I want to rebuild my Halloween site, but I think I’ve left it too late for this year.

It’s currently just a hand-built site, which means it’s lightweight, runs quickly, and is really well optimised for SEO.

So good that its currently on page 1 at Google for halloween australia, halloween events, halloween costumes australia, and more.

It’s even translating into sales – I have links to affiliate companies on the site, and have referred a dozen sales for costumes and party goods in the last two weeks. So I really don’t want to mess things up.

But I wanted to make it more of a community.  Its pretty basic – you can’t upload PDFs of fliers, or have fancy fonts to advertise the halloween event. It needs more easy interaction.

Currently I have to manually approve all halloween events, to avoid spam. But if I make it better, people will be able to see straight away what their event looks like, and customise it on the spot.

I have a new Drupal version of the site ready on my laptop. I just have to upload it, and re-enter all the halloween events that people have already added. And there are more growing, every day.

If I do301 permanent redirects, so that people clicking on old indexed pages are automatically redirected to the new pages, that would fix things in the short term. But every seo forum I read, the experts admit that redirect are eventually followed by a drop in listings. It’s never smooth.

Do I want to risk my good rankings this close to halloween? Or do I upgrade the site to make it easier to use.

A conundrum.

It’s moved up the organic listings at Google, and is now high on page one for “halloween australia” and “halloween events australia“, which was my objective.

People are finding it, and submitting listings for halloween events this year. Some really cool events at the Australian Museum, Manhatten Bar and Nepean River cruises so far.

So I beefed it up again tonight.
Previously, the events search page just had the search fields, and if you hit “Search” without putting in a suburb, it listed the suburbs for you as links. That way you could see if your suburb, or one nearby, had any events.

But it wasn’t easily showing some of the recent cool stuff. So I added a little teaser, showing the last 5 events added, as soon as you land on the page. That will also help SEO, as the content on the page will be frequently changing. Made the suburb an active link, to make it user friendly, and reduce clicks.

And improved the formatting and colours of the event listings.

Wonder if there’s any chance of getting to position one by the end of the month.

Wonder if it will translate into some earnings, from affiliate costume sales, and adsense.

Cross fingers.