FHM vs Maxim
I was taking a look at the websites of two popular men’s magazines this morning — FHM and Maxim.
Both Maxim’s and FHM’s website look pretty nice. They might even win some design awards.
Does their magazine’s success mean they have great websites? No. If you were to try to make your website look like theirs, here is one thing you can expect to happen (unless you are the owner of a large, already established magazine.)
1. Little to no search engine traffic. The heavy flash content is un-indexable. These guys get search engine traffic because they rank for keywords for the name of their already popular magazines. I would be suprised if they were getting a significant level of traffic for any other keywords.
2. Visitor confusion. Sometimes confusion means people will stick around your site a while. It also means they might leave immediately.
Here is an example of a site you want to be like: AskMen.com.
Think I’m wrong? Lets ask Alexa:
Maxim: 2,146
FHM: 5,580
AskMen.com: 897
Alexa certainly isn’t a holy grail for determining how much traffic a site is getting, however, lets take into account something else: AskMen.com is a website, not a print magazine. It has no newstand coverage and you aren’t going to see it laying on your friends coffee table. AskMen.com’s website alone got them to the top.
“Newbies” often make the big mistake of equating a fancy website with online success. Don’t fall into this trap. It will save you a lot of money in the short term, and make you even more in the long run.
But also, don’t forget that you don’t actually need any relevant content on the page to rank well for a term.
Check out linkdomain:www.fhm.com on yahoo.com for 54,000 backlinks. That’s gonna carry some weight.
But wait…
106,000 for Maxim Online.
and…
5,450,000 for askmen.com
Woah. You’re right about them having achieved that webwise though, and there’s probably lots of deep linking going on.
So there’s probably a chicken and egg situation going on.
The biggest mistake most people make are that the most important thing of all in ranking is links and anchor text in those links.
But anyway, you can have it both ways. AskMen has both, lots of great content… and lots of great linkage
Comment by Chris Andrews — February 4, 2006 @ 7:05 am
The reason FHM and Maxim got those links is because of the print magazine. If either one of them would have taken the approach AskMen.com has, AskMen probably would not be able to even compete.
As someone who has read Maxim, FHM, and AskMen, I can tell you AskMen’s content pretty much sucks. But, at this point that doesn’t matter, because it exists and its free.
Comment by Andrew — February 4, 2006 @ 1:45 pm
I fall into the “newbie” fancy website trap all the time. I don’t mean too, but I can’t help design, and redesign until I think I’ve got something visually appealing, when deep down I know I should be working on content rather then wondering what colors look good together.
Comment by Deron — February 5, 2006 @ 11:32 pm
I’m not saying don’t make your site visually appealing, but rather, don’t sacrifice usuability — both for users and Search Engines — for being pretty.
Comment by Andrew — February 6, 2006 @ 12:30 pm