Well my blog has been live for a few weeks, a vast number of responses (1) but still Rome wasn’t built in a day, or a number of Blog posts.

In a previous article I spoke about why I started the blog, and there are numerous reasons. To give myself a voice, online, to practice what I preech – and to actually test the theory that generating increased levels of content will actually in fact increase traffic to my site.

So a few stats to kick things off with:

Since August 1 2007 – July 31 2008, my website has received 704 unique visits. Hardly something to cheer about, and not the sort of traffic required to make me millions – however the initial objective for the site was purely to show potential employers my graphic design skills.

So if we take 704 users and divide that by 12 months, we have an average 58.6 visitors/month (I will round it up to 59 for arguements sake. Whilst the site has been generally designed for search engines, I have done no real keyword research, nor have I tried any link building, other than pointing a few links to my site from other sites I have built.

52% of my visitors have come from Search Engines, 94% of those searches coming from Google. As I said initially the site was designed as a self promotional tool, and pretty much potential employers were emailed a link to my website, or they would have received it on my CV/Covering Letter. So to receive over 350 visits from search engines is a bonus. 200 of my visits is a result of directly inputting the URL into a browser, and this would seem to correspond correctly with the amount of self promotion I had undertaken upon my arrival in Australia.

Looking back at my stats when I discuss visits to my site of 59/month on average, I would pay well to consider that there is no such thing as an average month. I arrived in Australia toward the end of October 2007, so didn’t do a lot of self promoting until after that point. This is reflected in the period from August 1 2007 – October 31 2007, my site had the grand total of…. 81 visits, or an average of 27 visits/month.

In stark contrast to those months the next 3 provided a total of 198 visits, or an average of 66 month. This period really saw me emailing company execs politely begging for a job, and really driving the whole self promotion. It is also significant that a lot of traffic was generated by direct input or referrals, in fact the split is almost a third for search engines, direct input and referrals.

The following key period is from Feb 1 2008 – June 30 2008, in total there have been 330 visits, surprisingly, this also correlates to an average of 66 visits/month, however I can attribute search engines to increasing their traffic during this period, so whilst I haven’t been promoting my talents, the search engines have continued to do so (although keyword usage would dictate otherwise, but I won’t cover that here).

So why have I left the month of July out of the equation, simply because this was the month my blog went live, and I guess is somewhat of a benchmark date. So far for the month of July (which will be over in a few hours) my site has had a total of 95 visits, the highest month in the whole of the past year. I have had 2 previously good months before (well relative to general site traffic), April 2008 saw a total of 83 visits, while November 2007 saw a total of 78 visits. November would have been when I kicked off my self promoting in earnest – and there was a dip for December, and gradual rise in traffic for each consecutive month that followed until May and June which had a total combined visits of 102 people.

As my site had not been updated for sometime I can only assume Google had assumed it was losing relevance, and as such was driving less traffic to my pages, so it is nice to see that the addition of a blog has theoretically doubled traffic in its first month of action.

So why is this an experiment? I will return to these results periodically, whilst continuing to add content to my blog, and hopefully updating other areas of my website. I hope that the regular adding of content will result in increased traffic coming to my site, in particular my blog section. Additionally I am also hoping for some comments (not spammy). This post has purely laid down the previous facts, and created a benchmark from which I can measure future growth. It is worth noting that my original site was built in July 2007, so I have omitted that date from the results, to allow for spidering in search engines etc.

Many search engine gurus (myself included) advocate the timely creation of good content for websites. Blogs provide a quick, easy way to add content without having to worry about FTP, HTML coding or anything else, people like Matt Cutts have spoken extensively about the benefits of blogs to a company, so this is me tasting my own medicine and diving in.

Quantifying success, quite simply speaking, the easiest way to quantify success will be an improvement of traffic coming to the site. I haven’t discussed use of keywords on this post, as I judging whether regular updated content will actually help my site perform, without too much keyphrase/keyword research. So check back soon when I will update you on the great blogging, google, search engine experiment!

Filed under: SEO, PPC, Design by Moley
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Was just reading an interesting post on SEOmoz regarding how different Search Engine Professionals approach website reviews, and what information/proposals is passed onto the client. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/information-architecture-a-site-review-is-nothing-without-it 

The post is humerous and raises some valid points, some of which I have encountered myself in the past. Without doubt Keywords are an important ingredient required for the search engine mix, and as it is “words” people are searching for, it makes sense to implement those words into your website.

However there are ways with which to really give your website a major shot in the arm as far as keyword implementation is concerned, and this often falls on the side of way in which your site is built. Ensuring your website is built well, using standards compliant code, using keywords in meta titles, h1 & h2 tags, scattered throughout general content, ALT tags, pagenames (i.e. keyword.html), site structure (naming sub-folders with relevant keywords etc) and then considering your internal linking structure (making sure that your link to performance engines actually says “performance engines” and not page 2).

I remember trying to sell SEO to a customer a few years ago, he laughed at me and said all that was needed was simply to add the word sex into the site a few times and it would be ready to go. Needless to say his site was using frames, which presented 1 problem, also heavily relied on the use of flash, presenting another problem, was built with poor code, problem cubed, and had no real keywords/keyphrases used across the site (you can see a theme developing here).

Getting back to the blog post on SEOmoz, you can see how that problem relates. Not only did I need to supply a proposal based on keyword research, I would also need to supply a proposal which would completely rebuild the site from scratch. This would all be in addition to educating the client on the basic benefits of good search engine marketing. Needless to say, I never followed up my communication, the reason being in that it was no-one other than myself who built the original site for the client, well before I had ever learnt the basics of Search Engine Optimisation.

At the end of the day how could a client justify spending out on one website, only to have to have the same site rebuilt 2 years later, the wonders of hindsight. Going back to the title of this post, Website Build Vs Keywords, no doubt one cannot survive without the other, yet on their own both can slightly improve the performance of the site. To be truly effective SEO is a combination of good keyword research coupled with improved technical implementation of website design which incorporates good keyphrases.

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To the average web user, cuil won’t mean a thing, in fact it meant nothing to me either, well it wouldn’t have if someone had mentioned it in passing, anyway…

Whilst reading a few blog posts I came across a news story quoting a new search engine called Cuil - it already has made some bold statements about having a much larger index than Google and Microsoft, however upon testing out a few searches this morning, I came across some server load problems.

Putting that to one side, I love the simplicity of the search tool, and the search results certainly look vastly different from most of engines. It is very intuitive, and looks far more “sexier” than google (sorry G). It looks like the designers search engine, as opposed to perhaps the average joes search engine. I do fear that perhaps the name CUIL is not quite catchy enough – google for instance has created the “googler” a term describing people searching online, using obviously Google, can the same be done of CUIL?

I do believe that Search needs some true competition, and I see no real commercial competitors stepping up to the plate, this may be in part because those companies are driven by profits and marketshare, instead of actually developing a quick, simple and intuitive system that people will respond too.

However there are a tonne of search engine start-ups everyday, perhaps some of these are driven by improving search for end users, or by offering the biggest index of searchable results, I fear many are purely driven to compete with Google, for which they are already on a massive loss. I personally hope Cuil is different, and brings some new innovation to the search market, something which is seriously needed, if only to keep Google on its toes.

So I will be endorsing the site and using it alongside Google, so long as my site gets indexed (which it isn’t presently).

Filed under: SEO, PPC, Design by Moley
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I was just answering a post on LinkedIn regarding computer games and thought I would expand the topic a little bit. It talks about learning skills through playing Age Of Mythology. I had played that game quite extensively in the past, including the extension pack, and have been hoping (fingers crossed) and AOM2 to come out.

Whilst I cannot say my managerial skills improved as a result of playing that particular game, I can say that playing other games in the past must have contributed to some personal development, or at least awakened the importance of budgeting and planning in my mind.

One of the earliest games I can remember playing which required some ability to plan, manage and budget would have been SimCity – for every action there would also be a reaction, so you raise taxes to pay the bills and citizens leave, creating a hole in the budget. Another game I played to death, Civilisation, taught me similar ideas about planning, managing and budgeting, not to mention the educational factor built into the game associated with history and politics.

Obviously having played those games in the past, I have not gained Phd level of skills needed to manage a real town or city, but what it does is make you think about things. As a result of playing those games I dare say I try to plan and manage my finances far better than I did before.

Computer games have often been blamed on some of societies problems, both mentally and physically. However I think the gaming industry is now changing as people interact with games differently. Games are taking on a deeper meaning, and are offering new avenues to help teach new skills. The gaming industry could possibly overtake TV as the media outlet of choice, and could easily intergrate totally with the Internet (as is already being seen in some games). I believe that computer games will also open up new strategic partnerships which would help cross promote other products and services. TV advertising is on the decline, and perhaps the level of interaction which can be enabled through playing computer games may actually provide a more cost effective marketing opportunity for brand interaction.

The world is changing, driven by technology, and whilst games and its hardware have changed only now is the style of games beginning to evolve as well – welcome to the world of GAMES 2.0 (you heard it here first).

Filed under: SEO, PPC, Design by Moley
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I love nothing more than great use of background images in websites, especially when they are tiled to perfection (check out my own site lol).

Backgrounds are often considered an unused, waste of webspace. I have read many posts where users would rather see web pages fit to the width of the browser. My personal preference is still a nice background, with a fixed width, centred webpage sitting in the foreground. A good web background can help complement the foreground, whilst making it “step out” of the page, bringing the actual content greater prominance, and controlling the way the user sees and responds to your website.

I am also of the opinion that any webpage which is wider than 1024 pixels is actually too wide to actually read and understand well (please note I have no studies to back this up, just purely my opinion). For instance most books and magazines are of a limited width and these have “successfully been read for some time now, why should we change those dynamics to suit websites just because monitors are increasing in size?

What makes a good background? Well anything which doesn’t take the attention away from the foreground, but actually complements it and brings prominance to it. I personally like neutral or darker backgrounds with lighter foregrounds. I feel this approach helps lift the main contain from the rest of the page, it turns your browser into a frame and allows you to control the way you want people to access your content (I think I already mentioned that).

Most designers will know, trying to tile backgrounds can be diffcult and almost impossible, yet needs to be done to ensure file sizes are reduced to allow for quick web page downloads. Alas I stumbled upon this fantastic tool which allows you to customize your background images until your heart is content! Ok it doesn’t generate every type of background you could ever wish for, but does a pretty good job at generating stripes and is very Wed 2.0ish, you can find the free tool here www.stripegenerator.com - having just checked the URL the site appears to be down, dam! Should be back soon as I was only using it yesterday

So there is now no excuse for people to just lump plain colours in backgrounds, or messy graphics which do not mesh together at the edges!

Filed under: SEO, PPC, Design by Moley
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