The Earnestness of Absence

I know that it's been a long while since I updated this blog... and that's never a good thing. My excuse is that I've been madly working on my website. The site has expanded in so many ways that I needed to give it a complete overhaul. So, not only does the Nemeton Home Page have a completely new look and feel and should make it much easier to navigate and find the various sections of the site.

The Celtnet Recipes recipe section of the site has also had a major overhaul and now has almost 5000 recipes from all corners of the glove in the database. No mean feat as all the recipes are edited and annotated by me before being published. There's no copying and pasting of standard recipes going on here. As you can imagine, all this means that I've been extremely busy, hence the silence on this blog for a while.


Given that I've also updated the ClickBank Marketplace and given the ClickBank Ads Generators pages an overhaul (and, yes, they're still free for anyone to publish and create their own ClickBank-based ads on these pages) you can see that I've been busy.

Of course, all this effort is in aid of the One Million People Campaign that I and my website support, so all the effort is worthwhile! And now I'm onto the Celtnet Celtic section of the site. That bit of the website that actually kicked everything off so many years ago now.

What this comes down to is SEO. Websites change and adapt and the whole look and feel of websites also changes and adapts. To make certain your website is taken seriously you need to keep the site looking young and fresh and that means keeping up with the latest trends. Some of this is easy as I've used CSS from the start. But there's still a fair amount of re-engineering involved as I was learning CSS as I was going on. I now have a nice design developed for the recipes section of the site and I want to roll that out everywhere. It uses pure CSS to ensure that the central most important information part of the page appears first in the HTML so that the indexing spiders see this first.

But, as is often the case, all this frenetic activity has meant that I dropped the ball on several important SEO factors. The first of these is not doing enough link checking. I've ended up with hundreds of broken links for one reason or another and we all know that the search engines hate broken links and will penalize your site for it. I've been busy cleaning-up these broken links over the past few days and already my rankings and traffic are both climbing.

The other thing I ignored was a proper, systematic, approach to getting more in-bound links. Now, I'd been working hard on writing articles as ways of getting in-bound links and this was working quite well for me. Between January and April I tripled the traffic to my site (and did the same for my income). Which was great, but I kind of left things to stabilize at that level and that wasn't good.

Now, optimizing my ad placements helped raise revenue and that I did as part of my overall re-design (and it worked!). Then I had to go away and leave everything for almost three weeks and visitors fell. All the hard work in writing articles was only really working as long as I kept writing articles. I needed better ways to get links. So began a campaign of proper link building and link exchanges. I began writing articles for Wikipedia again as well as leaving recipes and comments on blogs. I also began using digg and other sites to promote my various web pages.

This led to an extra 400 in-bound links in the first week and my traffic and income began to climb again. Basically it means that the old stalwarts of the internet biz aren't dead at all. And if you want to make a profit then you need to keep working on your link-building. Write articles, exchange links, leave comments, join forums. Basically use any means you can to get links to your site 'out there'. And make certain that you get plenty of deep links into your site as well.

If you want more tips like this, then why not have a look at the How to Maximize your Web Traffic page where you can sign-up to a free six-part e-course on driving more traffic to your site. Just think what you could do if you could triple your website's traffic in three months (or even less!)

And, if you have a recipe-related site why not sign-up for a link exchange with the Celtnet Recipes Links reciprocal links page?