Internet

Launching a new web site – days 11, 12, 13

August 13, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Well, unfortunately I believe that my new site is officially in the “sandbox” which is Google’s way of controlling sites.

At Webconf.com the Google sandbox is explained in detail.

It’s never easy for newcomers to enter a market and there are barriers of different kinds. For newcomers to the world of search engines, the barrier is called a sandbox – your site stays there until it gets mature enough to be allowed to the Top Positions club. Although there is no direct confirmation of the existence of a sandbox, Google employees have implied it and SEO experts have seen in practice that new sites, no matter how well optimized, don’t rank high on Google, while on MSN and Yahoo they catch quickly. For Google, the jailing in the sandbox for new sites with new domains is on average 6 months, although it can vary from less than a month to over 8 months.

There are hurdles to overcome, just because the site is new. It might have been helpful to have submitted a few pages to Google when I first got the site going so that it would have time to get out of the sandbox.

Cpanel Stats are:

01 Aug 2009 29
02 Aug 2009 26
03 Aug 2009 36
04 Aug 2009 43
05 Aug 2009 67
06 Aug 2009 35
07 Aug 2009 50
08 Aug 2009 11
09 Aug 2009 11
10 Aug 2009 24
11 Aug 2009 9
12 Aug 2009 12

You’ll notice the drastic drop in visitors due to the sandbox effect. It’s very frustrating to go through these growing pains. My goal is to get back into the “top position’s club.”

Launching a new website – Days 6-10

August 10, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

This reports covers a span of days, mostly because there isn’t much new to report. There was a problem with having Google index the site as http://mynewsite.com and not http://www.mynewsite.com. That problem was solved with a 301 redirect file put in the .htaccess file. Now Google is showing all pages indexed for http://www.mynewchecks.com.

When studying the Cpanel stats, there were 32 external links pointing back to Website B and that is very good. There were 45 different keyword phrases that are bringing in traffic.

74 different page urls were bringing in traffic and there were 224 unique visitors for the month.

The daily statistics

1-Aug 29
2-Aug 26
3-Aug 36
4-Aug 43
5-Aug 67
6-Aug 35
7-Aug 50
8-Aug 11
9-Aug 11

After watching the movie, Julie and Julia, I realized that I’m not as diligent at writing everyday and my topic here is possibly boring to many people, so my apologies. I am hoping that it will get more exciting as time goes on.

Launching a new web site – Days 4 & 5

August 5, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Day 4

Video Marketing Efforts: I created a video using www.stupeflix.com. I have to say it was really fun to make and I guess it won’t hurt to show you the video here.

It was really fun to make and very easy too. The best part about it is that it ranks number 3 for the keyword phrase “order checks” when you do a Google video search. I think that video marketing is one way to advertise your business. I have yet to learn a few skills in being able to control the text as it displays throughout the video, but it wasn’t bad for a first try.

I also used SocialMarker.com to get the word out for my page that displays discount coupon codes for checks. That took about 30 minutes and it’s getting easier to get through the bookmarking procedure.

Cpanel stats: 43 visitors

Day 5

Today was a great day because I discovered that Google had indexed my site and I could see that 32 pages showed up in the Google search results. If you don’t know how to see if your site is showing up in the search results, just type in site:http://www.nameofyoursite.com into the Google search box to see if your site appears.

After discovering that, I took the keywords in my title tags and popped them into Google search and was quite happy with the results. There were 30 keyword phrases that had page one search results. Out of those, seven were number one listings. There were 39 keyword phrases that were in the first three pages of search results. It is too soon to tell which keyword phrase will be the most profitable, but at this point, I start to speculate and it becomes fun to watch the statistics complete the story.

I used SeoElite to see how many sites had links pointing to my site and it reported this:

1 – from a page rank 8
6 – from a page rank 6
5 – from a page rank 1

Cpanel shows 25 pages showing links to Website B.

Cpanel – 47 visitors.

I was informed that Amit completed his social bookmarking. He does a great job and offers his services to others as well. You can contact him through his site at WickedFire.com

Best tips for launching a new site: Based upon some of the Social Bookmarking experiences I’ve had, it seems best to submit good articles that have content relevant to the place you submit them to or they are considered spam by the site owners. Google search engine results should start bringing in more traffic within a few days.

Launching a new web site – Day 3

August 3, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

This is a series of articles relating to advertising activities behind launching a new web site. This article represents day 3 of a 30 Day Plan to build traffic to a new web site and report the number of daily visitors as reported in AWStats in the CPanel.

The following is a list of marketing activities performed for the day.

1. Spent time reading Webproworld.com for marketing tips. Advice from the web site, Webproworld.com was that “some of the best ways to build links are forum posting, blog commenting, directory submission, article submission, and social bookmarking and you can use all of these strategies at the same time.”

2. Published an ezine article on coolchecks.net/blog with a link to the new site.

3. Checked Google to see if the site had been included in their index. There were 7 page results from social bookmarking, but the main site has not been indexed yet.

4. Asked for help from a Facebook friend, Amit Nyamtabad to do more Social Bookmarks.

5. Posted links on Twitter and Facebook about Christian Bank Checks.

6. Made forum comments on three forums.

7. Spent time at Alexa.com finding out my who was linking to my competitors.

8. Submitted to two directories, prolinkdirectory.com and directoryvault.com.

9. Published an article at www.coolchecks.net about business checks which linked back to the new site.

10. Checked Cpanel Statistics on visitors.

Aug. 1 = 29

Aug. 2 = 26

Aug. 3 = 21 (This may change by tomorrow.)

Conclusions: It takes a while for Google to index sites so while you are waiting for that to happen, it’s good to spend time doing other promoting activities.

Launching a New Website – Days 1 & 2

August 2, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Day 1:

The first thing I did was to get a robot.txt file and get it uploaded to the main domain. This file tells Google and other bots to stay away from pages that you don’t want to show the world. It’s just a text file and you can learn how to make one.

Then I created a sitemap for the site. Now a sitemap is needed to tell the bots just where all the pages on your site are and for some reason they love this file, so I feed it to them. I go to a free site that will create it for me.

I just put the URL in a form and wait five minutes. Then I saved it as an html file and a .xml file because my site visitors really like to see what I have on my site and Google bots really like to gobble up .xml files. So I uploaded both of these files to my site.

I then started the launching procedure which just means you let Google know about your new site and you invite people to it. It’s very simple to do, but a mandatory step as far as I’m concerned. You need to go to Google and set up an account. You basically have to claim your site and tell Google where your sitemap information is. It’s
very easy to do. Just follow the directions there. So that being done, I have to wait until Google actually indexes the site to get any organic traffic (search traffic) from it.

Because it was late at night, I just barely had time to announce the site to my Facebook and Twitter Friends.

Cpanel stats for visits: Aug. 1 = 29 (probably mine)

Day 2:

Today I downloaded Roboform and realized what a fool I’ve been for so many years to have not used this tool before. I think I spend at least 30 minutes out of my day filling in usernames and passwords and this free
software takes all of that away. The reason I did this was so that I could more efficiently use Social Marker. I spent about an hour submitting a Website B page to various sites using Social Marker.

This post will be updated tomorrow with new statistics and new advertising activities. I may have forgotten to mention that one of the stipulations of this project is to spend no advertising dollars on PPC.

Thanks for reading this and stay tuned for a progress update on launching a new web site in 30 days.