Myo wrote in for some general advice on what to do with computer hardware website Ecomatrix.

“I have recently created a new site, www.ecomatrix.net using a 3 year old domain.

The new site is about a month old and was created using product datafeeds.  What would you say would be the best course of action for the website?

Should I continue to add products and build a massive database of products and/or write some articles related to computers?

I am still building links to the site, should I concentrate on buidling links or building content or both?”

Here’s what Dan had to say:

Dan

Hi, Myo, how are you?

Well done on grabbing the domain and all the effort you seem to have put in so far.

You ask whether you should keep building links, or whether you should build more articles.  To answer that, you should look at how much traffic you’re getting at the moment, and what terms it’s coming in for.

Here are 3 things to take into account:

1. If you’re getting a small amount of traffic, but for the right kind of terms, then some general linkbuilding may be useful purely to boost the traffic per term.

2. If you’re getting a lot of traffic, but for the wrong terms, adding articles for your key terms could help divert some of your link equity onto those terms. Building links specifically to those new articles, and featuring them in your site architecture would help there too.

3. If you’re getting a decent amount of traffic, for the right terms, is it converting into visits to your merchants (and ultimately sales)?

Looking at your site, I have a feeling ‘number 3′ – conversion – will be the most important thing to work on.  As a very quick example, you’ve put in a lot of effort adding hundreds of articles, but you haven’t added merchant links on many of them, and where you have added links to the articles they’re not very prominent.  Meanwhile, elsewhere on the site you have your datafeeds with very little unique content.

If I was you, before spending extra hours on more traffic, I’d make the priority to get the site converting.

A very easy way to start sorting out your conversion is to go through each type of page on your site (eg. homepage, category, subcategory, product, article) and ask yourself these 2 joined questions:

“What do I want a visitor to do on this page?” and “What could get in the way of a visitor doing what I want them to do on this page?”

Hope that’s of some use!

Dan