I thought it was time for a little update on my mole niche website
I had some major problems with the site for the last 2 weeks, and finally tracked it down.
As you might remember, the site is being hosted by Atspace, a free hosting company.
For some reason my site was actually down for 2 weeks, and I couldn't work out why it wasn't working, after all a few of the other sites on the same Atspace account (yes I have more than one ;) ) were working fine.
I have finally worked out the problem, Atspace were having problems with phishing connected with Yahoo and Aol, maybe just to do with images from those locations, but they refuse to go into exact details. Anyway, they are blocking, among other thing, some references to both Yahoo and Aol, mainly images. I had a link button from Yahoo "Add to my Yahoo" on the site for the RSS feed of the email subscription.
While fixing it, I decided to do a major overhall.
My keyword density was far too high, and from the data I saw, those who visited the site rarely stayed for more than a glance at the first page.
This is a content site, I don't want to scare people away or "squeeze them", I want to draw them in.
Gone are the requestor popups (you know the ones you click that auto-fire Outlook express to subscribe to an email list)
Gone is most of the "sales speak" from the front page
I have added a nice "suggestion" for people to work their way down the menu progressively. I hope it works a little as a multi-step pre-sell, but who knows, most of the gurus really concentrate on single page sites, or maybe with an upsell.
Alternatively they do massive content sites.
Part of my content is "research links" which I will actually be expanding in a number of directions.
Over time I will develop my own content, and gradually phase the research links into the background.
I have now added a blog, this time "remote hosted", so I can add pictures easily, and it shares traffic with the main site. This is going to allow me to add a lot of content very fast whilst I am researching, and then it can be compiled at a later date in the main site. Blogger is an insanely fast research tool.
So how are we doing in the search engines?
Well Google droped most of the site due to downtime - hopefully sitemaps will get it back in fast.
MSN the site is currently no.2 on "ground moles"
MSN 3rd site listed on "get rid of moles" (of those that refer to the animal and not skin, actually 8th listing from 5 sites.
Yahoo, also dropped out, but the new blog should work wonders there
Now ideally I would like to get the site to No1 on the search term "mole" on Google.
I have some ideas for some totally unique articles to help, and most importantly some expanded content to add to my main site to go with it, and it is all Public Domain .gov stuff !
Give me 6 months ;)
