My fan site has been riding the rollercoaster of Google Love and Hate for the past month. In my last go around with my Fan Site things were marvvy. Absolutely no problems - and I was starting to think that I finally knew what was going on and how to do better with the site.
Now I’m not too sure.
Again.
See the fan site has taken ANOTHER turn down the slipper slope to nowheresville. I don’t know if it’s just the weekends that are killing the site, but I’m having one hell of a week. Earlier this week I tipped the visitor scale of 160 unique visitors. Yesterday I had a hellish day of 28 unique visitors. This past week was awesome - visitor numbers were going up and I was blogging about the latest goings on with the fan site topic. It was heaven. Now I’m not sure what’s going on. Nothing has change with the site - but my numbers have tanked. Maybe I’m feeling the pinch because my numbers are low (but were going up) and now they’re not…
I checked DigitalPoint numbers and I’ve fallen off the Google charts with a number of my keywords. Now here’s my SEO question to you… do I need to blog about these keywords very often to keep them fresh in the search engines? Why am I showing up one day with these keywords and then the next day they’re gone? Google doesn’t change the algorithm that often do they? Is this because the site is new and I’ve got to hussle my butt and start getting more backlinks to various pages in the site?
I’m not sure? Â Any insight as to why I’m this crazy SEO rollercoaster would be so greatly appreciated!
Popularity: 3% [?]
pagepeel by webpicasso.de
June 10th, 2007 at 11:16 am
I personally came to realize that the only way to guarantee to a website a constant stream of traffic is diversifying your traffic sources. It comes down to the old saying “do not put all your eggs in the same basket”.
That’s why I use PPC, article marketing, seo, press releases and other techniques to drive traffic to my websites.
If my natural rankings go down suddenly, I have other sources that bring me traffic.
June 10th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Hey Empress ! I’m not blogging much but I am still following my feeds . . .
Anyway to answer your question: you will need backlinks to your site but it’s a case of quality over quantity. You’ll also need to ensure that the anchor text (the clickable portion of the link) is the words that your visitors will be searching for.
How do you get quality links ? You basically need to get what are called authority sites to link to you. For a fan site, I’d try and get the relevant Wikipedia page to link to your site. It’ll be a ‘no follow’ link but it will still get your site crawled.
Take a look at your competitors site and check out their backlinks, try and decide which ones are authority links, add in a few lower quality links and you should start to do OK.
If you want me to check out your site and current backlinks feel free to drop me an email and I’ll take a look - I’ve just finished teaching 2 days of SEO so I’m still so it’ll be no trouble.
It’ll take a while for your links to have an effect but if you have enough authority links then you’ll ride out the variations that can occur as Google tweak the algorithms.
Pidea
June 10th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Hi Empress, not too sure about your SERP’s, but I’ve got some projects on the go at the moment which rely solely on SE traffic, and I notice a significant (around 50%) drop in google traffic over the weekends.
It’s frustrating to see your traffic, and therefore income, drop for a couple of days, but I’m convinced they’ll pick up again on Monday. (These projects have only been running a couple of weeks, but I’m already seeing this as a pattern)
A couple of suggestions worth trying - get the all in one SEO pack plugin, this allows you to rewrite your titles so that the article heading comes bfore the site name, amongst other things.
Also, you can change the URL structure to take out the date, and put the category in its place. Go to Options -> permalinks in WP, and change the custom structure to /Êtegory%/%postname%/
Be careful with the second one though, as it rewrites your URL’s on the fly, the posts you have made up till now will have the changed URL structure, whilst google visitors will be looking for the old structure. You’ll need to set your 404 to redirect to the home page, so at least they don’t get the 404 message.
I’ve found these two things to be extremely successful with my new projects, wish I’d known about it a long time ago.
June 11th, 2007 at 5:56 am
Empress,
You may want to explore some other traffic options. Stumbleupon has been a great site for a traffic boosts. As far as blogging. I would definitely do some on topic keyword posts. You may even want to think about some creating some secondary sites to feed into the primary. Good luck
June 11th, 2007 at 9:12 am
[...] when I’m setting this in motion, it isn’t that easy. So I asked you… and I have to thank you for the great feedback I got for the question I asked.  Vido had a [...]