To Sell or Not to Sell

To Sell or Not to Sell
September 21, 2006

I mentioned in my previous blog that I had been considering putting my other website up for sale. Well, I've gone ahead and made that move. I've yet to receive an offer for the site, so in the meantime I'm doing some experimenting.

The site had dropped to #12 in Yahoo, and risen as high as #29 in Google for a popular keyphrase. I decided to tweak the keywords and H1 header a little and see what the results would be. I left the site alone for a few weeks after making these changes and it has risen to #10 in Yahoo. With Google, however, the site vanished overnight and hasn't returned to even the top 100 results for the original keyphrase.

I'm now in the midst of tweaking again, and am curious to see what the results will be this time. Here's a question for you: Is it better to rank near the top of the first page results in Yahoo, or the third page results in Google? Remember, Google is by far the most popular search engine and Yahoo comes in a distant second.

The answer? If your site is on the third page of any search engine, you can basically forget about receiving traffic from a search. As far as being on the second page, I'm not really sure about Google, but Yahoo yields practically nothing.

Two different animals, Google and Yahoo. Google cares more about inbound links. On-page optimization seems to be more necessary in Yahoo. Still, both are quite important to either search engine. But a word of caution: if you find yourself moving into a decent ranking position with Google, don't do anything drastic like I did.

Continue to build upon known successful principles to increase your ranking. For example, I've written another article for the site and placed it with an article submission service; this will help pick up a few more inbound links. I'm also still trading links, but being careful to trade only with websites of related content.

I suppose that if I see the site move into a high ranking position and see sales increase, I'll take it off the market. Until that happens, it's for sale.

Update:
December 11, 2006

I had someone very interested in purchasing the site but I decided not to sell. The reason I didn't sell was that the website started climbing the rankings again. It's now ranked #1 in Yahoo, #8 in MSN and #7 in Google. Considering the keywords are very competitive, I am extremely pleased to be on the first page of Google results (out of nearly 20 million results).

The website you're on now, WebsiteDoIt.com, has also climbed onto the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN results for its main keywords. I guess the moral of this story is to be patient!