Origin of this blog dates back to October, 2007 when it was first published to offer tips and guidance on entrance and recruitment exams...
Origin of this blog dates back to October, 2007 when it was first published to offer tips and guidance on entrance and recruitment exams. Close to 7 years has since passed and till last month I had kept the same look and feel of the blog, a screenshot of which you can find in the left. This was mostly because of my laziness and also because I cared the least for blog traffic – without doing anything, the blog used to attract more than a million page hit per month.. Moreover, people who love the content on my site would come anyway – Google.com is not the best looking site after all, Am I right?
But I was in fact wrong! Why? Because:
1.0 My blog is not “Google.com” – although the intention is same: to provide helpful and free info to people.
2.0 If I am supposed to be offering helpful and free info to people, it should cater to as many people as possible – so traffic counts after all!
As a result, because Internet law had changed (since the blog origin in 2007) courtesy Google (more than
90% of my traffic comes from Google searches - I do not go and beg anyone to visit my blog, you see! ), my laziness did not notice the drop in blog traffic count. This was until some two months back, when I found less number of people to be visiting my blog. Less? It is some 100K visit per month now, compared to what was 1000K an year ago..
There was a heart ache – how can this happen? I have not changed anything and I am still offering the same kind of info to people, without asking for anything…
The truth was: I SHOULD HAVE CHANGED and that too, LONG BACK… to keep pace with the change in Internet law (aka Google Search algo!)….
So in May this year I thought I should change the way I was treating my blog – let me change the look and feel of the blog and also find out what is wrong and how to improve the blog traffic… In other words, I decided to go in for following two kinds of changes:
1.0 Blog Template Optimization: Change the template (i.e. the way you see and interact with the blog)
2.0 Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Find how to maximize the traffic by trying to rank in topmost places in Google Search Result.
So I first decided to buy a decently good looking and user-friendly template and zeroed in on “Squid” template from “themeforest.net”. It had most of the things that I wanted and also the price was not much – USD 20 only.
After buying the template and installing the same, I found to my horror that there were a lot of bugs – there were Java Script Errors, Redundant CSS elements etc. and therefore, the page loading time was high!
I solved many of these issues myself but yet some problems remained for which I had no answers. That is the time I thought I should seek help from the experts on these fields. In other words I needed two experts:
1. One who would optimize the blog template so that it loads fast.
2. One who would perform SEO Audit to improve my visibility in Google Search Result.
Now where can you find the freelancers who can do these jobs?
I found “freelancer.com” and “Odesk.com” was two such places in which you can post your requirements and invite freelancers to do it.
I preferred “Odesk.com” and posted these requirements as following two jobs:
How was the experience and were my objectives met?
This is the topic of my next exclusive article: How my blog loads faster now – courtesy Satinder Singh. It tells you in what shape the blog was and how this freelancer improved it.
On the other hand, the freelancer working on improving SEO aspect of this blog is currently on the job and if he meets the objectives, I am going to post a similar article to tell you about him as well.
These blog posts are being made to help you improve your blog/website too, in case you own any and they have problems, just like mine!
COMMENTS