This past month or so I’ve found renewed interest in all things internet marketing and social media, and begun a crash course in building my understanding back to where it was, and even surpassing it. This website, now just completing its 14th year of operation, has become a crash course in search engine optimization and marketing effectiveness. At the peak I was entertaining over 10,000 unique visitors a month, mostly via search engines. Of course, four years ago or so my updates became decidedly less regular and traffic, appropriately, died down. I went so far as removing the site from search engine spiders when I was seeking a job prior to Ingram Micro, which should have put a death spike through any traffic hopes I may have. That said, oddly enough over 1,000 of you are still piling in on a monthly basis. More interesting to me is that less than 20% of my traffic is search engine related right now, as I build that effectiveness back up again, and more than half is inbound linking from other sites. In fact, over 1,700 websites link to this one, which blows my mind.
So today I visited www.websitegrader.com to test the current marketing effectiveness of the site as I begin the process of raising that effectiveness. I was ecstatic to get this review:
A website grade of 91/100 for www.overanything.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 91% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.
I could instantly raise the effectiveness with some back end tools that are currently being implemented, and perhaps new blogging software that would allow for different META tags and TITLES on each page (currently, my age-old blog software is repeating the same tags for all 3,000+ pages). Even my traffic ranking is pegged by Alexa as being in the top 12.25% of all websites. Go figure. Should be fun to see where I can take things from here as I proactively begin to put the tools I’ve learned, and continue to learn, into action.
Today’s Random Links
PETA urges Ben & Jerry’s to make breast milk ice cream.
Clay Aiken is gay! Wow. Who saw that one coming?
HBO Canada is launching next month.
Today’s Returning Shows
Criminal Minds (9 p.m.)
CSI: NY (10 p.m.)
Lipstick Jungle (10 p.m.)
Now Playing
Dennis Wilson – Pacific Ocean Blue