The interesting thing about cell phone search is that it’s often used for different reasons than normal search. For example, someone might with a cell phone is more likely to be searching for information relevant to being on the road in some particular place. Thus, their searches are more likely to be seeking local information.

At SeaWaves, we are aggressively trying to identify ways that we can get involved in local mobile search, and our plans are to utilize our Jersey Shore website site as testing ground.

Let me explain by using an example. Over at College Crunch, we have built a wide-net resource around the phrase “starting salary” – but we are not really interested in that specific phrase. Rather, we are interested in phrases like “starting salary for engineers” or “average starting salary for biochemists”

The phrase “starting salary” is just the singular phrase that all of the many search phrases we are targeting have in common. By creating a very large resource article that discusses the starting salaries of many careers, we are accomplishing multiple tasks at once:

1. We are building a unique resource that is link worthy from many different types of sites
2. We are creating a single, strong, authoritative page (rather than diluting the strength over hundreds of smaller pages)
3. We are reinforcing our common keyphrase (starting salary)
4. We are creating an expandable resource that can be made more valuable by adding new informational units (adding careers)
5. We are creating a platform from which to quickly gain search traffic for related phrases by doing Post-Hoc keyword researc

In general, I encourage every serious website to build out a few Wide-Net resources each year. Once you see the benefits of building big, structured content like this, you’ll want to do lots more.

For whatever reason, Google never really fell in love with the site. The writer was a health expert, who knew what she was talking about. Articles were on topics ranging from the dangers of Tilapia (fish) to 10 things to keep your heart healthy.

I always found myself learning something new whenever I read that blog. And while the blog will continue in some form in the future, I don’t think it ever really reached it’s true potential.

There are a number of reasons to explain this, but perhaps best of all is that the site never accumulated a nice body of natural links. Unfortunately, natural link building doesn’t always happen naturally, even with good content.

The site does not get very much traffic at this point. However, we are in the process of resuscitating it with the hopes of getting traffic up below the 100k Alexa range.

What are our challenges?

The biggest challenge for an old, stale site, is getting the attention of search engines again. I strongly suspect that domains are associated with various relevancy factors including frequency of updates. I’ve seen situations where it takes months to get to a point where your site is reassessed and given proper status.

The best way to fix this is to build lots of links and to ping both your own site and the new links with submissions to Mixx, Propeller, etc.

Additionally, it is important to produce quality content, submit to social media, and hopefully get some natural links.