Like most people in the web industry I got several personal eternity projects waiting for execution. As unlikely as it may seem my recent 3 week sick leave (due to frontal sinusitis) provided me a change to finally tackle a project I had been planning for several years. And since I usually like to weave my projects together to get maximum efficiency I think dealing blog related SEO & marketing issues in SEOMoz would make a fun-to-make/read article series.
Without further introductions (they come in later) I would like to introduce Ringtone Search – a blog about mobile information society & technology.
I originally had an idea to make a ringtones search service similar to one we operate in Finland but since we couldn’t find appropriate partners the project was iced. The domain was purchased about a year ago, but it has never been used or promoted online (for some reason it has dummy page indexed by Google, most likely due to a misspelled link) . So this could make a nice sandbox example...
This is also a good candidate for possible geo-location issues. The server locates in UK. I come from Finland. And target audience is mainly US. So it should have a very varying base of incoming links by the time all is done…. I believe Google has no problems with this equation but If MSN follows the same track as with our main site, this blog will be MIA in everywhere else but MSN UK.
Since this is more or less a sidekick project (I do have to work with client sites and run my business) I have made few very simple guidelines I follow with this site:
- make quality, not quantity. Limited time means low post count. This should however be equated by higher quality.
- make it interesting. Everything begins from the title like (I just love How to Get Lots of RSS Readers to Click-Through entry by Rand) and ends up on having real content issues. Since I have a very long work history with mobile devices and applications development/marketing I think it's time I share some of my views with rest of the world.
- Don’t count. This project has zero goals / expectations when it comes to revenue. In terms of desing, SEO etc. I would consider this to be very close to "average blog" (ie. zero budget).
Before I started writing this article I sent an application for Google AdSense. Now, approx. 33 minutes later the application is approved and the site is serving public service ads… It will be interesting to see what kind of revenue this site can provide and in which time range. It is also possible that at some point I switch over to Yahoo or MSN offerings and make some level of comparison.
Below are listed few topics I have in mind for future blog topics, but if you have ideas be sure to ad yours to the list (but before that, please read at least one entry in the ringtone-search.net blog, so you understand the nature of topics/content I’m working with):
- Studying the markets and selecting topics
- Selecting the right blogging platform for the job
- Keywords in domain name – do they matter
- Sandboxing
- Geo-location issues
- Relying on quality content vs. link/publicity campaigns
- Search engine traffic vs. other sources of traffic
- Ad positioning
That's what being geeky is about ;)
btw.. the results for above G-query changed to something more meaningfull overnight. Now the site is in position #72 for extract phrase search, otherwise mia (got to find time to work with backlinks)
As otherwise, technorati and gada have proved to be an interesting sources of traffic (especially with some long tail / misspelled terms).
Thanks for sharing, 2K. It's interesting to have stats and data on someone else's site (particularly from another country).
updates...
* google updated their index to include new mainpage. So far it shows only mainpage tough I know it has indexed all the subs as well as feed.
* also first bits of adsense revenue have been generated....
* yahoo... still showing nothing. I know the site is indexed by slurp...
Questions...
* Why this Google search returns only 50 uniques out of 370,000 results..? And do you think it is possible for ringtone-search.net to get into the "visible" resultset (please, be specific why yes or no).
just decided to share some statistics on first 48 hours:
* all major search engines indexed the site within first 24h (note: the only link is/was this seomoz link)
* googlebot was the fastest to crawl (only 30 seconds after the site was submitted using "submit a site" feature)
* msn was the fastest one to include new content on their search. Amazingly the two entries were visible in less than 12 hours time. Google and yahoo still show the old dummy page...
* msn was / is also the first search engine to bring in a visitor to the site
* traffic outside search engine scope (listed only services bringing more than 10 visitors): seomoz, digg, blogilista.fi (a finnish alternative to delicious) and gada.be... combined approx. 150 unique visitors...
* adsense ads content... mainly premium mobile content ads in english. Also noted some ads in japanese and french too. As expected, the targeting is still bit off...