Pictures-of-Cats.org website update

Another quick update on the progress or otherwise of my website www.pictures-of-cats.org Today I added two Amazon shop pages. I needed to write these pages using some free software (NVU - very good free download) to ensure that the page was wide enough to accept the Amazon shop (my site is quite narrow).

I think it is time to add a shop for 2 reasons:

• Traffic is slowly climbing despite MSN totally dropping the site (if Google drop it it's over and out asta la vista baby - actually it wouldn't be over, I'd just press on until they came back and they would)
• It may encourage some visitors to come back. This is important as 80% of my visitors are first and last timers.

I can see traffic climbing as I add pages but the search engines are slow. Alexa (traffic rank compiler) seems to swing around a bit too. It seems to lag a bit and it can mislead particularly if your site is ranked outside the 100,000, which 99.95% are!

I have languished on about 600,000 for about 1.5 months but hope to drop into the 500,000 area soon with a far wind, but can't bank on it.

I hope MSN will return soon too as that would give the site a boost, which is much needed.

I have also added some contextual Amazon links on two pages. You just add some script code to the page in question and Amazon adds links to certain words and phrases on the page automatically. The links lead to Amazon products. This is really cool as some companies demand that your site has 500,000 hits per month before they do this. You'd have to be traffic ranked about 10,000 to get those kind of hits. I am impressed with Amazon on this service.

Ranking

Ranking in this context means Alexa ranking. This blog I am surprised to say is ranked just over 4 million. I think that's not bad since very little SEO stuff has taken place. And it is so easy to add content to this blog as the HTML side works so well, such as uploading photographs. It is just delightfully easy. The ease encourages me to write something as I don't get bogged down with HTML stuff and formatting stuff.

Another thing about the Google Blogger that I love is the labels. You don't need a navbar as you just tag the article with a name that describes it and Google lists the labels in the left margin. It makes a navbar for you as you go along. Neat.

The biggest difficulty in building a visited website is creating enough good content. That takes time and making it easy to type an article is a great plus.

Pictures of Cats is doing OK but stalling as MS have gone a bit silly and totally wiped me of the face of the internet. I am totally unlisted by MSN but fortunately Yahoo and Google as still listing me so I still get found only my hits have fallen due to no MSN searches.

I emailed MSN and they "kind of" admitted that there was a problem and asked me to re-submit the site and they said wait 2 weeks or so and I should be listed again. I really don't think that this is my website that is wrong but the way that the searech engines change the algorithms. I don't blame them they as are always trying to improve the way the search works but for website builders it means that the goal posts are being moved.

The overriding point though is that the search engines want to find the best content so if you wan to be found make it good. On that basis I am going over some of my pages and upgrading them and see what happens.

Ranking to POC website POC American Curl

The only thing

It's been a long time since I came to the blog. Too busy working and building the pictures of cats website.

If anyone is reading this and who is also building a website, say a blog, it is hard if you want o get seen. It doesn't matter one jot if you are a hobby webmaster or are building a blog like a diary not caring whether it is seen or not. But if you are trying to get seen amongst all the competition then it's a different ball game completely.

You have to apply a lot of SEO stuff, whenever you build a page. That slows you down a lot. There are lots of technical issues as well. Never mind the writing the stuff.

Anyway after that moan, my website is currently ranked 675,000 in the world. Not bad as it is only about 4 months old at a maximum.

Need to get the page rank up though. Actually I need to get a page rank..The answer is to keep building content and good inbound links. Keep going until you are there.