SEO for Metasearch sites like KAYAK or Trivago

[Blake_Davis]

Interested in getting some opinions of best practices for large dynamic sites?

My main question is, should we be focusing on a different "strategy" if we have a similar type site or does the same principles still apply? Second question is would building a blog presence in our community be a better strategy than trying to get our dynamic pages to rank?

If there is a great step by step or white paper resource anyone could recommend, would be greatly appreciated, as our technical team is just diving into SEO.

If anyone cares to take a look, our site is SupremeGolf.com

[Everett]

Adding a blog is a good way for you to publish unique, useful content for your visitors, which will help with organic rankings if you don't allow the other pages to be indexed.

However, if you allow the other pages to be indexed and Google determines that the content on those pages is not unique, or doesn't provide added value, then the entire domain could be penalized (i.e. Panda) so in that case a blog wouldn't help much.

[Blake_Davis]

Thanks for the info.

My thinking is to incorporate a blog into our platform.. That will allow us to create original content around specific keywords/ phrases that we want to rank organically for..

Do you agree with adding in a blog is a good way to increase organic rankings?

[Everett]

I would be concerned with even having a site like this these days. I know other large brands get away with it, but it won't be long before Google takes over those niches completely. If it's scaleable and automated, Google will own it.

Best practices for sites like that involve adding value above and beyond the curation of the content from other sources. If you have an audience already then user-generated content could be one way to go. Editorial content that is 100% unique and useful is great too, but difficult to scale on a site like that.

Another best practice would be to limit the amount of pages Google has indexed. Don't ever allow pages with zero listings to be indexed (i.e. a search that returned 0 results).

Good luck.

[Blake_Davis]

Thanks for responding Everett! I was asking the latter... Our site is identical to KAYAK.com or Trivago.com... We have a "dynamic" site that pulls in other sites deals... Do you know of any good resources regarding best practices for our type of site that I could check out when building out our SEO plan?

Thanks again!

[Everett]

Are you asking how to rank better on meta search sites, or how to rank a meta search site on Google? If the latter, you're better off keeping your internal "dynamic" search result pages unindexable by Google.

[MoosaHemani]

Ryan totally nailed it!

Here is right principles will remain the same. No matter how big or small the size of your website is, you have to avoid duplicate content, include unique title tag, Meta descriptions, robots.txt site maps and more.

When you talk about building a strategy to win the online industry, now this can always be different and also changing on continuous basis depending on the dynamics change within the industry. Try to build a strategy that suites your condition instead of going for industry trends and common factors.

Obviously, building links is a principle which will remain the same but where to build link is very much based on your strategy.

I will second Cyrus webinar as it contains pretty much everything you are asking for!
Hope this helps!

[RyanPurkey]

I see strategy and principles as separate things. To me principles are things like crawler accessibility, lack of errors, mobile accessibility, black and white sorts of issues. Every site should follow those.

Strategy on the other hand can be widely different. You could develop a strategy where you're competing on educational terms and creating content around specific training or aspects of a swing similar to how bodybuilding.com breaks down exercises into video, descriptions etc. The tie-in to your current site in that example would be course pros that are best at teaching certain aspects of the game, or courses that emphasize being able to shoot a draw or fade.  That sort of content would really lend itself to blogging and community.

For the basics of SEO, Cyrus had a great webinar a little while back covering the steps involved in researching and developing your strategy into your site here: http://moz.com/webinars/seo-basics-the-fundamental-signals-used-to-rank-our-content-higher  Cheers!