The ACTUAL 30 day diary

After reading this thread (http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-content/113689-taking-new-site-top-30-day-case-study.html) and reading 'Get out while you can' by George Marshall (both highly recommended), I got some motivation to spend some time working on a site that I'd previously made and since forgot about (I tend to loose interest once I've built a site). This thread is basically for myself and others to learn what does / doesn't work and what can / cannot be achieved with minimal effort and budget. Please feel free to make suggestions on how things can be improved etc. Not sure how large a post can be, but I'll try to update this post with future updates rather than post later in the thread if possible...

Background

So I put a minisite (a fairly large one granted) on DressUpGamesForGirls.org.uk in the summer. It cost me reg fee and I regged it purely because a) the .com sold for $15k and b) I’d never seen a domain available before that had anything like the 165,000 uk exacts and 823,000 global exacts that this had. I’m fully aware that it isn’t particularly memorable and the prefix is the least preferable.

I monetised it using adsense text and banner ads, links and also a search box, and used the 'advertising heatmap' that G produce to place the ads in the most effective places on the page. At the same time I set up a Facebook page and installed webmaster tools. Since then, left to it’s own devices the Facebook page has had 67 likes and the site made £5.29 through adsense. Webmaster tools shows 18 links to the site. It didn’t rank for the main keyword phrase or it’s secondary 2 keywords in G, not surprising as it’s a competitive niche and the site has incomplete meta data, minimal written content and not much in the way of links.

Day 1

I firstly went through and just cleaned the code up a bit, did some light SEO (keywords, anchor text, image alt’s) and played with things like cross browser compatibility. I added a small amount of new content (2 new games). I then updated the facebook page for the site with an announcement for said games and out of curiosity started a discussion about it too. I then used jumptags.com to social bookmark the site, a concept I've not used at all before. Finally, as Storeburst put some money in my Paypal account, I signed up to Stacy’s unique 200 blog post package (there's a link in the WickedFire thread posted at the beginning).

Revenue = £0.99
Incoming Links = 18
Rank (KW1) = unranked
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = unranked

Day 2

Not much time today so just ‘tweeted’ a link on a twitter account I made for another site (again this isn't something I've used before really, should probably work on getting followers). Corrected meta data mistake on all pages, also made adjustments to the footer (linked sitemap from all pages). Won’t get round to uploading until I’ve written some descriptions for the games pages. I signed up to delicious.com and bookmarked the site from there. I also signed up to FreeTrafficSystem.com which publishes articles automatically to blogs. I wrote a quick article off the top of my head and linked it to my delicious and jumptags URLs using my #1 and #2 keywords as anchor text. Initial impressions of the system are good, it has inbuilt spin feature to randomize links, keywords and the article itself between different blog posts. It could be potentially dodgy in terms of replicating content, hence I gave it as many options for spinning as I could and didn't link directly back to my site.

Revenue = £0.01
Incoming Links = 18
Rank (KW1) = unranked
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = unranked

Day 3

Too busy with coursework to do much today, probably a good idea to take a day off aswell so not to worry G.

Revenue = £0.05
Incoming Links = 18
Rank (KW1) = unranked
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = unranked

Day 4

Uploaded modified pages from day 2 and generated new sitemap. After reading Molly Hunter (who I guess is on here?)’s blog, I have got myself a .edu link. The theory goes that .edu links carry more weight as they are from educational establishments mainly. Suck it and see I say.

Also drawing inspiration from Molly’s blog I registered on myprop.org and gave the site another social bookmark from which to send links. Also ‘liked’ it, so maybe will appear on my facebook profile? I’ve also joined SoundClick.com, an mp3 portal and music blog. I posted a link with KW1 anchor text, and then bookmarked the link to my profile over on jumptags.com, delicious.com and myprops.org. So basically I dedicate day 4 to Molly Hunter!

I should also say that I'm using the rank checking tool at Further.co.uk to check my rankings (http://www.further.co.uk/tools/search-position-check/)

Revenue = £0.13
Incoming Links = 18
Rank (KW1) = unranked in all but MSN US, where I'm 10th apparently (although can't find it on bing.com which I guess is MSN US?)
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = unranked

Day 5

Another day off so as not to upset G. Still no real progress towards ranking, should have enough time to add written content tomorrow to speed things up. Would like to rank somewhere even if it's 2000th within the next few days..

Revenue = £0.00
Incoming Links = 18
Rank (KW1) = unranked again!
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = unranked

Day 11

I can't see from this screen when i last updated the thread so I'm going to guess that today is around day 11.. but as this is only a summary of what has happened the last few days it doesn't really make much diffference. Income has all but died, £0.08 on the 11th and that is it.

Still no sign of any extra links on webmaster tools hence I'm going to delay the project until the weekend. My article I typed and spun on FreeTrafficSystem has appeared on a plethora of related sites and blogs with some PR and also my link building package from Stacy has finished, so we should hopefully see some results soon.

Revenue = £0.00
Incoming Links = 18
Rank (KW1) = ranked 96 in Yahoo UK, progress!
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = ranked 53 on Yahoo UK

I should say that is only from Further.co.uk's tool, I had a quick check to see if the ranking for makeover games (kw3) in Yahoo was correct but couldn't find it. I'll try some other position checkers later, Further seems to be quite hit and miss

Day 12

Ok so I said project on hold until the weekend, but I'll give a little up date today. Refreshed my webmaster tools page earlier to be pleasantly surprised, my link count has finally gone up. 18 has risen to 211.. happy days! I guess this will creep up by another 50 or so, maybe more in the coming week/s from link building already done. I'll add more content as my next step to get plenty of keywords on the pages (without being spammy) and start phase 2 of link building. Checking webmaster tools the most commonly used anchor text on my links has been kw1 and kw2 which is good stuff, kw3 didn't make the top 5 so I'll aim to balance it out a little during phase 2.

Revenue = £0.00
Incoming Links = 211
Rank (KW1) = ranked 98 in Yahoo UK - will analyse these ranks in more detail tomorrow
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = ranked 50 on Yahoo UK

Day 17

I've started to trickle content on to a couple of the game pages to get keywords on the pages more. I'm going to add a basic paragraph under the game on all the game pages, every day or maybe every other day, so that the site gets regular content added. Then once I've done them all, I'll go back through them and add more text (only so much written word you can put on a game site). Also, I checked my rankings on further.co.uk against where they actually are and found that they were usually a little out but not much, good enough as a guide until you're on page 1.

Revenue = £0.03
Incoming Links = 211
Rank (KW1) = ranked 97 in Yahoo UK - further.co.uk says 94
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = ranked 49 on Yahoo UK - further.co.uk says 50

If I search for 'dressupgamesforgirls' on the search engines, I rank:

Google UK = 6
Yahoo UK = 8
Bing UK = 9

Is this because of the exact match bonus or what? I guess it must be, as other than the anchor text in the footer, 'dressupgamesforgirls' doesn't appear anywhere else on the page, everywhere else it has spaces seperating the words. Anyone have any thoughts?

Day 19

The last few days have been spread over a lot of my sites, just sprucing things up here and there... fresh logos and content for some of my storebursts, emailing various companies for an upcoming project and finishing off a new site. As far as this one goes, I've been adding a paragraph to the game pages a couple at a time and will continue to work my way through them.

After watching the Gadget Show on youtube last night, I had an idea. Why not set up a free account selling merchandise for the store. At the very least you get a few links from a high PR site, aswell as the potential traffic that might notice my profile page on it... best case scenario people may actually buy some of the merchandise, which aslong as your markup is set at more than the base price is a little profit. I used cafepress.co.uk, which provided you don't want to edit the appearance of your store too much or have much control over the design of products you sell, is free.

Time will tell if it's worthwhile, I've only put the sites logo on a load of different merchandise at the moment, not much design work. It also gives me something to update my facebook page with, which I shall do now!

Revenue = £0.09
Incoming Links = 211
Rank (KW1) = ranked 96 on Yahoo UK
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = ranked 56 on Yahoo UK

(rankings from further)

Day 23

So, I've just been adding little bits of content here and there on the site since the last update; I could've done more but I've been working on finalising another site to go live this week. Nothing special to update money wise, on day 21 I made 53p and just a few pence on the other days.

There is a development links wise, however. My link count in G analytics has dropped from 211 to 80! I take it the reason for this is poor quality links that have been deleted already..? In which case it may be a blessing I suppose. Please enlighten me...

Revenue = £0.00
Incoming Links = 80
Rank (KW1) = ranked 91 on Yahoo UK
Rank (KW2) = unranked
Rank (KW3) = ranked 51 on Yahoo UK

 

Not sure if anyones interested either way but project put on hold for a week or so until some links get crawled

 

keep it up. will be interesting to see it through.

 

Will do mate. I've blitzed it fairly hard with links for a week or so but analytics still says I'm have 18 links. If I leave it a week hopefully some might start filtering through. I've been working on a new project in the mean time, so it'l be good to learn some lessons from this one to save time

 

Don't get disheartened by the reported number of links, they will be found.

From my experience you'll do well with the domain being an exact match of your main phrase (main benefit being that links often end up being the domain as you'll know) - so keep at it and report back, there is interest in your diary...

 

Definitely! It's a very interesting diary - I've returned to your thread quite a few times. Keep it up and good luck!

Thank you for sharing your results.

Best wishes, Richard

 

Cheers guys. I'm trying not to get disheartened but it's hard when you're impatient like me lol. I'll update it to cover the last few days in a min, then I'll probably continue the project at the weekend.

I've noticed that if you search for my kw1 phrase with no spaces in between (dressupgamesforgirls) I'm on page 1 of G... strange

 

i dont know about anyone else, but my adsense is very very down right now.

 

Yes, keep up the good work.

I'd be a little worried about the quality of the incoming links - need to keep an eye on that.

Thanks for sharing.

 

You should update your .htaccess as at the moment both www.DressUpGamesForGirls.org.uk AND DressUpGamesForGirls.org.uk work - which means you're leaking link equity and basically confusing Google as to what it should be listing. I can see from your backlinks you are targetting the www. so add this to .htaccess:

PHP:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.dressupgamesforgirls.org.uk/$1 [R=301,L] 

Be very careful getting so many lower quality links, especially as quickly as you are doing it. I wouldn't get any more links, apart from high-quality natural ones on non-keyword anchor texts, for the next few months. Looking at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.dressupgamesforgirls.org.uk&bwm=i&bwmf=s&bwmo=d there are already more than enough links for a site this young.

 

Thanks for the replies. The next phase of link building won't start for a week or so yet and isn't going to be intensive, I was thinking a slow drip of 1 or 2 a week from places like Ezine etc..? I thought it would be better than going completely cold turkey on link building

peter_w - I understand the point you're making but not the remedy, where is .htaccess to be found?

 

Create a file titled .htaccess in notepad and copy the contents from my post. Hit save and upload it to your root level (where you have your index page - usually public_HTML in your FTP).

 

Cheers mate I'll get it done

 

I'm enjoying this diary - please keep it up.

And thanks.

 

If you're looking for links, I have a PR2 page on dollmakers on my PR3 site. There are only 4 external links on there at the moment (and about 4 internal), and I doubt I will be adding any more soon. Page itself is probably 5, 6 years old as far as I can remember. Still one of the most popular pages on my site though (unfortunately).

 

Thanks I'm glad you're enjoying it, I've been a bit lax this last week as I've got masses of college work but I will plough in full pelt again weeknights this week.

blossom - I will gladly take you up on a link, although I don't have much to offer back. This site is probably my oldest but I'll give you a link if you like? Let me know.

 

I'll PM you, I have a site I've not quite finished yet that I want to start link building on soon

 

ok blossom cool

 

I've been reading pauls (aka molly) blog since the beginning and you get some good tips from it. I've just baught the bible aswell and wroking through it. Some good stuff and it does help to structure your link building

 

Paul? Molly? Is it a bloke or a bird or what..?? Let me know how you get on with it mate I'm always partial to internet related reading materials. How much was this bible?