it works (go figure)
Well waddyaknow. Belchfire.net had it’s biggest day ever yesterday. I’ve never been able to exceed 5000 unique visitors per day for any length of time, and since March 1st, my web traffic has doubled:
01-Sep-03 3728 49925 950119 7.95 GB
…
01-Mar-04 4910 49680 729579 7.44 GB
30-Mar-04 9171 113725 1584520 18.93 GB
As you can see by this crude extract, things have been very consistent over the last 6 months, and just in the last 30 days things exploded. It was not a single day spike (didn’t get slashdotted or anything). It was a gradule, steady increase. I attribute the phenominal gains to the exact things I’ve written about in this blog. It was not a single change or modification, but rather the combination of all of them. What I changed after March 1st, 2004:
- modified belchfire.net pages to more closely match the Google and Yahoo keyword and element density report from goRank research
- entered custom meta keywords and description tags on most pages (still have around 450 news articles to do)
- entered custom page titles on all major pages and sections
- created a search engine friendly sitemap using netroglycerine.com’s Site Map Generator (free)
- a css trick I’ll expand on later
Previous to this, I also convered all dynamic URLs on Belchfire.net to static. That didn’t effect web traffic to a great extent (as Belchfire.net was already in the top 10 search results for my keywords), but it did increase the number of pages the search engines indexed.
Next post I’ll look at web stats. What data to collect, how to interperete the results and how to monitor them and tweak your site based on that data.