[Duke]

Originally Posted by Vautrin

I was wondering how the forum performed in its new format? Are we having more page views / month?

This is actually a tough question to answer because in truth, I have no idea. The one major downside of the site upgrades is there seems to be no way for me to track statistics accurately any more whereas the old site tracked virtually everything. I've looked at stat tracking modules but there are none (that I can find) that will track the Joomla portion (main page, news) and the vBulletin portion (forums) as well as the Wiki portion (Life Support Dictionary, coming soon).

In an attempt to track what’s going on, I started a google analytics account and added tracking code to all pages within the forum theme and the main sites theme. The problem is that I'm not sure exactly how google arrives at it's numbers because I don't believe them to be entirely accurate. For example, google analytics says that the forums have been spidered by google (88 visits) and yahoo (1 visit) which is complete malarkey because I know for a fact that I've seen yahoo slurp spiders in the forum more than once as well as MSN bots yet MSN isn't even mentioned. I've also seen one other "Unknown Bot" that was visiting for 2 days straight and I see no mention of that either.

If I had to guess though I'd say all of our site statistics reverted back to the same status they were at around 3.5 years ago. Much of this is my fault but I just don't have the funds at my disposal to make this site place high in the SERPS right now. To get the forums placing higher in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages), I need to have cleaner url's and that software costs around $170.00 which I just can't afford right now given the site alone costs me over $100/month.

The other problem is that the old site had high placement in the SERPS for many of our targeted keywords so we ended up with decent traffic from Search Engine Queries. This is no longer the case though because the change in site software means a change in url's as well. Essentially, anyone who tried to find us via a Search Engine over the past month or more has either found our test site or an error 404 page. Even though they both have re-directs to the main page, I doubt that many people bother to try because an error page is simply an annoyance and many people just hit the back button as a result.

There is good news of course so I thought I'd leave that for last. In this past month, I've learned more about being a webmaster than my accumulated knowledge over the past 4 years. This time around, I'm actually building a site properly from the ground up and although it may take time, we'll see the benefit in the form of traffic and new membership before the year is up. I will be digging into my RRSP a bit due to issues with my car (again) so I'll likely pull out the $170.00 needed for the forum SEO (Search Engine Optimization) software.

The news from the old site has been corrupted over the course of all our server moves so all stories published in the past 3 years are completely useless. Each and every story has to be re-written and since I have to do all this manually, I'm also picking the more popular articles and editing them in the interests of updated info as well as SEO. Following are some of our newly edited articles and how they place in google.com:


Keyword(s) and Keyword(s) Phrases Currently Being Tracked:


Attracting the Opposite Sex:
- May 27, 2007: Page 3, Result 21: Results 21 - 30 of about 932,000 for attracting the opposite sex. (0.08 seconds)
- May 31, 2007: Page 1, Result 10: Results 1 - 10 of about 893,000 for attracting the opposite sex. (0.15 seconds)


Blaming Gaming:
- May 24, 2007: Page 1, Result 4: Results 1 - 10 of about 502,000 for blaming gaming. (0.12 seconds)
- May 27, 2007: Page 1, Result 5: Results 1 - 10 of about 518,000 for blaming gaming. (0.15 seconds)
- May 31, 2007: Page 1, Result 7: Results 1 - 10 of about 520,000 for blaming gaming. (0.13 seconds) May require editing.


Fussy Food Habits:
- May 24, 2007: Page 1, Result 5: Results 1 - 10 of about 222,000 for fussy food habits. (0.06 seconds)


Growing to Love Your Baby:
- May 24, 2007: Page 1, Result 1. This search is still being indexed under joomla.lifesupporters.com so all traffic is seeing error 404 pages instead of an article. Results 1 - 10 of about 11,600,000 for growing to love your baby. (0.11 seconds)
Finally being indexed under lifesupporters.com: www.lifesupporters.com/family_friendly_news/my_child/growing_to_love_your_baby/ - 23k -
-May 27, 2004: Page 1, Result 1: Results 1 - 10 of about 19,800,000 for growing to love your baby. (0.21 seconds)


Justice for Michael:
- May 25, 2007 (AM): Page 2, Result 17: Results 11 - 20 of about 63,900,000 for Justice for Michael. (0.16 seconds)
- May 25, 2007 (PM): Page 3, Result 23: Results 21 - 30 of about 67,200,000 for Justice for Michael. (0.22 seconds) NOOOOO!
- If it drops much farther it will require editing.
- May 27, 2007 (AM): Page 3, Result 28: Results 21 - 30 of about 63,900,000 for Justice for Michael. (0.16 seconds)
- Requires Editing
- Edited May 27, 2007.
- May 27, 2007 (PM): Page 3, Result 26: Results 21 - 30 of about 59,900,000 for Justice for michael. (0.16 seconds)
- May 31, 2007: Page 1, Result 10: Results 1 - 10 of about 61,900,000 for Justice for michael. (0.19 seconds) Wow, big change due to edit?


PayPal Scam:
- May 26, 2007: Page 28, Result 277: Results 271 - 280 of about 1,390,000 for PayPal Scam. (0.15 seconds)
- May 31, 2007: Page 13, Result 125: Results 121 - 130 of about 1,630,000 for Paypal scam. (0.10 seconds) Big Move Forward.


Signs of Child Suicide:
- May 27, 2007: Page 2, Result 16: Results 11 - 20 of about 1,370,000 for signs of child suicide. (0.12 seconds)
- May 31, 2007: Page 1, Result 6: Results 1 - 10 of about 1,380,000 for signs of child suicide. (0.21 seconds)


Temperature, Humidity and Sleep:
- May 27, 2007: Page 1, Result 1: Results 1 - 10 of about 1,030,000 for Temperature, Humidity and Sleep. (0.15 seconds)


Understanding Depression:
- May 24, 2007: Page 6, Result 56: Results 51 - 60 of about 3,940,000 for Understanding Depression. (0.11 seconds)
- May 27, 2007: Page 6, Result 59: Results 51 - 60 of about 3,700,000 for understanding depression. (0.15 seconds) May require editing.
- May 27, 2007 (PM): Page 6, Result 53: Results 51 - 60 of about 3,700,000 for Understanding Depression. (0.15 seconds)
- May 31, 2007 (PM): Page 6, Result 52: Results 51 - 60 of about 3,510,000 for understanding depression. (0.08 seconds) Edit.


Why Women Smell Good:
- May 24, 2007 (AM): Page 1, Result 2: Results 1 - 10 of about 1,650,000 for why women smell good. (0.33 seconds)
- May 24, 2007 (PM): Page 1, Result 3: Results 1 - 10 of about 1,450,000 for Why women smell good. (0.27 seconds)
- May 27, 2007: Page 1, Result 2: Results 1 - 10 of about 1,690,000 for why women smell good. (0.33 seconds)


RECENTLY ADDED: (not sorted curently)


Show your children you care:
- May 28, 2007: Page 1, Result 7: Results 1 - 10 of about 84,100,000 for show your children you care. (0.12 seconds)
- May 31, 2007: Page 1, Result 4: Results 1 - 10 of about 83,200,000 for show your children you care. (0.11 seconds)


Unfaithful Partner?:
- May 28, 2007: Page 2, Result 11: Results 11 - 20 of about 592,000 for unfaithful partner. (0.10 seconds) Requires Editing.


Confronting Self Pity:
- May 28, 2007: Page 1, Result 1: Results 1 - 10 of about 422,000 for confronting self pity. (0.22 seconds)


Here is a great example of what google is looking for when the spider the page:

***** Lifesupporters.com Google Page Cache for Understanding Depression.

=> click me.

- The highlighted words indicates the keyword(s)/keyword phrases.
- The frequency of highlighted words indicates keyword(s) density.

If we write articles like this, the SERPS will be kind to us.

As you can see, there is clearly some progress in the way we post news now and the additional software has helped by cleaning up the url's considerably. For example, which url is more relevent to you:

1. http://www.lifesupporters.com/family...s/cms_testing/
2. http://www.lifesupporters.com/content/view/35/1/
3. http://www.lifesupporters.com/phpnuk...rder=0&thold=0

I'm hoping you all can see that 1. is the best a url can get, it's clean, it's relevant and it should help our indexing (I hope) as it's done good so far.

1. Current url formatting at lifesupporters.com, the only portion not to be formatted right now is the Link Directory but that will come in time.
2. Old url format of the Joomla Main Site prior to addition of SEF Advance.
3. Old url format of an article on the old lifesupporters.com website now found here.

As you can see, a lot of work has been done to minimize the damage done in the site move but the damage was unavoidable sadly. Keeping that in mind, we are experiencing a massive traffic slowdown (how much though I cannot tell) but it will not only catch up to the old traffic we had, it will double and perhaps triple it (at least) inside of 2 years. The whole idea is to finally get some exposure to lifesupporters.com and we're finally on a solid enough foundation (from a software standpoint) for this to actually happen.

The last point I'll add is our Life Support Directory. This one project alone will help place us in the top positions for many search queries with a billion or so competing indexed content. If we make sure that all articles within this Directory are structured in the interests of SEO, the traffic we gain from it will boggle the mind when you consider the following placements:

Abuse: Results 1 - 10 of about 338,000,000 for abuse [definition]. (0.05 seconds)

Life Support: Results 1 - 10 of about 1,020,000,000 for Life Support [definition]. (0.19 seconds)

Death: Results 1 - 10 of about 357,000,000 for Death [definition]. (0.07 seconds)

We plan on covering all social issues from A - Z so if someone types in one of these issues, if we've done our job right they should see Lifesupporters.com - Life Support or Lifesupporters.com - Abuse on the top of page one in google, yahoo, msn, all over the world.

This is the plan of course and I'm fairly optimistic we'll get there it's just there's a lot of work to do between now and then.

I'll post some traffic graphs this weekend for you all to see what kind of stats I have so far.

Ken