Improvement to my loans site, going mobile

Last night I spent hours and hours, trawling through the articles and news sections of my secured loans site searchandapply.co.uk. Basically I was re-writing alot of the content, taking out old links and adding new key words and phrases, linking back to new pages and generally tidying up the seo work on it and a the birth of an idea for mobile development.

One of the big changes I now need to make, now that I am happy with the keywords I am targeting is to change the URL set up so that everytime I write a new article or news item the title of the article is used at the URL. I can’t believe I have sat for so long on the site not doing this! Its devastating to my SEO efforts. The latest article I have written, a funny piece about people borrowing huge amounts of money to fund dental work is entitled

Brits rack up £60m in loans at the dentist

A great eye catching title to make people want to read the article, don’t you agree? The only problem with it is that the URL is

http://www.searchandapply.co.uk/news.php?news_id=93

How rubbish!

It should be http://www.searchandapply.co.uk/news/brits-rack-up-£60m-in-loans-at-the-dentist

Come on, thats a school boy error, one which I should have sorted out ages ago!

So my next step is to do just that and get it sorted and see exactly how much of an impact this change will have on my sites rankings. I’m actually quite excited because last time I checked…last night…I had just crept onto the 2nd page of Google UK for “home improvement loans.” Not too bad.

Moving on from this, I happened to check my Facebook and realised Tom Thurston, the best damn mobile developer in the UK, was online. We had a brief chat and in conversation thought it would b a good idea to look at creating a mobile site for Search and Apply. A simple loan comparison table site which people can access from their mobiles to search for the top “best buy” loans on the market.

Here’s a quick illustration of what I came up with:

I have the domain name ukloans.mobi, a decent .mobi as UK Loans is searched for a few thousand times per month. but what a simple set up heh? Now i won’t tell you all the ins and outs of how we intend to build the site nor our mobie marketing ideas, these are always kept hush hush, but I think this is a cool little concept, one which should drive a nice new stream of traffic to my loans site from the mobile web, for little more than some time and effort.

Tags: mobile development, Mobile Domains, seo