Here’s some events coming up in our fair city.
New Year 2008
New Year 2008 : NV Penthouse Lounge
New Year 2008 : Champagne Supernova
New Year 2008 : Cruise
Sports Related Events
Chicago Hash House Anthrax Run
Holiday Sports Festival 2007
Paralympics Table Tennis Chicago
Holiday Activities
Navy Pier Winter Wonderfest
Chicago Christkindlmarket
Chicago Star Wars Exhibit
Big News
Chicago Smoking Ban
Downtown Chicago Casino
Chicago Cool Roof Grants
I don’t know the exact cause, but my Amazon Affiliate Google Traffic has jumped a bit today. The site is about 10 days old and thus far I’ve been getting between 0 and 1 Google Organic visitors per day. I’ve got a few hours left in Wednesday, and I’ve gotten 8 Google Organic visitors so far. They have all been on long-tail search terms (shortest is 3 words, longest is 9 words) which is fine by me. My end goal is to get some steady traffic, mainly from long-tail searches.
My hypothesis about why I have this little jump in Google Organic traffic:
1) Just dumb luck, it will go away tomorrow
2) I’ve been updating daily and things are getting around through the Google machine
3) People are getting anxious about Christmas and doing more gift-related searches
Anyways, this was a little exciting for me so that’s all I’ve got for now.
I didn’t do any work on my Amazon Affiliate Site this weekend. From Fri-Sunday, I had one organic Google visitor. I’m going to need to spend some time getting some backlinks to my site, just to help raise the relevancy. Right now I have a few inbound links from other sites that I own, but I need to widen that reach a little.
I have posted one item today and will post another item this evening. My goal is to post two items each day and that might eventually allow me to get the Google Webmaster Tools Fast Crawl Rate for the Amazon Affiliate Site.
In other news, traffic to Blog Project A dropped off over the weekend. There was a big event that I ranked well for and it was driving good traffic to the site, but now that event has passed. On Friday I had 140 visitors, Saturday I had 70, Sunday I had 53. Today looks like it is going well but you can never tell until the day is over since Google Analytics don’t constantly update their display. As long as I start to climb up again, keep posting relevant material, building my base of articles, things will go good for Blog Project A.
Continuing on my Amazon Affiliate SEO path… After some playing around, it seems to me that using “click here” might be the best option for my new Amazon Affiliate site. I’ve been running 2 updates per day. Yesterday I had 2 visitors via Google Search Traffic and 1 Amazon Affiliate Click. As stated in my Amazon Affiliate NoFollow post, I added rel=”nofollow” tags to all of my outgoing Amazon links, so that might explain why I had 22 click-throughs to Amazon on my first day - I think it was Google doing all the ‘clicking’. Compared with my Blog Project A, this is fair enough traffic. You really can’t judge much this early on, but it’s good that I’m getting 2 Google Search Results visitors already.Using “Click Here” throughout my posts allows me add as many links as I want and I don’t need to worry about giving away all my keyword juice for the search terms.Other News…Blog Project A is going good and traffic continues to increase. There are of course a few posts that are bringing a lot of traffic, so I just need to make sure that I keep posting. This blog flows with the seasons, so the posts that are popular now will not be so popular as time goes on, but they will continue to be valuable.I recently read DNSEO.net’s article about How to Eliminate Duplicate Content and realized that Blog Project A had 3 or 4 different pages where each post was showing up - Previous Posts, Monthly Archives, Category Archives, Actual Post Page - so I read that article and took a few minutes to implement the suggested changes. I doubt that I’ve seen any results from those changes yet, but hopefully that will help boost some of my pages even more in the SERPS.Don’t forget to checkout ProInterneter’s Free PHP eBook.
As I mentioned earlier, I have begun working on some Amazon Affiliate SEO tactics. On solution to the outgoing anchor text issue that I am testing, is the idea of putting NoFollow tags in my Amazon Affiliate links. My idea here is that I can use Keywords for Anchor Text, and not give up the juice that those keywords hold for my page. Usually whatever you use as Anchor Text for a link, that anchor text will be associated with the page that you are linking to - not associated with the page that you created.
I haven’t been able to find anything that says “Yes, it will keep the anchor and associate them with your current page” - and I suspect that it may not be the case, but I have created a few test pages using NoFollow tags, and we’ll see what happens over time.
In the meantime, I have read some things that suggest the using “click here” as anchor text for your outgoing links will actually increase the traffic that you send to that link - and in the case of an Amazon Affiliate site, that is exactly what you want to do. My basic theory is to action for long tail keywords, talk about the item for a bit and then get those people to link over to Amazon via my site.
As a general update, my Amazon site got 2 visitors on Tuesday and 0 visitors on Wednesday. My Amazon Affiliate account says I have recorded 22 click-throughs, so I wonder if those are the result of Google following links where I didn’t use NoFollow, or if my reporting is so far behind that I have really had 22 click-throughs? It seems that I should be getting at least 1/20 conversion rate, so I’m thinking that these 22 click-throughs came from somewhere else… or actually it could be from another site where I posted one Amazon Affiliate Link - the Amazon reporting tool isn’t particularly useful.