This month was another poor preforming month, but there’s reasons to be hopeful. I earned $19.61 cents, a little over double what it was last year, even though it’s half of what I was making just two short months ago. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that traffic to my website has returned to the pre-new name launch. Clicks have steadily increased since July to about 90% of what they previously where. It’s been close to, but not quite two months since I purchased the new domain name. Everything I had been reading seem to imply it could be two to three months before a return to normal, so it looks like I may even be a little ahead of schedule.

Actual clicks reported from Google Webmaster Tools

If you spend any part of your day coding, you’ve probably heard the expression “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Apparently that holds true for search engine optimization as well. After the site map issue, I burned myself again with the canonical URLs.

Despite the missteps, the optimization seems to be paying off in the long run. Google is now indexing way more of my site. We’re up to about 24% of my entire (paramaterized) site being indexed. I’ve also noticed some additional traffic from those additional paramaterized URLs. One of the URLs paramaterized was the Miscarriage Reassurer. For example, https://datayze.com/miscarriage-reassurer.php?weeks=5&days2 now jumps you to the odds for 5 weeks, 2 days. Seeing a few of those paramaterized URLs for landing pages makes me realize how much more common it is to query for “miscarriage odds at 5 weeks 2 days” than generically “miscarriage odds.” I only started to see this behavior in the last couple of days, so I’m hoping this trend will continue and make for a strong September, if nothing else in terms of user base.

I’ve also been working on site speed. I’ve set up browser caching and minified my CSS and Javascript. I had to write my own custom minifier after a few I downloaded didn’t work. It turns out Javascript can be particularly nasty to minify when doing a shallow parse, especially when your code contains regular expressions which are not quoted.

Finally I’ve been working on making my site mobile friendly. Half the apps have already been converted and another couple will be finalized in the next day or two. The last few will be a bit challenging since they generate large tables which won’t fit nicely on small screens. After minifying Javascript I feel ready for the challenge.

I’ve been continuing to work on behind the scenes improvements, so I don’t have any new apps to report (though I do have a few nearing completion.) Next month.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft