Hi Users,
Sorry for the big gap between blog posts, it has been a hectic couple of weeks, mainly as a result of a burning desire to get through an eBook which will be made available on the Kindle store.
Some of you may have noticed a sharp decline in page views which coincided with our last theme change, I can confirm that this decline did happen. To be a little more specific, we lost about 20% of our organic search engine traffic and about 40% of our page views.
After a lot of deliberation, a few tweaks, and a lot of analysis which concluded that most of our stuff is still ranked pretty highly, I (with the help of some SEO guys) concluded that the correlation between theme change and loss of reader activity was not a coincidence.
This is a big disappointment to me, particularly as I really liked the last design aesthetically. This time the basis of our theme change has purely been from a SEO standpoint. We were able to identify a couple of problems with the last theme, the lack of content ‘above the fold’ being a possible cause, whilst the undynamic homepage probably wasn’t passing too much juice around.
The fact that readers were staying on the site for less time is probably all the evidence that is required to conclude that a lot of content was getting well and truly buried. This theme offers us some solutions, the obvious one being that the homepage is very dynamic, it shows the latest posts from every category rather than just a couple. In addition, it also presents random posts from throughout the site in the sidebar! This can only help the flow of juice to old buried posts, as well as the flow of internal traffic to the far flung corners of the site.
We have already just seen the biggest traffic day since the decline, and expect this to continue. So, about this theme, asides from being proven as the quickest WordPress theme on the planet (with a few tweaks), there are also tonnes of features which can be found via this option on the toolbar:
I’ll leave you to explore those. Swift is well known for its SEO benefits, with many seasoned pros noting improved rankings within a week or so of having changed the theme, so I am looking forward to seeing where it leaves us. Like I said, impressions are already rising, and that has to be a good sign.
The New Rule
OK, we also have a new rule, and that is that no posts can start with an image. You must write a paragraph of text before any image is inserted, irrespective of whether you left align it, right align it or centre align it. There will be an AdSense ad going into that top left hand side, just like the previous theme, and aesthetically it looks much neater if text is wrapped around that AdSense unit. In addition, a few people have reported articles with no AdSense ads showing, a test showed that this often happens on articles which start with an image, and many were fixed when the image was moved down the page a little. This will not be applied in retrospective, you can change old content if you wish, but this will only be enforced for new content.
I need to finish this post off now and get on with inserting AdSense ads (yet again).
Cheers,
Ryan
My traffic bombed after the new update. Of course I did seem to have about 12 of my articles on the front page in the last design!!!
Ah it was you wot nicked by traffic on the last one was it lol … mine bombed after that one .. picking up a little bit though still not great … will hang in there and see what happens anyway
It takes a while for things to actually change, in terms of organic incoming traffic, the only thing that would have changed is internal traffic flow. I’m going to start building up backlinks again over the next week to help give it a push.
cheers Ryan … what’s the latest re the adsense ads please … only seeing one ad top right at the moment.
hhm. Ryan sounds like a good idea all aorund, but i’d love to know how much “text” will make the left ads come up?