Project: Website Marketing (pt2)
Following up on my recent post about documenting the marketing of davidbehan.com, it’s one week on and good news so far. I’ve managed to achieve some of the targets I’ve set out and I’m on route to hitting the others. This is going to be an ongoing process with the ultimate aim of taking the top spot for "web design ireland" in Google. I don’t expect to do that over night or even in the next few weeks but with these efforts and bit of energy, I don’t think it is an impossible task. I’ve often joked with Dave Davis online, who’s currently holding number 1, that I want that place so if you’re reading Dave, now you know… I’m coming for ya! Any tips you want to share? 
So, what’s been the main changes in the past week, I hear you say? Well, here’s a quick summary of some of the stats from the past week in comparison to the month previous:
- Website Stats for Past Week
- Visits: 4,454 (compared to average of 168 for previous weeks)
- Page Views: 10,425 (compared to average of 352 for previous weeks)
- Page Views Per Day: 1,489 (compared to 50 for previous weeks) - Google Ranking for "Web Design Ireland"
- on google.com: was 46th, now 23rd
- on google.ie (worldwide search): was 55th, now 24th
- on google.ie (ireland only search): was 37th, now 19th
Ok, that’s a massive jump in usage in comparison to the previous month. Basically what caused this was a temporary traffic spike to the site. This website was featured on the likes of cssmania.com, w3csites.com, mostinspired.com, screenalicious.com, and a few more. Other smaller sites pick up feeds from these sites and have also begun to link in. Actually, I think I only submitted the site to cssmania.com and all the rest picked it up from there. The visitors that have been coming to the site over the past week have not necessarily been the target visitors I am ultimately trying to attract to the site (and I mean that with total respect to you all). This is evident from the high bounce rate. However, a fair portion are, and I’d like to say thank you to all the people who have commented on the new site or dropped me a message. My aim for this site is to advertise the services that I provide as well as open my knowledgebase to whoever might want/need to use it. Along the way, I hope to pick up a client or two as well!!!
As I mentioned, this was a traffic spike and as the days go by, less and less visitors have been coming from those sites. However, what this is helping with is more inlinks that Google picks up, which in turn pushes the site up the rankings. The higher up the rankings the site goes, the more likely a potential client might find the site through the targetted keywords. Already, this has become evident with a jump up the rankings as shown above.
It is now time to get more and more of these websites linking in so that it pushes the site up higher in the rankings on Google. I’ve got a few plans for this and it’s going to take a lot of manual effort, visiting directory type websites, filling in the website details and getting a link in return. I’m planning on doing this over a couple of evenings in the next week and hopefully get a lot more backlinks than there is currently. I actually don’t think this process will end as there are so many websites out there you can get links from, it’ll take forever to do. I do however have a list of about 1,000 websites that competitor websites are linked from. It is this list that I’ve started to work off as well as try and find some other good quality inlinks. At the end of the day, it’s not always about the quantity of links but the quality of the links. The main one I got above was cssmania.com. The site was featured at the top of the page for about 3 days, and further down the page for another 2 days. Also, cssmania.com has a Page Rank of 6, which doesn’t hurt matters at all.
So, what’s the lesson for this week… get a nicely designed website using CSS (tableless) coding and get it featured on as many CSS Showcase websites as possible. Usually getting on to the top ones will allow the smaller ones to pick you up and they’ll add you themselves. Here’s a list to get you started: cssinsert.com. Please remember that the traffic from these sites will be a temporary spike and the majority of visits will be once off, but it will increase the inlinks to your site and help push up your search engine rankings, and that’s the name of the game in the end.
Well, that’s the update so far. I’ve a tough week of link building ahead of me and I expect a significant drop in the numbers to the site compared to this week unless some other top quality css showcase websites features this site for a couple of days. I don’t mind though. I always knew it was a traffic spike and I’ve heard of them being described as being addictive… once you have one, you just want more, more, MORE!!! I think I’m beginning to feel like that already 
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