Browsing Habits and the Days of the Week

Have you been examining your visitor stats lately? Do you take note of what happens on various days of the week and how the day can affect click-throughs and conversions?

Well, if you haven't been taking note of these factors affecting your website and your income, then shame on you! Because, the days of the week and what you have on offer can have a huge effect on the income you make. Indeed, these fluctuations in the behavours of people visiting my Celtnet website was one of the main reasons I began to develop my site into an authority site.

I began my site with the Celtnet Celtic pages, all based on my hobby and interests, the ancient Celtic gods and the ancient texts of Wales. I added adsense to this, but more in hope than any real expectation. There was some income and that's when I began the Celtnet Information region of the site. This was much more an attempt at making some real money... and, yes, during the middle of the week I did actually make some money, but over Friday and the weekend that steady flow became only a trickle.

Obviously, what I was offering only seemed to be needed during the middle of the week. To try and plug the obvious gap I added a Celtnet Recipes Collection and a Medicine Section and the addition of these two new parts to the website did even out the earnings across the week. Finally, I was getting a monthly cheque from Google.

Then I made a huge mistake... I began trying to grow my entire website across the board. I was adding new content in as many different places as possible but there was no focus. I now know that it would have been far better to focus on a single area of the site, growing both the content and the in-bound links. It took me a year to make this realization and that's cost the site a lot of income.

A year ago I decided to concentrate on the Celtnet Recipes region of the site. During the past 10 months I've grown the content from 1100 recipes to almost 6000 (each hand edited) my traffic has increased 6-fold and my income almost 10-fold. This has been due to building lots of content, getting deep links into the site and re-designing my pages so they're both more visitor friendly and better at converting. And now, in contrast to when I started, the weekend is my most productive time of the week.

I get more hits and more click-throughs on the weekend, by quite a large margin, and this is probably due to the visitors being just a little less 'internet savvy' and less ad-blind overall.

And whilst I'm still growing the recipes site I've added a growing Articles Submission site, where anyone can submit their articles (a key aspect of link building) as well as an eBooks sales section and a ClickBank Marketplace where anyone can search ClickBank products or even create free ClickBank-based ads for their own sites. Each separate income generation strategies.

If you would like to learn how the site was turned around from the doldrums to a success then check-out the How to Maximiey your Web Traffic eBook and course. And if you would like to know what drives me to making the most from the site then please check out the One Million People Charity Campaign as it's this to which the proceeds from the website are given.

Yes, you can make your website into a success, but it will require effort on your part, and there are no shortcuts. You HAVE to grow your content and grow your links.

Does Page Rank Really Matter?

At the end of September the webmaster forums were all-a-twitter in that Google seemed to be performing a page rank update. The first in many, many, months. Webmasters were desperately scanning the various datacentres to see if their page ranks had changed or not and reports were flying thick and fast. But it seems that no proper update of page rank was forthcoming. So, does it actually matter?

In a way page rank is critical, but in another it's totally irrelevant. Google uses page rank as an algorithmic measure of how important a website is (ie its rank in comparison to other similar websites, based on the number of links coming into a site and the 'authority' of those sites (ie their page rank).

As a result sites began to scan page rank and there grew a market around selling links from sites with high page rank. A site with high page rank could command a fair amount of money for selling links. Which distorted the natural, organic, growth of links to websites. Obviously this created an artificial skewing of results and Google didn't like this. So they began clamping down on the selling of links.

Now it seems that they are obfuscating page rank. The rank shown in Google's toolbar, or even on Google's datacentres may not actually represent the true page rank or ranking of a site. Indeed, I run the Celtnet and Celtnet Recipes sites. Both these currently have a PR of 0 yet I've managed to grow my traffic five fold in the past six months and my income almost ten fold. If the observed page rank was the true arbiter of a site's quality and position in the search engines then this could not happen.

Which does lead to a bit of a problem. Because higher page rank gives a site more 'juice' in terms of website ranking and getting links is the only way to improve your position in the search engines many webmasters have decided to only exchange links with high PR sites (typically 3 and above). But if page ranks are no longer accurate, how do webmasters with good sites but low PR (artificially low, it seems) exchange links?

We're in the position of having another artificial stewing of how websites are percieved and the placing of a huge barrier in front of new entrants into the field.

The Importance of Links

Unfortunately, the Internet is not a meritocracy. You may have the world's best content on your blog or website, but if nobody reads that content then it's effectively less than useless to you as the site's publisher.

I'm not saying that great content isn't important. In fact it's a vital component for any serious presence on the internet, because you want the experience of anyone visiting your website to be a good one. So you need to give them confidence in your site and the only way to do that is to provide them with great, individualistic and above all useful content. So you need to build your site and add great content each and every day.

This is where the true currency of the internet comes in — links. Unless you have links coming into your website then your site will not be found and your content will not be indexed. How you do this may well vary, but here are some of my favorite strategies (and I've used these to increase my website's traffic 10-fold in the past 6 months!

• Submitting articles to article directories. This is an all-time favorite and still works really well. In essence you write an article on a topic related to your site and you then submit that article to one of the web's main article directories. Personally, I tend to use the following:
  
  
  EzineArticles.com — not the fastest, but it's been around for a long time and has lots of kudos
  
  GoArticles — submitted articles are instantly live you can enter affiliate links.
  
  Celtnet Articles — not one of the biggest, but articles are quality reviewed and they are published quickly.
  
  Article Dashboard — turn-around time can be long but this is good for getting your articles picked-up by eZines and published elsewhere.
  
  
  
  These are only a few and you can view many more on-line. These are the ones I tend to use myself and they've been good to me in terms both of getting my articles published and picked-up by others. Just remember that each article accepted gives you at least 2 links (typically 3) back to your website and if your content is picked-up by others you get even more links.
  


• Link exchanges — whether you do this through a third party or go for link exchanges personally it can still be a good way of getting links back to your site. Many say this methodology is devalued these days, but remember that it's not just search traffic you want... any means of getting quality links to your site is useful and if you exchange links with a related site you will get referral traffic from that site.
  


• Blog posting — posting to blogs such as this one can be a very useful way of getting more links to your site. Basically you can write a post on a given topic and then include links back to your site that are relevant to your topic.
  


• Free Web Page sites — Sites such as squdoo and hubpages allow you to create individual web pages. You can use these sites to write on a topic and include links back to your own website that are relevant to that topic.
  


• Submit your site to Directories — this is probably not as important as it used to be, but some directories such as DMOZ have a high traffic ranking and can be beneficial.
  


• Blog Comments — Commenting on onthers' blogs or on on-line forums can be an excellent way of disseminating your website's URL. You will increase your traffic both by the virtue that there are more links pointing to your site and by people coming across your URL 'by accident'.
  

These are just some of the ideas of the ways that you can help get more links to your site. And the truth is that I tend to spend at least 2 hours a day on getting links. In the end though the processes above can be considered as 'priming the pump'. You need enough links into your site for your site and its contents to get on the search engines' radar. But, eventually, if you have good content, then you will start to develop good links back to your site as other webmasters and bloggers mention your site and give you links back to it.

These are just some ideas about how you can improve the links to your site. You can read more about this in the article: How to Improve your Google Ranking.

If you are truly serious about improving your search engine rankings and your traffic then you really need to check out: The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic. And whilst you're there, why not sign-up for the free six-part eCourse.