trying to take the "little at a time" approach to seo. not stressed, but make it fun. like a puzzle to solve, y'kno?

i sucessfully managed to get all redirects working right, so everyone coming in with the www. prefix will get redirected without it to both the site and the forums. yay, me.

*traffic is going up gradually.* i'm currently getting about 600 hits a day, so i'm approaching levels pre site redesign. that's good news. bounce rate is also down from before by about 30-40%, so the traffic i'm getting seems better quality overall. and i'm getting a higher registration rate from the traffic thusfar...not enough data for solid comparisons over time, but that's the trend.

*i'm attritubing some of this to dropping the vb archive and links to showposts in favor of using the vbseo sitemap for se's, and using permalinks only for forum posts.* i figure the content-rich threads getting linked has to consistently come up higher in se rankings than the individual posts, even with fewer indexed...

*my adsense, however, is NOT going up* to the same levels as before, at about 1/4 of what it was. i suspect this is related to the differences in content that is available and the types of visitors i'm getting.

*i have lots of content that still needs to be imported into my new cms,* which is going to be a tech challenge and require a lot of manual tweaking...big time demands to get this up and running! this content (recipes) was also a big source of my former se traffic, so i know this will impact it. and since the recipes were visitor submitted and many of so-so quality, it was also probably a big source of exits via adsense...

*next steps involve working on getting my content up over time and some serious adsense tweaking* to see if i can't get that revenue up. if i can get my adsense optimization and placement set up effectively, then the traffic building will continue to help with revenue.

*it does feel good to see the traffic trending upward, though.* and for some reason, yahoo slurp is ALL OVER the site, every time i check. googlebot comes to visit, but slurp seems to be moving in.

oh well...overall, i'm satisified with my progress and will continue to work, tweak and ponder along the way...

View the Original Blog Post Here...