What does the data say?

It is day 10 of the 100 blogs in 100 days challenge and it's time to have a look at the metrics. I will do this every 10 days to see how things are progressing.

I searched for these terms using Google (in a browser that I was not logged into my Google account with, this can distorts the results if you are.)

Well I wasn't expecting much change over the first 10 days but it looks like it may be working. All my search terms but 1 have improved, the first two, the most important ones, have improved substantially, by 11 and 12 places respectively. And my name and Leeds by one place. But 'MODX Leeds' has dropped by 2 places. It's on page one already, so that might be that other sites that register for those keywords have improved.

And I'm getting 2.6 more visitors a day to the site. That might be because of my increased social media activity, and it is only over 10 days so we can't read too much into that.

It could be because I fixed some problems. Last August I restructured the site in a major way, splitting the blog in half and making it two blogs. It made sense logically but the Google ranking really dropped (it was hovering around page 2 and 3 for the above search terms). But during that change I inadvertently made some changes that probably didn't help.

It is recommended that all sites have a sitemap.xml file. It is a list of all the pages on your site with and indication of their relative importance and how often they change. It helps the Google crawlers document your site. When I restructured the blog one of the new blogs got left off the sitemap. So in effect it looked like the blog had lost half its content in the sitemap.

I would be surprised though if this could have so negatively effected my ranking, because Google should have still been able to find the pages by following links within the site.

Maybe it was a combination of this and just neglect (updating the website very infrequently)

Anyway, starting this blog challenge has bought my attention back to the site, and I have been doing a few SEO nips and tucks:

• Sorting the sitemap out
• Restructuring the h1, h2, h3 header tags

Most of those changes have been over the last couple of days so I wouldn't have expected Google to pick up on them so quickly ( though Webmaster Tools tells me that I am visited by Google Crawlers on a daily basis). So maybe the blogging is helping out.

But anyway the experiment hasn't been running very long so there isn't much data to go on. We shall see what happens over the coming 90 days.

Website development daily time-sheet

What website work has been done today?

Total: 12 hours 21 minutes

Well that was a marathon day!

Slightly frustrating in parts as went up a bit of blind alley when trying to figure out how to set up the next and previous buttons for the journal when in fact the actual solution was quite straight forward. But I did learn some new stuff while I was up the alley!