One of the most interesting things I have noticed about SEO is that as you develop a site with a lot of credibility in a field you can do a lot to drive results in related long tail terms in that field by just leveraging your own domain. This is old hat and I have long used it for areas like playing with getting long tail cocktail terms ranked.
I however have never really tested doing this from scratch until recently, with my cocktail site, I found the time to create a new section of the sites for all ingredients that exist in the database. For example: http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displayingredient.php/74-grenadine
The way I wanted to increase the SEO traffic for these pages was by linking from each cocktail’s page to the pages of the ingredients in that cocktail using the name of the ingredient in the cocktail as you can see on this page http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/2390-Malibu-Sunrise
Within a month this entirely new site section has become 5% of total traffic entering the site and is growing as you can see very nicely. One other really nice factor is the targeted nature of these visits means that they have only a 20% bounce rate and so are engaging v. nicely with the site in general since on entering they probably want to browse around… this is different to cocktails where typically they want that one cocktail and then are done and leave in >40% of the cases.
At the moment my big question is whether or not to launch a US version of the site or just port this entire site to .com and try and leverage the backlinks and SEO success into being a top 5 cocktail site globally instead of just in the UK. I also need to get the cocktail recommendation engine restarted because after migrating servers last year to deal with the increasing volume of the site I forgot to turn the engine on, broke the code and since the impact was only gradual only finally noticed this year that I had screwed up and my bounce rates for cocktails were once again through the roof.
