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.

To thumbnail or not to thumbnail

I need some feedback from visitors to my website Pictures of Cats on how best to present Helmi Flick's fine photographs.

By the way, Helmi is a very generous person. A lady in the true sense. I want to maximize the use of her photographs and to show them off.

Large size images are better but as usual everything that we do on the internet is compromised by current technology. Large photos load slowly. My site's Navbar is made up of images and sometimes loads a little slowly. Also the site's page is narrow.

These factors encourage me to link to large images on simple web pages from the "main site" by thumbnails. But is this what visitors want? There is a resistance to clicking on thumbnails perhaps.

Yet Fickr is made up of thumbnails so that tells me it is alright. I had a little moment of enlightenment today. Thumbnail images have to be just small enough to prevent the viewer from seeing enough of the image to satisfy him/her. That will encourage a click through to the large image. Flickr use thumbnails that are 75px square. I intend to adopt that.

So, I have decided that my thumbnails are a fraction too large. What do you think?

Building a website about cats

You would be forgiven for thinking that there are a gazillion cat websites. There are actually not that many websites exclusively dedicated to cats above 1m Alexa. And there is only one dedicated to the very best pictures of cats supported by carefully researched facts. Yes, I promoting my own website Pictures of Cats and I shouldn't.

But the effort that has gone into getting it to the position it is in now has been awesome. And I am not saying that it is in a good position; just an OK position. Currently ranked about 620k in Alexa and falling (!) having risen to 608k.

The hard part is to keep building great content. It takes a long time and you cannot go too fast and skimp on production as you will, in the end, lose visitors.

The key is to deliver information that is really useful. My modus operandi is to combine the finest cat photographs (and art - yet to do this) with carefully researched facts supported by my thoughts covering wider issues.

If someone reads this (and I have no illusions believe me) then if you want to build a website think hard about it. Make sure that you are very interested in the subject matter of the website as this will keep you going (vital as sometimes it is hard to keep going as it is massively hard to to get seen no matter how well you have SEOed the site).

Keep disciplined and resolve to build pages regularly. Try and build say 200-400 pages (a lot) all of good quality. The search engines will reward you for it.

Don't try and trick the search engines. You can't beat father Google he is too good at this kind of stuff. But use Google and befriend him. Make it a symbiotic relationship.

I have been trying to get a page rank and am still unranked. I have 190 inbound links some from sites ranked in the 300-400k and I am on the home page of these sites. One day Google will be kind enough to page rank me. I've been going since June 2007.

Head down and press on. Like a golfer about to win a major championship it pays to not look at the scoreboard and just keep building quality content.

SBI

Hi, I'm back and I know no-one knows (yet...) but things are gradually changing and it's really thanks to 2 things.

Firstly, my determination to make this website work and earn some money to give away to cat charities. That would make me happy.

Secondly, a thanks to Ken Evoy the President of SiteSell and Site Build It (SBI). My site is an SBI site and without the SBI mentality and Search Engine optimization techniques I would not have achieved anything like I have.

The SBI mentality is very clear. It is not about quick fixes and fast bucks but creating quality content. This must be the way. It must be a long term objective, to achieve traffic. And the only way to get there in the long term is through quality as it endures longer than the quick fix stuff.

Essentially, in time (and I reckon the journey from starting a website to achieving an Alexa ranking of say 300,000 takes about 2 plus years or more) excellent content will keep visitors and get new visitors. The way the site looks (its "look and feel") although of some importance is much less important than the content - what the site says and does.

Look for example at Craigslist, a retro style website of enormous success. It is very functional and does it function.

This is (as they say) not a beauty parade. The most beautiful site doesn't win. The best site wins and the best site is the one with the best content as after all a website is something to read.

This blog is now about my journey to a successful website. I will no doubt look back with a smile. My target is to make £500 a month from the site.

I am currently ranked 648,ooo by Alexa and at one time it looked like going up (and it still might). But, you know, Alexa is not that accurate for sites ranked below 100,000 so not too much should be read into the figures if you are outside that figure.

I am also working on Page rank by slowly getting good inbound links from well ranked sites. This is a slow process as well and the inbound links that I have are not yet showing up in Alexa.