Jul 11 2010
At this very moment, I am up to my neck in Internet gremlins
I’m changing a lot of content around tonight and many links may be broken until, say, Sunday. I’m doing my best to update the links, but if you find any that don’t work, please post a comment somewhere. Thanks!
Say it: “I’m up to my neck in Internet sh*t!”
If I am still buried in Internet gremlins after the weekend is through, THEN I will break out the profanity. And not the asterisked kind. More like the heretofore-known-only-to-Marines kind.
Here’s what I’d like to accomplish by Sunday night:
–Redo the sidebar so that popular pages are more prominent.
–Rewrite the article summaries so that they’re more Google-friendly. I have a few hundred 2-3 sentence summaries to write. (My goal is to have one for each post in the Writing Articles category with more than ~100 words, so I have probably somewhere in the range of 400-600 to do).
–Rewrite old-and-popular pages, particularly those with unusually high bounce rates.
–Use phrases like “graphic novel” far more often than I do currently. (I find the term a bit pretentious, but Analytics indicates that the people looking for writing advice are significantly more likely to use “graphic novel” in their Google searches than “comic book”). This will entail a minor rewrite of 25-50 key articles and titles. This is pretty fast.
–Change the permalinks for fairly unpopular pages to woo Google. The top 30 articles won’t be touched because it would break too many inbound links.
–When an article has an unusually high exit rate (many people leave the site after reading it), I’ll try inserting links to similar articles to encourage readers to keep circulating. Also, I’ll try to make sure that the quality is high.
–I’m going to try to increase the amount of pages with StumbleUpon links at the bottom from ~15 to ~50.
–I’m going to try to cut down the number of categories and use them more broadly. Also, I’m renaming the titles of the categories for Google-friendliness.
–Try to catch as many of the changed links as I can. Updating the indexes should be fairly simple, but catching every link on other pages will be nightmarish.
–Be more consistent about providing metadata on videos and pictures, like captions for pictures embedded in the picture itself. Google can’t “read” videos or pictures as well as text, but captions help tell Google what the file is about.
Keep up the good work! So far, so good
It’s far too soon to tell if this is just coincidental or somehow related to the changes, but traffic is up
~60%75% over the past two days, from ~350 visits per summer day to about 600. In particular, one of the pages that I revamped for search engine optimization is up380%420%. (UPDATE: I adjusted the figures after getting the full day’s worth of data).Most of the new traffic consists of Google referrals to that page.
Reasons for caution:
–Two days is a ludicrously short period of time to draw any conclusions.
–Google referrals are significantly more likely to bounce (leave quickly). Historically, about 75% of Google referrals bounce, compared to 50% of regular searchers.
–The page in question is a Batman demotivational poster, which doesn’t overlap much with graphic novel, comic book, and novel writing advice. Unless you’re a writer and/or publishing professional and/or teacher, most of the content here would probably not interest you very much.
–The search engine optimization tricks I used could not work as well on the vast majority of my pages. Many people are searching for Batman demotivational posters. In contrast, I can revamp an article about how to write effective action scenes, but there just aren’t as many interested readers out there.
PS: I finally got to #1 on Google for [comic book writing advice], but I’m getting destroyed on [how to write a comic book] and pretty much everything related to graphic novels.