Knowcal Blog

As both google and other search engines (Yahoo, AOL and others) are now actively indexing the site the user numbers are growing steadily and the Adsense clickthrough rate looking much more healthy. With only 0.1% of the site currently indexed the possibility of 1000 times the traffic (and adsense revenue) is both exciting and daunting.

Users are also staying longer and performing more searches on the site with increasing numbers staying between 2 and 5 minutes and a quarter of them return visits. I don't want to make too much of these statistics yet, but I think it shows the SEO strategy is working and that the users like the novely of the service - it is certainly more compelling than the competitors' sites but I would say that!

The logs are also telling me that the results are coming in at the number one spot on Google quite often, with the vast majority within the top ten. However, I understand the bias in these numbers - if the results are way down the list then the chances of a clickthrough are slim so there will be nothing for the log to measure!

I have also added some google sitemaps to the site and further simplified the URL structure which makes it clearer for us humans and simpler for the search engines to follow (now only 2 path levels rather than 3 and no annoying paranthesis). It will be interesting to see if this makes a big difference and hopefully the sitemap reports will give me more indepth positioning information.

All-in-all good progress this week.

The next step is to increase my page rank through gaining more links - the hardest part of SEO.