Local Riding

A unique horse riding and equestrian website exploring the wealth of local equestrian facilities.

Local Riding is owned and operated by Debbie Irwin and was first setup on 6th June 2007.

Debbie has used a CSS driven 3 column template to build her website, which focuses on the grassy green and earthy browns of the equestrian lifestyle.

The site presents extraordinarily well and the visitor knows instantly, exactly what this website is all about.

This is a large site in a large niche and shows over 600 pages indexed in Google and over 4000 yahoo links. There is a wordpress blog, a directory, various RSS feeds, an events calendar and a really well presented store; all using PHP functions and MySQL databases but seamlessly integrated into the main site. The site apears to be aimed at mainly UK visitors.

Ratings
Look-and-Feel
Ease-Of-Use
Content-Quality
Overall

Debbie clearly has a tremendous passion for horses and horse riding and has put together a terrific website showing just how passionate she is. Local Riding demonstrates perfectly, how easily Site Build It can be used to build a website that includes all the bells and whistles.

At the time of writing this SBI Site Review, the Local Riding website statistics are …

Website Title: Local Riding – Your Horse Riding Equestrian Reference – Title Relevance: 100%

Main Meta Description: Local Riding – Your Equestrian Community. A unique horse riding and equestrian website exploring the wealth of local equestrian facilities. – Description Relevance: 100% relevant.

Main Meta Keywords: local riding, equestrian community, horse riding – Keyword Relevance: 100% relevant

Search Results for Primary Keyword: Google #1 and 2 – Yahoo#1 to 4 – Bing #1 to 4

Overall SEO Score: 100%

DMOZ: 1 listing

Wikipedia: 6 pages

Alexa Rank/Trend: 690,077: Up 1,446 ranks over the last three months.
Compete Rank: 256,919 with 5,389 U.S. visitors per month
Quantcast Rank: 50,380
Google Pagerank: 3/10

Site Worth Appraisal Estimate: $8,902

SBI Tools & Resources Used in Local Riding :

In creating Local Riding Debbie has used all of the tools and resources provided by Site Build It, except for the including…

• Content 2.0 - The SBI Web 2.0 feature included in the Site Build It package, which allows your visitors to submit their own content and images to your site.

• Form Build It – which allows the SBI user to create an unlimited number of Contact or other forms and to analyze and measure results. Including Database storage for managing, searching and reporting of form data

• Socialize It - An optional bookmarking module that you can build into your site pages and which includes bookmarking functions for the main social networks.

• RSS It - The Subcribe Section that appears in the left side below the navigation and allows visitors to subscribe to the sites RSS feeds.

• Infin It - which allows the site owner to simply and seamlessly integrate PHP and MySQL features using sub-domains. It has been used here to integrate the blog, the directory and the store.

Monetization Methods – How Does Local Riding Generate an Income…

Debbie monetizes Local Riding using three main methods, which include…

• Google Adsense advertisements, which are clearly not the main revenue generator, as the ad blocks are mostly below the fold and lack any emphasis. Better positioning would increase income from the google ads.

• Google Search, which is perfectly positioned at the top of the right hand column and will probably be used regularly on this large site.

• The eBay Partner Network, which allows Debbie to display relevant ebay goods directly within local riding and to build the Tack & Togs store around them. The eBay goods are certainly relevant and plentiful. The store, which appears to be based on the BANS system, and the blog, which will be using an ebay plugin, are put together and present very well indeed.

• There is also a paid (bid) directory listing system, The Equestrian Directory, where equestrian websites can be included for as little as £1 GBP with the top site displaying a bid of £12 GBP . A quick count showed almost 300 listings and all listings seem to be permanent and verified manually. Definitely a nice PR3 site to add your own equestrian site too.

Overall …

Definitely one of the most comprehensive SBI sites we’ve come across and really, quite well done. The size of the niche is daunting and Debbie could have created more than one equestrian niche website from the content on local riding. Say a Dressage site, a Showjumping site, a Horse Health site and a Horse Training Site. The fact that results are so good, shows the real power of the SBI site submitter.

Integration of all the various parts is excellent and shows a full understanding of the Infin-It module and the importance of consistent look and feel… We like it, a lot.

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