College Admissions eBook Website Revised

Last August we launched our website College Admission Secrets Exposed to promote the eBook publication of the same name. Initially and in all honesty, the site was juvenile at best. So in recent months we had a revision of the marketing web site, graphics, ebook covers, and blog content for the site. After months of rework we are pleased to report that the additions and revisions have now been completed with a few minor items still outstanding. Along with our publication updates we additionally made changes to the primary website hosting our eBook, which can be found at CollegeAdmissionSecretsExposed.com

Built on a custom WordPress theme platform, the blog and site layout is designed to accomplish two goals. 1) To provide free student advice for current and prospective college and university students through our blog entries, articles and commentaries. 2) To provide a platform to market and promote our eBook on how to get into college with College Admission Secrets Exposed.

Additionally, we have been working with our other sites to consolidate our United States University and College, by state database which we are publishing on the site as a free resource for our visitors.

Article List of Job Search Tips and Strategies

For the last few months we have been producing a number unique and relevant articles specifically related to Job Search Tips and Strategies. To date, this topic is by far the most talked about topic primarily do to the current economic situation and high unemployment. Other topics focusing on Career Success and Job Security round out the top three, to date most discussed topics on ResumeAdvantagePro.com. Below is a grouping of direct links to each of the articles relating to job searching tips and job search strategies.

Commuting to a New Job Opportunity
Job Search Engines Are Not Equal
Find a Job – Energize a Stagnant Job Search Tips
Using a Career Center for your Job Search
Job Interview Tips - Prepare Questions in Advance
Need a Job - Using Job Search Engines
Job Search Strategies while Employed - Tips and Secrets Revealed
Use the Newspaper Jobs and Employment Classifieds
Job Hunting is Hard but Jobs ARE Out There
How to get an Edge on Your Job Search
Job Application Process, The Perfect Job - Part 3
Job Descriptions and Duties - The Perfect Job, Part 2
Job Descriptions and Duties - The Perfect Job, Part 1
How to Prepare for a Job Interview - Tips and Questions
Job Hunting? Do More Than Email Resumes and Wait
Job Hunting Tips and Resume Writing Help
Resume Writing Secrets You Will Discover

In the coming months more topics will be added and those popular topics relating to resume writing and job hunting will continue to be discussed. Feel free to join in on the conversation, make comments or suggestions. Cheers all, -Brian.

How to Make a Site Map

Webpage site maps are still a great opportunity to provide the web spiders and robots while crawling your site a quick one stop map to identify your page hierarchy. Many sitemaps can be auto generated using basic link checking software like Xenu Link Checker (a program I highly recommend and use often). But all site maps look the same, so this time around I decided to change things up a bit by creating a page I call Resume Writing Tips and Resume Articles, which is directly linked to the index home page.

I did this specifically for ResumeAdvantagePro.com because I wanted more then just a page call site map, and by putting the link text in my footer with the anchor text as "Resume Tips and Resume Articles". It not only allows this page to be associated with the link phrase but it seems to have more relevancy between the page name and the actual content provided. But then again, who knows. I still create and upload a sitemap.xml at least once a month to Google and put it in my root index for the web spiders to locate.

Teacher Resume - New Site Added

I just added a new website titled MyTeacherResume.com. The intent is to use specific niche web sites as part of my marketing strategy for ResumeAdvantagePro.com. Now before anyone see this as an attempt to create a content farm site; our primary attempt is to provide quality content specific to the Teaching industry and Teacher as it pertains to their jobs and career field.

It will take time to build up our content and posts on the Teacher Resume site, but for now we are starting with major teaching career activities such as preschool and kindergarten, elementary, middle school, and high school. We will move into more college categories at some stage but our focus for the site for now is primarily on K-12 grades.

Google Site Performance - Site Page Speed Tool

New Toy! Yea. Google now has as part of their webmaster tools a site performance page loading speed estimator that looks at a random selection of pages on your site and averages the load speed. This provides you a quick and dirty look at any load delays or issues you may on your site. Thanks again Google for a quick and simple tool that is free and highly useful. Yet I must point out that even though I use Google webmasters tools often, this feature was pointed out to me by my friend Leroy and his site http://www.interfacebus.com/ .

The site performance page speed tool, according to Google's webmaster tools, Free Class Notes Online averages 2.8 seconds to load as of the last update on January 26 of this year. This is faster then 53 percent of sites out there. The index or home page averages a load time of 1.7 seconds.

While on my other site, Resume Advantage Pro, the average load time is 2.6 seconds across the entire web site, 56 percent better then other sites, with the home page or index page loading in 2.1 seconds. This is fantastic because this index page is full of resume writing and free career advice articles and tips that are continually updated. I believe part of the good performance numbers comes from using Wordpress as my CMS which is optimized well.

Free Class Notes Online - 2010 Stats

This past year, Free Class Notes Online performed well pulling in 42,853 total visitors from 170 countries, and a total of 104,901 page views for the year. I did switch completely the URL address from ClassNotes123.com over to FreeClassNotesOnline.com in early 2010 which is why my Google Analytics data is missing the first quarter.

I do have the numbers from the previous URL of Class Notes 123. There were 4,323 visitors, January through March of 2010 from the old class notes site. I made the switch because is appeared that the URL was hindering my traffic. I can honestly say I did see an up tick in traffic after the switch but I believe that's from having more keyword combinations in the URL name.

The bulk of my traffic is organic with Google search engine dominating the traffic source at over 77 percent of the total traffic. Yahoo and Bing organic traffic is very low totaling less then 4 percent combined. One could say if I optimize a bit for Yahoo and / or Bing I might see a jump in traffic; something I'll consider throughout this year as I find time. Overall it was a good year for traffic. Now if I can only get the same traffic on my newest site, http://www.resumeadvantagepro.com/ , then I'll be really, really happy! Cheers all. -Brian

How Often Should You Update a Sitemap

Onsite maintenance completed this morning with additional testing performed on the main index site, http://www.resumeadvantagepro.com/  We use Xenu Link checker to look for any onsite or external broken links or invalid URL issues. In running the report we do always find that there is an odd issue with a forbidden request 403 Error, specifically generated from the comment block. Not an issue but makes the report look a bit odd but nothing unusual for us. Per this reporting, no orphan files were reported or internal page errors. Currently we’re showing 417 total internal URL's by MIME type.

Additionally, we're updating the uploaded Google Webmaster sitemap. There is always the question of how many times or how often should you update a sitemap. In our case, we often generate a new .xml site map once or twice a month depending on the level of new content and blog activity we have. This round we submitted 108 pages to be indexed, up 13 sense our last sitemap update.