Joel Hainley

Well it’s only been two weeks since I wrote the original entry about hamtesting.com needing some SEO love. I’ve been pretty busy since then and while I’m not into the top page yet, I’m starting to build some traffic. If you look to the previous post you’ll see that my numbers were pitifully low.

I setup google analytics, google webmaster tools, and setup the google sitemap generator and have been tweaking the content structure of the individual pages, adding in meta tags, as well as making the content, and site structure, a little more friendly to search engines. All of this has been positively wonderful for getting some decent traffic numbers for my first couple of weeks at getting started with this.

The other thing that I’ve done is modified the home page to be an better explanation of how to utilize the site to prepare for your ham radio test. I’ve also given users the ability to simply browse the question pool without having to utilize the test preparation system or the review system to see the questions in the pool for the question they are interested in. There are some other user experience things that I want to focus on over the next couple of weeks that might significantly help with user retention. Here’s the numbers for the last two weeks ( please note : this information is from google analytics, my base numbers from the original post were from adsense, I’m not sure how closely these systems agree on any given data point . )

186 visitors
2,088 page views

So given that the totals for nov2007-jan2008 were 230 page views. I think I’ve hit my originally stated goals for traffic, so now it’s time to come up with some new goals. I’d like to work towards getting the trend to increase and figure out how to crack the first page on google’s results for some of the search terms I’ve identified as being good terms to focus on.

History  

I finished the basic functionality of hamtesting.com in July 2007. I wrote the whole thing in Ruby/Rails in a week and then spent some time trying to deploy it, dealing with a bunch of issues related to inefficient xml processing etc, making it play nicely with apache and whatnot. While sitting at a Super Happy Dev House I finally had enough with trying to deploy Rails when I already knew all of the issues with PHP, so I sat down and rewrote it in PHP.   I launched the basic testing module of the site about a week later after I made it a little bit prettier( all css based ). I then wrote the review module and released that about 2 months later.

Getting The Word Out

I made a couple of lame attempts at getting some visitors to the site. I made some posts to some of the enthusiast groups and told people that I met about it, hoping to generate some interest. However, I naively thought that it would get itself found by the internet since it was vastly superior to most of the free testing sites, and even superior to most of the pay software/sites. Unfortunately it never seemed to generate much interest, I have some guesses at number of visitors in a given month and it’s VERY VERY OBVIOUS that the word ISN’T getting out.

 Using the Brain

Highly underrated, I used my brain to think about why people weren’t using the site. Then I typed in “ham testing” and “amateur radio testing” and “arrl testing” into google and started clicking back through the pages. I never did find my website. So how are others supposed to find it?

The Plan and The Goal

They say you need a goal and a plan to get there. So I have a goal. Hamtesting.com showing up on the first page of results when some keywords I’ve identified as being the most relevant are searched on. The plan is all laid out, I’d like to get triple the traffic of my biggest month thus far by the end of April, and then I’ll set some more goals.

The Baseline

In an effort to measure progress I’m going to put up some very unscientific numbers for the last two months :

january 2008 : 102 page impressions

december 2007 : 65 page impressions

november 2007 :  63 page impressions

So with those numbers as a basis perhaps we can see how effective my efforts are at generating some users for the site. I really believe the product is top notch and can improve people’s chances at passing their tests and learning what they have problems with quickly. It’s top notch, just gotta get the users!