I totally appreciate your feedback on how to stop my fan site from bouncing around the search engine rankings like a yo-yo.  It’s been a bit frustrating to see the stats go up and get butterflies in the stomach because I think I’m doing something right… only to see it completely crash - apparently not too many people love this fan site on the weekends.  Google doesn’t seem to like it much on the weekends either.  I’m hoping to see it come back this week - which would play into the whole dynamic/pattern I’m seeing with this fan site.

As I was skimming through my RSS feeds, ProBlogger had some interesting tips for working on a new site - what would you do sort of thing - which plays greatly into my fan site, since it’s still really new.   First step is to work on the SEO - get the meta tags, H1’s, etc all in line.  Then work on content.  Secondly work on getting links from sites/blogs that are in the same niche as myself.

It seems so logical and straightforward doesn’t it?

But 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 great suggestion - and one that I’d been pondering in regards to my fan site is that I might have put all my eggs in one basket.  So when the crunch comes - I’m feeling it hardcore.  If I was able to get a few more baskets (working on articles, submitting posts to other blogs and forums, different avenues of income) that I wouldn’t be hurting quite so much when the Google machine decides not to like my site much.

Pidea also suggested that I work on my backlinks.  I honestly have to say that I’ve been pretty slack with that in the last week or so.  I guess I need to find sites that are similar to mine - in the same fan base and promote the crap out of my site.  I’m thinking that instead of just the basic “here’s my homepage” link that I diversify that as well and have links from various sites - linking to various internal pages to my fan site.  Kind of break it up and it looks a bit more natural rather than such a focus on my main page?  Just an idea…

Stu has mentioned a cool plugin to try out for SEO - it’s an all in one SEO tool.  I’ve downloaded it and I’m going to be trying it out.  Anything to help the SEO along - I’m game.  Thanks so much Stu!

Now I’ve been really leary of bouncing into all this social networking stuff - and honestly it might be hurting my site, because I haven’t been.  Shobber offered up things like Stumbleupon, to increase my traffic.   My question to that is - I know by adding articles to things like stumbleupon, digg, technorati - that traffic can increase, but it seems so temporary.  Maybe I’m doing that part wrong?  Or is that the point, short bursts of traffic to get people to find the site and if they like it, it would be up to them to come back and add the RSS feed, etc?

I have to say with all the feedback that I got - I am actually thinking that “yes” I’m going in the right direction - and that this ebb and flow comes with the territory - and why am I finding this all out now - 2 years into the whole affiliate marketing adventure.  Honestly I’ve been lazy about putting things in motion and learning about them - head on.  I’ve built sites and let them go - never doing much with the follow-through.  This project is different.  I’m going to see it through as far as I can and learn as much as I can here to apply it to other projects that I’ve been thinking about - or have up and running, that need a lot of SEO / link love.

Oh … it’s going to get busy around here!  LOL.

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