Getting Out of the Sandbox

by Eric Pender on September 2, 2009

I just wanted to provide another update to what I’ve been working on over at Spartan-Football.com.

We’re just about 72 hours away from kickoff.  Traffic was really huge the first two days that the site launched, since I got a lot of traffic from Spartan Tailgate.  It really drove more traffic than I could have imagined.  I’ve also seen the share of traffic shift from referring sites to direct hits and search.

In the first week, 88% of traffic came from referring sites, with 8.5% from direct traffic and just 2% from search.  Those percentages have changed pretty substantially.  In the past 7 days, just ~30% of traffic came from referring sites, 43% from direct traffic and 26% from search.  Over the past week and a half, organic search traffic has really started to pick up, and it appears that the site is slowly coming out of the Google sandbox.  It seems like the site was able to get a decent amount of initial traffic from referring sites since it was a new website that people hadn’t seen before.  Visitors wanted to see the new site, check it out, and now that initial “introductory” traffic has now subsided a bit.

Also, the growth of the Facebook page has been really interesting to watch.  The pace of growth of the Facebook page has just about doubled every week.

Spartan-Football.com Facebook Fan Page Growth

Spartan-Football.com Facebook Fan Page Growth

Unfortunately, it hasn’t translated into significantly increased traffic to the site as of yet.

Facebook traffic to Spartan-Football.com

Facebook traffic to Spartan-Football.com

Hopefully as we get into the season, and people get more involved in the football season, referring traffic from Facebook will start to increase.

Last time I updated, there were a couple of items that I wanted to put on the radar to work on.  Figured I would provide a progress report here: [click to continue…]

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As I mentioned earlier in the month (or maybe it was last month), I’ve started working on a side project, a website called Spartan-Football.com.  The site has pretty much taken up all of my free time for the last 3-4 weeks, but it’s safe to say I’ve learned quite a bit in those weeks.

So far I’ve pretty much gotten all of the design elements squared away, and have started writing content for the site.  Which, by the way, is exceptionally difficult and was only heightened my level of respect for the sports bloggers that I’ve been following and who make it seem so damn easy.  The design probably took me 3 weeks or so, basically just piecing together different parts until it started to look like something resembling a serious website.  Shout-out, by the way, to Bugsy Sailor (the guy behind such projects as Yooper Steez, Hometown Invasion and Daily Fruuit) for coming up with the idea for the design of using the jersey mesh as the background to the site.

As you might be able to tell, I am building the site using Wordpress as the underlying platform, and Thesis as the theme (although I really consider it more of a code base).  This is my first time using Thesis and and must say I am exceptionally happy with it.  I’m not sure I would say that it’s so easy to use, as much as it provides so many options.  I still don’t understand how to program the hooks, but I can use the OpenHook plugin to do pretty much everything I need to do. [click to continue…]

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Dumb Pipes – A RCN Case Study

August 15, 2009

I recently moved into a new apartment with a new roommate, after I had been living alone in Chicago for four years. I was an RCN customer at my last place, and my roommate was an RCN customer when I moved in.
After I moved and unpacked countless boxes, I was left with one box [...]

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New Project – Spartan-Football.com

July 22, 2009

I know posting has been nonexistent for nearly two months.  It is because I have been working on a new website dedicated to Michigan State football news and commentary, called Spartan-Football.com.  We’re going to be covering everything from players and coaches to recruiting and statistics.  While the new site is still going through development, we [...]

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Search is an Innovator’s Dilemma

May 20, 2009

I just ran across this article from Time titled “What Will the World Do with More Search Engines?“  My first reaction and answer to this question was “it will ignore them,” and for actual search engines, I think that is true.  User habits have already been ingrained, and chiseling away at market share is no [...]

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Analysis of Mobile Ads on the iPhone

April 13, 2009

Much has been said about the opportunities that Internet-enabled mobile phones and so-called smart phones bring to advertisers.
While I agree that the next 3-5 years will bring about significant innovation with regard to mobile advertising, current mobile-based advertising has shown a lack of effective execution.  Granted, my view is biased toward advertising on the iPhone, [...]

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Knowing When to Say No

March 30, 2009

It’s important to know what your capabilities are, to know what you can accomplish.  It’s just as important to know what you cannot accomplish.  Today, I had one of those situations.
A former coworker of mine had a friend who is a photographer and who wanted to launch a new website.  My coworker referred him to [...]

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Deep Pages with Google Sitelinks

March 21, 2009

If you are plugged in to my Twitter feed you may have already seen this, as I posted this earlier today.  I found this while I was doing some competitive analysis of the SEO efforts for Toyota and Honda, among others.
Both Honda and Toyota, among others, are getting Google Sitelinks to their deep pages.  We’ve [...]

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The Importance of Category Pages in SEO

March 16, 2009

If you are doing SEO for an e-commerce site, it is critically important to optimize your category pages.  In fact, there may be cases in which it is more important to optimize your category pages even more than your product pages.
Natural search visitors to your product pages with naturally convert well.  Odds are that the [...]

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SEO is Dead. Long Live SEO!

March 13, 2009

It has been a while since there the requisite “SEO is dead” conversation.  But I’ve been thinking a lot about the longevity of search.  Let’s face it, my career revolves around the product offerings from roughly three main companies (and one of those companies controls a 70%+ market-share).
While Google is nowhere near going out of business, [...]

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