Fast-forward to July and now August.  I started to notice during July a definite drop in speed on Slicehost.  A whole percentage point in fact.  What had been quick was more sluggish, though certainly quicker than most sites.  Now that Google has admitted site speed is a part of their ranking factor for websites – read Matt Cutts article, he suggests this is not a panic issue – and given I saw results for myself in the additional speed verses rank I figured it wouldn’t hurt to play with what was reportedly a quicker service recently – Linode.

Naturally – still running on NginX and loving the server response with that.  Still miles faster than Apache.

The results was a massive speed difference.  Still awaiting third party confirmation on the exact figures – which I’ll post when I have them for comparison – but according to Google webmaster tools we’ve moved up – and to quote “This is faster than 73% of sites”.  Up from 64%.  Which was, to my mind, worth the effort of trialling it using this blog – as is my custom.  It was gratifying indeed to receive an email message from Steph G at FollowSteph noting a sudden change in SERP for this blog.  So – over came the other sites. 

Adverts?  WTF?

Yes.  It’s true, your eyes are not deceiving you.  I’ve placed two adverts for products on this blog.  I’ve said time and time again I hate Google adds, they are messy and spammy looking to my taste.  So there are still none of those here.  Rather the adds are for two products I both use and heartily endorse.  Being Woothemes – arguably the best of the best in WordPress themes and WPMUDEV for stunningly powerful WordPress plugins.   Between these two subscriptions – I have developer accounts with both – I have streamlined the number of plugins I use on this blog and my websites, such as MixAction, and increased their search engine spider readability to boot.  Lovely clean tools.  So I’m happy to endorse them, and yep – if you click the links they do drop a cookie and they are affiliate links.  Given the amount of traffic I get from non mISV’s or ISV’s for articles on rip-off sites like NowDownload it seemed reasonable to spread the load a little in terms of costs.

Seriously though.  If you’re looking for decent themes and plugins as ISV’s you can’t go past these two.  I tried the others, like ThemeForest and so on, certainly a lot cheaper, but frankly most of them are simply not up to par at all.  The backend for Woothemes is a delight, the plugins from WPMUDEV are fantastic (they have a great shopping cart in beta too).  Haven’t met anything close to these.  I’m about to trial the Thesis theme soon, which I’ve also licensed and which has caused an enormous  row in WordPress and GPL circles due to it’s non distributive license – recently partially revoked – and while it’s certainly a clean theme it’s also an ornery one.  It’s power is also it’s biggest drawback when it comes to time.  Matt Cutts uses it on his blog, as do a number of other notaries and I may trial it here once I trick something original up with it.

Finally…

I’ve succumbed to the Dark Site and purchased an Apple iPhone – the 3G, the aerial on the 4th generation will be a problem for me out in the sticks beyond Melbourne’s outer edge.  Frankly I’m enamoured.  I generally loath mobile phones, but this ones actually useful.  Synchronizing appointments, contacts, mail etc with Outlook is great and the built in iPod is awesome as a car player, cars being something else I replaced recently, upgrading from a little four cylinder Nissan Pulsar to a nice comfortable 4 litre six cylinder Ford Falcon.

Scott Kane

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1. Launched CDROO.com Royalty Free Music, aimed at the theater sound cue industry for our product MixAction, but also for podcasters, bloggers, video creators and handy for ISV’s.
2. I posted about content writing for websites being hard work and fun.
3. Posted here I intended to, in a sense, replicate what was done June 2008 here in an effort to bring MixAction to market – goal July 29th as a beta at the minimum.

So how’s all that been going then?

1. and 2. CDROO And Content

Pleased to say my contention in respect of content really paid dividends with CDROO.  The site went live on Sunday 7th of June 2009, previously it was offline, pointing to a “Currently Offline” page with no content, all database driven so therefore invisible to the search engines and no sitemap.xml file to cheat with.  As of yesterday (just on a week later) CDROO has made it to page one in Google for what are, for that site, important keywords.  Money where my mouth is time, so:

You can click the image to the right to zoom in.

Basically the site has begun to appear on page one in Google for a number of competitive keywords and in the example to the left extremely competitive keywords of “Royalty Free Music”.  Not all Google engines in all TLD’s reflect this yet, which is quite common with Google, there’s a bit of catch-up that goes on with the TLD’s.  But it’s a pleasing result and it’s basically down to rich content.

Now, the thing is here that while CDROO has nothing to do with software sites, it’s music, the keywords being targeted are more competitive than most Micro ISV’s software products.  There are domains on page one of that result who’ve been there since the turn of the century.  Some of these players are huge with very large websites.  There are no download sites to help them get there, CDROO has a Google PR value of only 3 (it’s been offline for almost 8 months or more and most of that PR exists due to this blog).  It’s down to the content there, there are no Adwords campaigns for it running now or previously.  I’ve made a point of posting this, not as a pat on the back or even to refute the nonentity who posted a comment last week decrying the article I wrote on content – and to be fair there’s a comment in the same post from an ISV supporting the claims I made on content so it wasn’t all negative.  Rather to illustrate this process is not magic, it’s not about silly coloured SEO hats or anything else.  It’s actually about rolling up your sleeves, being creative with content and putting in the hard yards.

Did WordPress, the engine the site uses for delivery of all content, play a role?  Absolutely.  No question.  The right plug-ins, using it’s rich features such as categories and tags certainly played a role, Google and the other engines are eating it up.  Sales are small, no question, but visits are increasing and as sound and music is to a degree subjective it will take time to turn the SEO result into sales as the collection of available music and sound on the site grows.

3. July 29th Goal For MixAction

OK, this is actually the tougher one of the two.  Unlike this time last year I’m now either running or building six websites, including this blog, so there’s less of me to go round.  But yes, yesterday was a productive day coding and a good start to the self push I started yesterday – and I got an article written for MixAction’s own blog – something I now schedule to do two to three times a week.  MixAction’s website still doesn’t rank number one for every keyword, but it’s nearly always in the top two results there and indeed in most instances does rank number one for main keywords and I’m seeing it overtake those it wasn’t number one for over time as I continue to write content.

The people using the tool Keyword spy and WhoIS lookups that “analyse” the site  that I see in my MixAction site logs daily?

You’re doing it wrong! 

Looking towards an update on coding next post.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use. – Wendell Johnson

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