant. My brother lives on the Isle of Man, but I hadn't heard about Scots having problems. My niece married one, but they moved to Norwich to find work.

[crabfoot]

My brother lives on the Isle of Man, but I hadn't heard about Scots having problems.

It's just an old jest - there was once a law on Man that permitted shooting Scotsmen on sight, dating back to pre-medieval times when raiders would visit - it took a long time to repeal it, but they didn't enforce it. They used to joke about it on comic postcards.

Sometimes old laws get disregarded but not repealed. There were English laws which only got taken off the books in 1978 that prohibited using a car on Sunday except to go to church or visit a doctor, and another that made everybody that didn't go to church subject to a fine.

EDIT: I didn't comment about the Gargyl keyword tool -
Looky, you are not going to see results with that thing until you set the locale to "France" and select "all languages" - then it will show you a low number of searches for "chemin de St Gilles", "chemins de St Gilles" and "route de St Gilles" - and it will suggest St Jaques as a better option.