Ideas for a contest or a promotion.

[-GR-]

Our site has finally started to turn around since I switched the domain name. Long story short I switched the domain name from the short version to the spelled out version for keywords. I did everything by the book and did the proper 301's but still lost all the indexed pages and the google page rank.

While we still don't have page rank the indexes are starting to mount up again and traffic is on the rise finally. We are averaging about 5 - 10 new members a day which may not be a lot to some of you we are at least back to where we were before the domain change.

I was donated for items for a contest, granted the monetary value is about $30 each but for our niche and visitors the prizes would be special to them.

I am undecided if I would be better off doing a contest for article submissions or for the top four members for active member referrals?

I am also open to ideas for other contests that would help grow the community.

 

[iTuN3r]

What kind of community is it ?

 

[-GR-]

We deal with primarily antique tractors and machinery.

 

[AnthonyCea]

I would have a post your best antique tractor photo contest.

 

[-GR-]

Well we already do a monthly featured tractor nominations and voting and that really wouldn't help develop new members.

 

[AnthonyCea]

Everything you add as far as content helps bring in new members, many times a photo can do the trick if the proper meta data is attached with a description.

 

[-GR-]

You know that is one thing I need to get better at is adding titles to images and descriptions. I am often in too much of a hurry and don't bother with it but I know people search for images a lot.

 

[AnthonyCea]

File names need to be descriptive and so do alt tags for images if you want to rank for the photo.

The problem is most file names that are numbers have no correlation with the photo at all, so you need members to add proper alt tags at least.

 

[-GR-]

I might make it a staff project, at least on the really good images. There are a couple thousand in the gallery LOL

 

[AnthonyCea]

It is hard to get a Julia Roberts photo to rank if it has no alt tags and file names that are 99880000.jpg

See the properties on these photos and you will see what I am saying.

http://juliarobertsphotos.blinkblogs.com/

 

[-GR-]

Yep, good pics but no good file names or anything in the alt tags.

 

[AnthonyCea]

There you go, that is the very same problem you will have ranking your photos.

 

[-GR-]

I think we decided on going the article route. Since content always was and always will be king. We have been doing pretty good with getting new articles up, maybe one a week which is good for our site. The domain change, re-indexing and loss of page rank is what is hurting us right now. I am sure it will come back around soon enough.

I also have a task list for our staff to go through and add titles to any images in the gallery that don't have any yet. Surprisingly there are more that have titles then I thought.