I have tons of content in login protected pages, that require people to login to view everything, I want members to join my site, but yet the visitors that aren't able to see it until they register. I am wondering if this is hurting me or is this a good strategy?
I think that would hurt your site. Not only visitors are reluctant/lazy to register (unless the site provides some sort of service) but the biggest thing that would hurt the site that, search engines can't crawl your content. If they can't crawl your pages, your site won't be index in their database. If your site pages are not indexed, then you won't get any organic traffic from search engines, which is the best traffic. You need search engine traffic. Every site needs search engine traffic because that traffic is targeted and free.
So, if you just offering content in your protected pages, i would say make it public so that search engines can crawl your content into their database. Also, this will make people not get discouraged and leave.
You can put a newsletter instead to collect peoples email.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I do have one more question, I have a google adsense account, and I allow google to access my login protected pages, using the Site Authentication thing, in addition most of my content was converted to video tutorials, so now that really gets me confused, because search engines cant "index" whats in the video tutorials...
I do have a forum setup, thats probably the only thing thats not login protected.
Even if you've let Google index your protected pages, you're right, they can't read the video content so all they see is page with the code for your videos and that's not really search engine friendly. Unless there's some important reason for protecting your site, I would limit your use of protected pages where necessary.
__________________
Don't put the cart before the horse. Plan your website, thencreate it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Recent Blog Posts...
Thanks for your suggestions, I guess I'll go open up my tutorials section at my site to the public, even though they're all video tutorials and Google cant really do much about them
Now I'm getting visitors to the site, but do you know how I would convert them to members?
Could you put your site in your sig file so we can see it? Better still why not post a thread in the Site Reviews forum and let the WebsiteBabble members critique it.
Maybe that will help us understand why you are not converting them into members. There are many factors that could be preventing this but seeing your site may help.
__________________
Don't put the cart before the horse. Plan your website, thencreate it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Recent Blog Posts...
The only articles that I protect on my blog are those that the content is no longer relevant or outdated. I even protect content that I use for personal note taking (prep work for an actual blog) other than that everything is wide open.
Content in login protected pages
Linear Mode
