Cracking the XML

After a lot of struggling I finally got the XML feed working and the first 2 directory pages, linking to 9 merchant pages are up! I started on the 2 smallest categories I could find and even they took a while - and I'm not even 10% of the way through the list of merchants! It should get quicker as I work through them, I was still ironing out problems and smoothing the system into place at first.

So I've created an XML based feed for Mortgage Providers and Car Breakdown Providers. I suppose that by adding 1 new section a week, or maybe say a handful of merchants each week, then that's probably best as far as the search engines are concerned.

If I go full out to get all of the merchants up it would be a good sized directory structure, but there might be more appeal to the search engines if I can build it steadily. That way, every time they return to the site there are new pages to uncover. It's giving a more maintained look to the site. And along with the merchants updating their XML feeds, this will provide a series of pages on which there are regular updates.

Hopefully, this area will be wonderful bait to the search engines and will start driving in more traffic to the site, and maybe even a few more affiliate commissions. It wouldn't take many affiliate commissions for me to be really happy. Some of them pay really well and just 1 payment would out a huge smile on my face!

I did decide last week, aside from this area of work, that to get traffic back to what it was on CompareMortgageRates I probably needed to start adding new content pages weekly. Well, whilst I work out what I'm going to add this is a good starting point! I'm also trying to add 'news' to content pages (as well as the home page) to also keep these pages fresh. Since the site made it's drop through the search engines I've been trying my best to recover it. One day I will, but the traffic has dropped further over the last week, even though it's position on Google searches remained constant. Presumably other search engines have now also lowered it!