David Behan's Web Design Ireland Blog

Project: website marketing (pt3)

Well, it’s been 4 weeks since the launch of the new website and I’ve done a fair bit of marketing on the website. Still have lots to do but the past month has seen some good results. I outlined my targets in the first post and gave an update in the second post. This post is to round up a full summary of how the site is fairing out now, after the changes took place. So here’s the final results of the last 4 weeks, compared to the previous 4 weeks. To gather this information, I’m using Google Stats, Google Webmaster Tools, Web CEO, PopURI.us, Feedburner

Link and Search Engine Analysis 4 Weeks Ago Now
Google Page Rank 3 3
Google Back Links 627 1,351
Google Home Page Back Links 171 665
Google SERP’s
- web design ireland 46 (com)
55 (ie-ww)
37 (ie-io)
15 (com)
17 (ie-ww)
14 (ie-io)
- web design meath 12 (com)
27 (ie-ww)
21 (ie-io)
3 (com)
14 (ie-ww)
12 (ie-io)
- web design navan 4 (com)
6 (ie-ww)
6 (ie-io)
3 (com)
6 (ie-ww)
6 (ie-io)
- web development ireland n/a (com)
n/a (ie-ww)
n/a (ie-io)
16 (com)
17 (ie-ww)
16 (ie-io)
- web marketing ireland n/a (com)
n/a (ie-ww)
n/a (ie-io)
11 (com)
12 (ie-ww)
8 (ie-io)
Yahoo Back Links 630 1,447
Technorati Links 74 112
Del.icio.us Bookmarks 0 20
Alexa Rank 843,100 342,309

Note: Under Google SERP’s (search engine ranking positions), (com) means google.com results, (ie-ww) means google.ie world wide results, and (ie-io) means google.ie ireland only results.

Website Statistics Analysis 4-8 Weeks Ago Past 4 Weeks
Visits 673 8,581
Visits Per Day 24 306
Page Views 1,410 17,666
Page Views Per Day 50 630
Page Views Per Visit 2.10 2.06
Average Time on Site 00:01:40 00:01:26
Bounce Rate 67.46% 64.51%
Percentage New Visits 81.72% 80.63%
Traffic Sources 9% (direct)
35% (referring sites)
56% (search engines)
9% (direct)
85% (referring sites)
6% (search engines)
Blog RSS Subscribers 14 21

Note: This information was gathered using Google Analytics and is for the 4 week period, 26th April 2007 to 23rd May 2007 (i.e. prior to new site launch and new website promotion techniques) and the 4 week period, 24th May 2007 to 20th June 2007 (i.e. first 4 weeks of the new site).

Marketing Targets
These were the marketing targets that I had set for the site. Did I achieve them? Well, see below and why it did/didn’t happen! :D

  • Increase Google Page Rank to 5 on next release
    Well, Google hasn’t released it’s new page ranks yet, but I expect the sites up at 4 at the moment. With a bit more link building, I’m sure it can get to the 5 target before the next release.
  • Increase Backlinks 10 fold.
    Ok, I only doubled it and that has been due to lack of time on my part. I have a list of sites that I was supposed to go through and add links to but didn’t get a minute. I’ll keep working on this. 10 fold was a bit ambitious I think.
  • Google Keyword Ranking Targets:
    - web design ireland: at least page 2 Got it! Really happy with this! Page 1, here I come! :D
    - web design meath: top 3 results Still lagging behind on Ireland searches. Need more backlinks I think!
    - web design navan: top 1 result Again, Clickstream hold the top spot. More backlinks should knock them off the top.
    - web development ireland: top 10 pages Got to page 2. Good start!
    - web marketing ireland: top 10 pages Again, page 2. Next targets will be page 1.
  • Increase visits per day to 250
    Well, got this up to 306 for the 4 week period but I expect it may die down after the traffic spikes I described in part 2. Will need to keep link building to keep this figure up.
  • Increase page views per day to 750
    Didn’t quite make the 750 with only a 630 result. Due to the site not being sticky enough and the low amount of pages per visit. Need to work on increasing that to get more out of the visitors I get.
  • Treble the blog subscribers
    Actually, very ambitious here! Only managed a 50% increase. Glad people are reading though and hopefully I can provide some interesting reads and get more people to subscribe!

Summary
Well, that’s it for this part of the marketing strategy. I’ll report again in a month or two on how the site is fairing out. I’ll get the head down and do a load of link building and see if I can get the site on to the first page of Google for the chosen keywords as well as keep building the visitors and page views. I might even give a monthly snap shot of how things are going and what I’ve done in the past month to help push things further. Hopefully, someone will benefit from this information on how to market and build on their website. If you have any questions or comments, would love to hear them, so drop them into the comments below.

Slán anois! :D

13 Comments (post a comment)

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Joseph  spacer

Hi there.

I always read you blog. Its really good. I am only new to the web design industry. I know that back links have a big part to play on search engine ranking but not sure on ways of getting links… Is there any tips you might have about this..

I really think your work is great. well done

June 28, 2007 @ 1:13 pm
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David  spacer

Hi Joseph,

There’s lots of ways to get back links. A few of the ways that I do it is by posting on blogs and forums (and having signature links back to the site), visiting portal sites and adding my sites details, getting featured on websites such as http://www.cssmania.com (and then lots of smaller websites pick them up and feature it too). It’s a time consuming task and really takes time to build up. Another great way is client websites and having your link back to your site in the footer. All these add up and help build your backlinks.

Recently I used http://www.webceo.com to analyse my competitor websites to see who is linking to them. With this information, I can sometimes add my link beside theirs.

Oh, get involved with the community. I see you have started a blog. I’ve visited your website and I’m sure a couple of my other readers (all 3 of them) have as well. They might read something there and link to you from their blog. A good blog attracts some nice visitors and good inlinks too. I’m a casual blogger compared to others in the Irish web design community. If you haven’t already, pop over and say hello to Richard at http://www.redcardinal.ie, he’ll surely throw some more advice your way. Have you joined up on http://www.irishwebmasterforum.com yet?

Keep in touch and thanks for your comment! :D

July 4, 2007 @ 12:45 am
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Joseph  spacer

Cheer david….

That is very useful stuff… I know its time consuming, suppose there is no easy way around it. :D I just joined the irish web master forum.. lots of thing to talk about in it. cheers for the advice. Greatly appriciate it.

July 4, 2007 @ 3:11 pm
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David  spacer

No problem Joseph. Saw 1 of your posts over there alright. Will surely be in debate with you at some point! :D

July 4, 2007 @ 3:17 pm

Thank you for the nice article. I am trying to learn about CEO, but in portuguese (i´m portuguese) there isn´t almost nothing about CEO, so, i´m glad i find you blog.

Have a great weekend!

August 5, 2007 @ 1:58 am

RE PR5: You can see if you already have such pagerank when you log in to your Google Sitemaps account. If there is any green line as Medium PR, then you already have got PR5. PR available to public isn’t always precise.

When my primary web site achieved PR5 it had already medium PR for about 2-3 months before the FF toolbar shown me this fact.

September 10, 2007 @ 12:46 pm
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Louie  spacer

when is part 4 coming?

September 14, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
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David  spacer

@Universos: you’re most welcome

@Jan: cheers for the tip. I have the tiniest green line (about 5px wide) in medium. Should I expect PR5 do you think?

@Louie: Part 4 will come as soon as I can spare some time for the blog. I’ve been really busy the last while and neglected the blog a little so I’ll get back on top of things and write part 4.

September 25, 2007 @ 6:40 am
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Louie  spacer

Dave I know how you feel.
I am trying to get into bloging myself for the last year, but there is always something coming up…

September 25, 2007 @ 9:57 pm

David,
I’m really good at computers… however whilst I am intelligent enough to undertand whats being said, the how to is probably best left to the wiz kid who got me into blogging.
Is there a ’simple’ [not wiz kids job really] way I can get my blog ‘out there’- marketing? I can do it in paper publications - no comprendé in computers!
I’ll barter for gardening advice?!

MANY THANKS
peter

September 29, 2007 @ 7:03 pm

The three project posts were great for tips and advice. I just recently launched a new site in Jan this year and have managed to get a PageRank of 3. I got my old site to 4 and was wondering if my marketing and link building strategy should now change to hopefully get to a PageRank of 5 or 6 by the end of 08. Ive also noticed that higher ranked sites are often not prepared to exchange links. Any advice would be appreciated

May 1, 2008 @ 11:04 pm

If you struggle with time in terms of backlinks, try some paid services - there are some really good ones, especially for submitting articles!

May 4, 2008 @ 12:50 am

Thanks for the advice Simona

May 10, 2008 @ 11:37 am

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