Back to business

An unacceptable amount of time passed since I last posted, but I'm back. Lack of focus is what kills most projects, and I'm guilty of that. Luckily the site has been doing OK in my absence, but it's time to take it to the "next level". First, let's get an update on or KPI's:

Visits/week
358

Bounce rate/week
45.25%

PageRank
4

Linkbacks
53

Number of pages indexed
487

Delicious bookmarks
109

Yahoo Site Explorer Inlinks
6916

The big news is that we've been at PageRank 4 for a couple months now, and the number of indexed pages has gone up dramatically. Unfortunately the big bump in traffic that I was expecting with the high PageRank hasn't materialized. I blame the extremely high PageRank of my competition. I must refocus on building that PageRank number, and getting to within the the top 3 results for my major keywords. Here are the marketing TODO's that I must get back to:


There is also some development I want to do:


To get on the horse and knock a few things out, I've gone ahead and posted the site to Feedback Army. This service lets you submit your site for feedback (for a free), and even though I have enough feedback at this point, I'm hoping I can get some exposure and maybe some new ideas to spark some big ideas. It's only $10 for 10 reviews, so why not:


I'm going to change the KPI's moving forward, based on some new information:

• Adding "Sitemap indexed URLs" based on Google's Webmaster Tools, as this appears to be a much more accurate way to judge how much of my site Google can see.
• Adding "Links to site according to Webmaster Tools" as this again seems to tell you how many links Google see's, which is key.

A lesson learned is that there is indeed a period where Google keeps you at 0 PageRank, and about 5 months later they let you lose based on your real linkback measure. Unfortunately, that doesn't let loose huge amounts of traffic as I expected.