Forum Moderators: mack
My site is five months old and I believe off to a good start. I quickly(4 months) hit 1,500 hits a day, but since then I've fallen to approximately 1k a day. The site's subject matter is hunting and fishing product information so I wonder if I'm between seasons. Google continues to be my biggest supporter and found the site quickly. I have the Yahoo directory listing and just last week got the nod on DMOZ. Content is constanly being updated daily. I am also aggressively seeking links.
My question is what's the timeframe for a new site? When did your site from a month standpoint really begin to take off. I'm not ready to abandon my strategy and think it may just be a matter of time. I would like to hear from you on when your site began to really take off and some of the stages I can expect. Thanks in advance.
1. Content
2. Popularity
3. Design
4. Ease of use
etc etc.
I played around with various methods for achieving good results but in the end I decided to make a links page on every site I've ever designed and have links swapping between them all. This resulted (over time) is all the sites moving from a PR2 to PR5 and slowly they are starting to creep towards PR6's. They are also placing very well on Search Engines for thier targeted phrases.
If you have no site base to work from then getting good quality links helps because the SE's will start to index your pages more quickly.
If I started from scratch knowing what I know now I could probably get in the top 5 for my search phrases within 2 to 3 months and a nice PR within that time frame also; maybe a month longer.
With a firm base of sites behind you can get get indexed in a day or two and a good placement in a few weeks normally.
Simon.
And WOW do you have a lot of links! I read elsewhere here that you shouldn't link all of your sites together. Though I am new at this I agree with your logic instead. Could you explain the point(s) of view for us on this argument? Thank you.
There is always a fine line when it comes to link exchanging (think I have about 450 links in total on my site at the moment). The problem is when you use link farms because SE's know who these are are are starting to block and ban them (Link farms will go the same route and posting on guestbooks and blogs in the near future imo).
I don't use link farms and I manually check each link I have on my sites. At the moment I can see no benifit of having each link in its own catagory but I will probably have to review this at a later date. The method I use at the moment would cause me a lot of problems trying to place the links in a proper catagory so at this time I don't do it.
Content and easy navigation is still king but by linking with a large number of other web site my site gets the cache refreshed often (normally every 1 to 2 days) but today I've altered my link exchange method slightly on my other sites to see if I can speed the process up even further. Because I update so often my goal is to get it cached at least once a day.
I have 10 main sites that have a lot of links and 30 others that are in the process. I do this so when I've designed a new site or have a new SEO contract I can get the new site indexed much faster than trying from scratch. By having a large, well established site base to work with SEO work is much easier and faster.
I only started link exchanging in the 3rd quater of last year and I've already seen the hits on my own site rise from 400 a month to 20,000 a month and my logs are showing that this is continuing to rise at a rate of 5,000 a month.
There is so much to web development and it is much harder than it used to be. Links are just one part of an ever increasing phase of web design and promotion.
One of the best tips I can give at the moment is learn CSS and use DIVs instead of tables where possible. I've recently had someone contact me asking to help with SEO and when I looked at his page it was 310 lines long and bloated with so much html code the SE's were having trouble indexing it. By using CSS and divs I reduced the html lines from 310 to 65 and the page size from 35kb to 6kb and it is now a very SE friendly web page.
The other major benefit of DIVs is, unlike tables, you don't have to wait for the whole page to load before it displays.
My god, I could go on forever with design tips, I better shut up now before this message heads towards a million lines :)
Simon.
Once I started really going all out on SEO and link exchanging it took 6 weeks before the hits started rising by large amounts.
If your site has hit a max limit try adding more pages with other content.
I started off with just a wallpapers section and now have have a fishing section, boat section and a ghost section which are also bringing in more and more people through different kinds of search phrases.
My plan is to keep increasing the pages each week which will bring in even more people. Because I live in a tourist area the pages I could write about Torbay are limitless.
Simon.
