It was back in April that I gave the last update on Jackie Colson-Miller's (www.RealEstateSizzle.com) progress in the Project Blogger competition. Now that we are more than half way through the contest, I figured I should give an update as to her site's statistics and changes over the last couple of months.
1. Design tweaks
We listened to all the complaints about the 'sizzling noise' upon loading the site, and as much as Jackie protested, we bent and removed it. Look for us to put it back as a clickable icon for those that want to 'experience the sizzle'.
There was talk that it was the cause of the site being a bit slow loading, but it turns out that the sizzle noise was not the culprit. It was a category sorting wordpress plug-in that we had installed back in week 2. Once we removed it, the site loaded twice as fast.
Left Sidebar Tweaks:
Jackie, herself, has experimented with some sidebar bling (widgets): the Library Thing and the Criteo Blog Roll. This Pingdom Site Loading Speed Analyzer shows that it is now the Criteo widget that is the slowest loading item on her site. We'll be axing it. No doubt.
Right Sidebar Tweaks:
We added a translation tool for the convenience of her growing international audience.
We redesigned her RSS Feed sign up area.
We added an 'impulse button' for her MLS Home Searching Feature.
Subtle, but cool tweaks
We created template pages for her site that allow her to have a page that has static information at the top of the page - just like a standard HTML page (images and text etc) and then have all her relevant blog articles cascade chronologically below the static content. This is a great feature about the Wordpress blogging tool if you can figure it out. It allows for introductions to different category sections of your site, and dynamic content to grow beneath. There are endless applications for this feature. Jackie is using it here and here.
The addition of Poll Daddy polls have proven successful, gaining a good sense of visitors' feelings about the Florida Property Tax Reform issues.
Current Stat Averages :
Daily Unique Visits: Consistently over 100
Weekly Unique Visits: 850-900
Daily Page Views Average: 250
Weekly Page View Average: 2200
Her statistics have quadrupled since I gave my last overview in April.
18% of traffic coming from Google Searches
Most effective result in Google: anything to do with Florida Property Tax Reform
54% of her traffic is repeat visitors and 46% new traffic.
Continues to appear in the top 100 real estate blogs for traffic based on BlogTopSites ranking.
Current inbound link count: 516 (unofficial)
Google Page Rank: 3
Technorati Authority: 25
Technorati Rank: under 225,000
Google Indexed Pages: 220
Now, I'm no judge, but if you did happen to ask me, I would say that this is a pretty darn good result for just 3 months of blogging. We'll see you back here again, at the finish line.
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