Instrumental Music

It almost doubled the normal number of visitors and on the festive day itself. Our iTune/Pod help pages were prompted by noticing a niche in this area which we sough to fill to our own advantage. We have been relatively successful and these are amongst if not quite always the most popular pages on our site. They also represent some of the longest visits which suggests that they do find the copy useful. But we are very unsuccessful at converting those visitors to listeners or paying customers. On reflection I suppose that this is just a piece of in appropriate targeting and we should really re-visit the whole novelty music issue.

Rank pulse is showing it's highest level of changes in rankings on one day for the last six months, so something is a foot. No comments on the SEO forums yet but I suppose that this is a good time to slip through a big change - too late to have a significant impact on the seasonal commercial activity and a quiet time in which to settle things down. We are seeing one of those seasonal increases in iTunes driven enquiries as people get their new iPods - just wish we knew how to convert a few of them into sales. Interest in the Carol of Bells is flagging a little but we'll keep it there until New Year or maybe even for the full 12 days of Christmas. Merry Christmas!

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.

Looking through the stats I thought I'd come back to the issue of the way our site is used. For a digital content site the whole issue of band width is Giga - we have to buy enough capacity from our ISP to ensure that our visitors and more importantly our customers can down load what they need. The way the site is engineered has some baring on that but at the out set all we had was a best guess. As things stand this month so far MP3 downloads have consumed about 60% of the bandwidth used on the site which is pretty good. Next up are the online steaming samples which appear as Flash animations at 12% but if you add the Javascript for the menu presentation to the gifs, png and jpeg files their combined total is about 16%. Following on are the Html files which include most of our text at about 10%, our CSS layout code at 1% and bringing up the rear PHP for the shop code at less than half a percent. I could wish that the PHP was working a little harder but overall the balance looks ...

We have just taken the time to have a look at the performance of our Christmas gift on the site. We noted earlier that we were quickly on to the first page of Google for that keyword phrase but on looking at and more importantly listening to the competition we have not made enough of our distinctive arrangement. While we might have to acknowledge the superiority of the Leonard Bernstein version ours would come a close second and might even edge ahead for festive values. So a minor up date on the index page is in order - just to make that point. So far nearly 400 downloads have been recorded - not breaking the bandwidth bank but some potential new customers we hope.

Yes our seasonal gesture has got off to a flying start and is now the number one keyword phrase for people searching for our site. This is really quite remarkably responsive and it illustrates the benefits of working with the Google grain rather than against it. In particular the site map facility seems to stream line the Google bot visits. It is also true that with our template page structure we are able to get a message like this out over all our pages very quickly and that must strengthen its impact in the ranking. So Carol of the Bells MP3 finds us at number 9 on the main Google engine and number 5 in our customised Legal MP3 Downloads engine. Without MP3 in the phrase we are nowhere and the addition of Free is no help at all. For those who would like to know more about this tune here is the Wikipedia reference.

Yes , I gave DMOZ a go. I have hardly used it except to register new sites to help them on their way on Google- not sure that works any more but it gives that extra air of respectability to be signed off by a reasonably knowledgeable human being. So it was a bit disappointing to find a significant number of broken or 'temporarily' down sites and one or two with very old news features. But it did take me down some interesting by ways - Mozart's works for mechanical organs and some organ replications. Several more independent sites have been added and we are up to 68 sites in total now. There is a bit of a Classical music bias and I'm going to wait for collaborators to address of other styles.

On virtually all metrics November was our best month yet. This is partly a seasonal recovery from the dog days of the summer when people are away from their PCs and partly a genuine strengthening of our positions on Google. However it has weakened a little in the last week so we are not getting too excited. Never the less I think it is probably time to bring out our Carol of the Bells seasonal gift because last year's press release is still floating around. You can download it free of charge for your personal use from here first: use this link Carol of the Bells in time for the first Sunday of Advent in the Christian Calendar.