I’ve just been looking at www.alexa.com to see how the traffic ranking for weather-watch.com is going. It’s now approximately the 207,000th most popular site on the Internet! That sounds pretty awful, until you see that 3 months ago it was the 1.7millionth most popular site.
The usage stats seem to be showing massive increases over the last few months as well. For example, hits so far in January are running at 2.5 times the number per day that there were in October. In August there was roughly one new user per day, now there are around 5 people per day joining up. Posts are increasing rapidly too. It took around two years to go from zero to 20,000 posts. You’ve managed to add another 14,000 posts in the last 5 months!
Keep it up…it’s you (the users) who make this site so good.
If anyone can think of any weather related discussion topics that’s not covered by an existing board within the forum…and that people would like to discuss, let me know and I’ll consider it. Maybe we can pull in even more members that way!
It’s good to see growth like that for a forum. Have you considered Google Adsense for advertising? The ads are context-related and can be displayed in a range of styles and colours. A lot of other forum sites use Adsense and it is a good way to get the traffic to offset the running costs of the site.
One idea might be to add a reviews section, either as a new forum, a child forum or sticky posts (say within FAQs). I think most users know the pros and cons of their own systems, and when buying a system there is nothing better than being aware of all the issues before you buy. A couple of user opinions about the various stations would be a good starting point for new weather station users, particularly as WD seems to support the widest range of stations.
well - i just selected the “traffic rank button” function and entered www.weather-watch.com an a URL and the button value says 441,509 for a traffic ranking ?!
That’s the one. The three month average is 440,000-ish. The 207,000th number is for yesterday. It might be different today…hopefully smaller if the trend continues
As a raw figure the Alexa stats probably aren’t a true reflection in the standing of this site in the whole Internet world, and they openly admit that the figures for anything less than 100,000 wouldn’t pass any real stats tests! However we are heading for the top 100,000 (in my dreams!) and they are a useful indicator given that there is nothing else (that I know of) that gives this kind of info. The fact that they back up the upward trend in posts/members is good…it means that we’re attracting more people who take part, rather than just registering never to return and leaving all the new posts just to Windy!
I would imagine that if you typed in weather software in google and weather-watch showed up on the first page, you would have a pretty good indication of your standing. You do score for weather display First page around entry 15
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You have to be careful when you say that Windy makes a lot of posts. An outsider might take this to mean that windy = hot air ??? :lol: :lol: :lol: Kinda of a weather joke.
At the moment windy round here means lots of cold air. Brrr.
In the last couple of months I’ve done a few Google searches and have been surprised to see weather watch high in the rankings…first and third on a couple of occasions…and not just out of 1 or 3 hits! Interestingly I’ve just looked for Weather Display on Google.co.uk and come up in 8th position.
I’ve just tried Weather Display in Google and it comes up #1 out of 10,900,000 - of course it will be the google-friendly way the web pages were designed… :lol:
I don’t think it is. I think it’s more down to the style of URL that Google likes. It doesn’t like query strings, i.e. URLs containing question marks because those are usually dynamically generated and you therefore can’t guarantee that the same page will be there next time you go back. The forum can use a ‘search engine friendly’ mode for URLs, i.e. without question marks, when viewing content, e.g. Weather-watch.com popularity (which if I remember correctly would be something like http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?action=view;topic=6994.0 in non-SEF mode).
It would be good to get Weather-Display higher in the “weather software” search, shockingly WeatherView32 8O is #3 on page 1, and WD is down on page 5.
I would have thought that all of us having the link to the weather display website on our webpages would help its “popularity” on Google, but maybe there are not enough?
there are more external links to Weather Display than there are to WeatherView32 according to Google.
Maybe Brian needs to get the tag changed to “Weather Software - Weather Display” - maybe having weather software as the first two words will help the position - but then I don’t really know all the factors that google use to place search results.
There are lots of factors that Google takes into account when ranking sites but there seems to be different opinions on exactly how it does it. Certain items are well known though - such as the number of different sites that have links to the site. Meta tags are less important than they were and by putting lots of keywords into the page with the same colour as the page background (to try and increase your ranking) can get you banned!
I suspect that because “Weather Display” ranks highly but not “Weather Software” is because there are lots of links to Weather Display but they don’t include “Weather Software” on the same link or page.
wv32 is included (demo) on CD with some weather stations (like the rainwise)
I need to do that…
where is a place that I can contact on the internet that can burn software onto CD and mail those cd’s to where I need, and with a logo on the cd too?
