Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

Because this site is relatively new ( Jan 08), I have been trying since the start of the year to build up our PageRank and of course visitor numbers.

On Tuesday the 29th of April, we received our first official PageRank and in the post “Website Performance against Google’s Benchmarking” I discussed how the site was performing in terms of visitor numbers.

So here’s the update:

PageRank

Our homepage’s PageRank has just gone up from 3 to 4. My aim continues to be to get a rank of 5 by the end of the year, we remain pretty much on course for that to happen. Some of the blog posts, such as this one on cold-calling are also starting to get a reasonable PageRank of 2 or 3.

While I would like to have more time to spend on SEO work, here’s what I have I being doing:

Blogging

On average I’m now posting about once a week. Some of my posts are starting to get picked up and mentioned by other bloggers such as Karl Goldfield in his blog “Startup Sales Mentor”

Articles

I also been using some of the blog posts as online articles, an example being, I was recently invited to submit sales articles to www.evancarmichael.com Here’s one of my articles from the site.

Link Building

My link building activities have suffered of late because we are now approaching funny season as regards business training, but I have still managed to submit the site to 20-25 directories. While directory submissions can take time and are frustrating to do, they remain in my opinion, an important and easier way of building one way inbound links

Blog Comments

Another method which I have started to build some incoming links is through commenting on other blogs. Blogs can have two types of comment policies, “nofollow” and dofollow . Its only those blogs that are dofollow which count in terms of PR (google Juice). When commenting on a blog, its important however to first read the post and contribute comments that add value to the discussion.

Site Visits

Note: Our old site is still live and continues to send small numbers of site visits, and because it’s now fast approaching the traditional time of year, when businesses seek out business training, I have also decided to up my spend with adwords.

So what’s the bottom line in terms of visitor numbers to the site?

In March and April we had 695 visits to the site and 2981 page views which compared very favourably in Goggle Benchmarking against similar sized sites. The benchmarks according to Google were 184 and 453 respectably.

So here’s how the site has performing since April:

In the three intervening months, the total number of visits were 1852 and the total number of page views were 5922.

If we do the maths, this means that the average monthly number of visits has gone up from 348 to 617 per month, with the numbers of page views going from 1491 to 1974.

Other figures according to Google, are that people are searching just over three pages deep (3.20 pages per visit) This has gone down from March April, where is was 4.29, but probably somewhat unavoidable with increased numbers of visits. New visits within the period is 73% which is up from 62% back in April.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with how the site has been performing, but realise that the amount of time I will be able to spend on site development will be less as we approach Christmas. I still plan however, to continue to increase the PageRank and build the visitors numbers. Ill post a further update as we approach the end of the year.

Tags: link building, pagerank, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, search engine promotion, SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 12:52 pm and is filed under web marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.