Pro Interneter

A few days ago I posted about the situation with my website SEO effort. I had updated my business website about 2 weeks ago, and had since seen a major drop in my position in Google SERPs.

The site slowly started to climb back into the search results, bouncing between page 2 and page 3 for a few days, but despite having links on many different webpages, Google hadn’t hit the homepage for a while and thus hadn’t updated the listing for my site.

This was the first time I had really revamped a website in an effort to improve the search results, and sometimes the “Google Dance” can get a bit tiresome. I finally posted about it on this blog, and used a link to my website - I think this directly helped Google to find my website again and update the listing. A day later, the results had been updated to reflect the new changes to my site, and I was getting listed much higher in Google. The site is currently is 3 or 4 when you type in the search phrase “Chicago Web Development”.

Through this process, I have been surprised at how much the Google results change on a day-to-day basis. Your site is constantly being re-shuffled against the other sites, and if Google doesn’t visit your site, it will just fall further and further down the list. Using a blog can be very helpful, since Google likes sites that are updated often. This worked in my situation, where I created a post and linked to my SEO’d site - Google hit my blog and then followed a link to my other site. Now I’ll see if I can beat the KROQ Weenie Roast.

I was looking at the Google Analytics stats for one of my other blogs, and wondering what exactly the “Bounce Rate” meant. I figured it had something to do with people coming and leaving my site, but I was a little concerned since the Bounce Rate over the weekend was upwards of 80%. Were people loading up my site and then skipping out without reading anything?

I quickly found some information, and was relieved by what I read. The Bounce Rate records the number of people who view a page on your site, and then don’t go to any other pages. Since the blog in question currently displays all of its posts on the homepage, that simply means that people were coming to the blog but not clicking over to any other pages. This is part of the reason why stats such as “Time Spent on Site” can be deceptive. People could in fact be going to your blog and reading all the articles on the homepage, but if they never click to another page, it will record their “Time Spent on Site” as 0:00.

This of course shows that web analytics need to be viewed with a grain of salt. You have to dig through the data to find what you’re really looking for. If your site has a splash page, then you are likely to have a very low Bounce Rate, because everyone is going to hit the splash page and then click the ‘enter’ link - thus going to another page and not recording as a ‘bounce’ - but are they really getting what they want from your site?

I recently updated my Chicago Web Development company website, but I haven’t been able to get the bots to hit the homepage for a while. I was ranking on the first page when searching for “Chicago Web Development” but then a few days ago I noticed that the site dropped off the face of the earth. It started to climb back up in the rankings, but it bouncing between page 2 and page 3.

From the looks of the results, they haven’t crossed the homepage for a while because it is still displaying the old meta tags and headers. Given this, I am thinking that flux in results is due mainly to the bots hitting the other relevant websites and resetting their position.

Since being accepted to NeverBlueAds, I have been testing some different keywords on Google, MSN and Yahoo. I have come up with a few ideas of campaigns that I would like to try, and through my testing I have found that Google can be a lot more pricey than the other two search engines.

I found one example where Google wants to charge me more than 2x the price (per click) that Yahoo or MSN would for running ads on the same keywords. I figure that even though Google is the most popular search engine, as long as Yahoo and MSN can deliver clicks, it really doesn’t matter where the clicks are coming from. The only real disadvantage would be that I would be able to make the connections between the Yahoo ads and my Google Analytics, to see which SERP Phrases are ultimately resulting into NeverBlue conversions.

This table compares Google and Yahoo, based on a $30/day limit, for a specific keyword.



Right there you can see the difference. Google wants way more cash from me, and promises less than half of the clicks that Yahoo will provide. Of course, this is all estimates at this point. My guess is that every average business owner just goes for Google and thus inflates the prices. Since I don’t have a lot of cash to play with at the moment, I will go with Yahoo to begin with. I will have to explore if they have some sort of conversion tracking system.

I was just reading / watching a video post on ProBlogger.net about choosing your blogging niche and Darren pretty much summed up how I felt. I think when I first came across all the “Make Money Online” blogs, I got it in my head that if I want to make money online, I have to write about about making money online. This really isn’t the case, and the fact is that I have never made a measurable amount of money from a website, so why would anyone want to listen to me anyways?

As I’ve been working on my even newer blog, I’ve been trying some different ideas for getting readers and building a following. I’ve read a lot a different theories, but most of them revolve around a few central ideas:

1. Create good content
2. When start, you build it 1 reader at a time
3. Building individual relationships can be very helpful

Since my new blog is in the self improvement / personal development world, I started poking around MyBlogLog and found some people that are writing blogs that are related to mine. I read some of their blogs, picked ones that I really liked and posted some comments. I would comment on their MyBlogLog page if they had been recently active, or I would leave a comment on their blog if I had something specific to add. Some of these people visited my blog, a few of them commented, added my RSS feed, or added me to their blog rolls.

Really it’s pretty exciting. I’ve got 6 people on my RSS feed right now, which is more than anything else I’ve ever done. I’m spending some time each day reaching out to new people and reading the other blogs in my niche. It’s a learning process and it’s been pretty fun so far.