Answer Hero How To Videos

Archive for the ‘Results -The Good, The Bad and The Mingin’ Category

Finally we have received the design for the AnswerHero.co.uk site!

With over 5000 pages now indexed by Google and the visitor numbers steadily increasing implementing a user friendly design has become ever more important.

Rather than work on all of the functionality we have decided to get the new design live immediately and then work on the features that have not yet been coded separately.

There are a couple of tweeks that we need the designers to make – the most important one being that they removed the h1 tag from the top of the answer pages, which would have a negative effect on search engine rankings. I have simply replaced this but it looks a bit ugly now so I have passed it back to them.

One new feature we have added is the search. On a site such as this, with many thousands of questions and answers, the search is an extremely important feature.

The easy option here would have been to use the Google search “widget” but that would not fit in with the style of the new design so I coded up a simple search script in ASP.

The interesting thing now will be to see what difference the new design makes to both the bounce rate and the time on site. We will keep you posted!

Well there are now 3990 pages in Google and we are getting about 200 visitors a day to the site so it’s looking good.

As you can see from the Google Anlaytics below the bounce rate is very high but that is to be expected as we have not yet implemented the new design which should be ready any day now.

Once we have this we can see how much of a difference it makes to the analytics and, as usual, we’ll post a blog to let you know.

At this point we could decide to put some advertising, such as AdSense, on the site and try to get some income from the visitors we are already getting but as the site is so ugly it could cause problems if someone from Google did a manual review so we will wait until the new design is live before making any decisions on advertising.

Google has now indexed 341 pages from the AnswerHero.co.uk site and the blog.

There have been a few visitors from Google using the following search phrases:

• who sells huggy buggy?
• alien in goo egg
• cordosyl
• how do you make ozzboz alian goo
• how to make a wrist corsage video
• indegestion tablets+dogs
• lily wrist corsage
• lucky joe hoodie

As you can see a lot of these phrases are not an exact match with a question that the page on the site is targeting but as mentioned previously that is the beauty of the Long Tail!

Just a quick update to say there are now 71 pages in Google.

Initially the blog was indexed, which makes sense as we have done nothing to get links into the main AnswerHero site. Google has then found a link to the main site from one of the posts and has been adding more pages as it follows the internal links.

In terms of search engine traffic there have only been a couple of visits to the main site as a result of a Google search and I’m not sure how many there have been to the blog as the Google Analytics plugin that I added doesn’t seem to be working on the individual posts!
I am going to look for an alternative plugin.

After a lot of trial and error we found that it was the Tweet This plugin that was causing the Wordpress to hang. Even trying to disable it in the Admin menu caused it to hang so in the end I simply renamed the directory on the server and we are working again.

I am now on the look out for an alternative Social Bookmarking plugin.

Well we have been happily posting away then all of a sudden I update a post and Wordpress has started hanging!

After viewing the different categories it seems to be a few posts that are causing the problem.
This is one reason why I hate using third party software – you have no control over what is going on.
We are not getting any error messages and I haven’t got a clue where to look.

Basically I managed to figure out, after some trial and error, that deleting the last few posts that were amended has solved the problem but now I can’t re-post them as it just keeps hangning.

There is a goog chance that when I publish this post the same thing is going to happen.

I will have to get on the the guy who installed Wordpress for us to see if he can find out what is wrong.

So no more posts for a while I am afraid.

Update Indeed after posting this the same thing happened. I will add this post when everything is back to normal.

For the moment it is just saved as a draft.

I am now registering for the Wordpress Support Forum and will see if anyone elese has had the same problem and if I can’t find an answer I’ll post a question on there.

Well after creating and submitting the podcast to iTunes this morning it has now become available from the iTunes Store. If you do a search for “AnswerHero” you’ll see my ugly mug.

Google has now moved on from indexing this blog and has started to add pages from the main AnswerHero.co.uk site.

As of this morning there are 18 pages in the Google index and two of the Q&A pages are ranking number one for their target terms:

• how much would a kona cycle cost you?
• who sells huggy buggy?

Obviously these terms are extremely long tail however we should find that we will get traffic from people searching for variations of the phrase and therefore start to get a trickle of visitors fairly soon.

As mentioned in my previous post on The Long Tail, getting ANY pages to rank this high is a great motivator and allows us to feel confident about putting additional effort into the site.

One thing we will now consider is paying someone to start answering the questions that are ranking so we do not fall into the trap of Google thinking we are thin on content, which we obviously are at the moment! We’ll let you know if we decide to do this and how much it is costing.

Google Analytics

I forgot to mention previously that we also added Google Analytics to the site so once we start to see some organic Google traffic I will update the blog to show you the kind of traffic we are getting.

I haven’t bothered to add a post about Google Analytics at this time as the instructions for installing it are clear enough on the Google Analytics pages themselves. Just to say though that we installed them just before the < /body > element so they would not affect the load times of the pages. It is more important to keep a visitor than to find out where they came from just before they hit the Back Button!

A quick update – as of this morning there are now 3 pages in the Google index.
One of the pages is ranking in position number 1 for it’s target term already but Google tends to favour new sites for a while and can then reduce the rankings once it has had chance to index the entire site and see how many links are present from other sites.

The target term is “Keywords in Blog URLs“:

For those of you who don’t know how to find out how many pages there are you type “site:” followed by the domain name into the Google search box.

Just a quick update to say that our first page is now in Google (do a search for “answerhero” to see the listing).
The page in question is the last blog post I added earlier today – The Long Tail

We had not submitted anything to the search engines manually nor had we added any links from our other sites so this was either a case of Google finding the link in the A4UForum Blog area or as a result of the Wordpress XML sitemap plugin which automatically informs the search engines when a new page is added.

We will let you know as and when Google or other search engines start to dig deeper.