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SANDHILL.COM SURPASSES
A QUARTER MILLION MONTHLY
PAGE VIEWS
Nine months after site launch, SandHill.com is flying high.
In the month of October 2005, SandHill.com reported more than 250,000 page views. Given that the site launched in February 2005, has no offline promotion, has not utilized a search engine optimization (SEO) program, and is largely promoted by word-of-mouth recommendations among the software community, such an achievement would seem nearly miraculous.
Well, not entirely miraculous. Explains PSD7 Creative Director Paul Seymour, “while we didn't conduct an SEO program, we did produce the site with good search results in mind. Intuitive page titles, headings and directories have enabled the site to perform very well on keyword queries that were deemed important.”
However, at the end of the day, content is king, and SandHill.com has plenty of it. “We focused on publishing valuable strategic analysis of the software industry, written by top industry experts,” explains Sand Hill Group co-founder M.R. Rangaswami. “We also provide a weekly update of software venture capital investments, mergers & acquisitions, and high level executive appointments. Plus we have our Community section with events listings and job postings, and so many other unique pieces of content not being offered anywhere else on the web. It has all contributed to our success.”
To manage all this content — which between February and October 2005 ballooned to 41 editorials, 39 user polls, 123 articles, and 29 topics with numerous posts in its own SandHill blog — PSD7 implemented its own in-house content management system, CMSAdmin. Running on an open-source Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL platform, CMSAdmin serves up thousands of pages daily without a hitch.
“We anticipated a lot of traffic on the site,” explains Paul, “and realized that none of the off-the-shelf content management systems would be able to handle either the page views or the customization.”
That means that site enhancements can be planned in advance through early site architecture. Which is important for Sand Hill, as they prepare for a launch of the next phase of their site, offering even more precisely targeted content to their growing audience. “As we get more data regarding what content gets the most pageviews,” says Rangaswami, “we get more ideas for new content.”
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