152 New Rare Dog Breed Profiles

Its been quite a little on the blog front, reason being I have been pulled away to work on other projects.

However, today I incorporated 152 new dog breed profile pages into the site. I have called them rare dog breeds because they are not UK breeds, so although some may be common in other countries they would very rarely been seen in the UK.

I still have a large number of breeds to add as well as interlink many of the pages, which will be easier to do once all dog breeds are completed.

Site Improvements

Today I worked on improving the dog breeds section of the site as I felt a number of pages could be interlinked better, ie linking from one relevant page to another. However after working through a few pages I gave up as I would need to redo the job once more dog breed profiles are added.

I have many more of those dog breed profiles to add and that's something I'll be aiming to complete this month.

March Web Site Traffic Increase

March was another growing month for traffic to the web site, with unique visitors increasing 50% on February's total.

The site still appears not to have aged enough for the Google search engine so doesn't yet have any particularly good rankings for primary keyword terms.

Mainly during the month of March a number of dog pictures pages were added or updated. I've hired help for that time consuming task and hopefully the addition of new pictures and pages will keep growing at an ever increasing rate. So far its been a bit of slow process.

April is set to be the best month yet!

Writers delay and prices up.

Oh well I was all raring to go and get over 100 dog breed pages completed within a week or so, but the company who will be doing the content for me can't start any new projects until January 9th 2008!!!

What I'm going to do is workout a big list of dog breeds I need writing about and get them to do them that week.

Not only that, they have just increased there prices for bulk orders. I've managed to get a better deal than currently quoted on the website, but not at the previous low levels.

Weimaraner and Spanish Water Dog breed pages back.

I have had the 2 breed pages back and they are very good. I'm very happy with both of them.

I've added them to the site here:
Weimaraner
and Spanish Water Dog.

I am now working on a list of other breeds to submit to them.

Getting help with written content

The task of building the biggest and best alround dog site is not an easy one. Certainly not one I can complete all by myself, well, not within a year anyway.

However finding writers to help is not easy either. My intial plan was to set up basic information pages and invite comments and information to be submitted from site visitors. Over time I would also review and add more information to the pages.

Well, I have found a company that actually has a team of writers so I have submitted 2 dog breeds to be writter about. I choose the Weimaraner as its a well known popular breed and one that information can easily be found.

I also choose a lesser known breed, the Spanish Water Dog

Goal - 100 hits a day from next week

I've been working alot behind the scenes of the complete dogs guide building lots of content for the web site, although most of it is spread across many part finished pages which aren't ready to be fully uploaded just yet. Most of those being dog breed pages.

I haven't done any promotion at all since trying to partner with some Dog Rescues web sites a few weeks ago.

Currently the site is getting 36 hits a day based on last weeks daily average. I just think now, coming to the end of the month it's about time the site started getting a bit more traffic and more visitors can actually start benefiting from the hard work going into the site.

My goal is to reach 700 unique daily hits next week, starting Monday, so an average of 100 a day. Importantly it must be done in a way so that the average number of daily unique visitors will remain at 100 a day (preferably more). This will be great as it immediately means I'll be set for reaching over 3000 visitors for the month of December.

My plan starts now and involves me completing and incorporating into the site as many new pages as possible so they start picking up the odd hit from the search engines, which they will do if they are deemed good quality content.

At some point I'll try and get some more links to the site., which is obviously easier the more good quality content I have!

First Visitor From Yahoo

One month and 4 days into launching the web site and today I got my first visitor from Yahoo search engine.

By amazing coincidence the term was for the exact same search term as the very first visitor who found my website via Google over 3 weeks ago, yes the mis spelling of "Cezar Milan" (the Dog Whisperer), which should have been spelt Cesar Milan.

This time the mis-spelling was on my Dog Psychology page which Ive since corrected.

In general traffic is pretty non existent, with approximately 6 hits a day from search engines and then just a few more from links I've been given on some other dog sites, mainly dog rescues.

However, this is fully as I expected. I'm working hard on good informative pages behind the scenes which I hope to start uploading to the site starting next week or the week after. The more good content I add the more hits I'm sure to start receiving.

Lots of US Dog Rescue Centers

Wow, there's literally hundreds of U.S dog rescue centers with web sites. I've been searching for them all day and emailing some to see if they want to be listed on my site and hopefuly give me a link back to my site.

Ive got replies starting to come back, much more from the U.S centers than than the UK ones. The U.S centers seem to be more with it as regards using the power of the internet to help there cause for rehoming dogs as well as raising funds.

Uk Dog Rescue Centers

I've had few responses from Uk dog rescues centers.
I have also started to contact U.S dog rescue centers, of which there seem to be alot more covering all kinds of different breeds.
Anyway, there's a few more I want to contact so I better get on with it

Working on Dog Rescue Centers Section

Today I made a start on the Dog Rescue Center section of the website. I think it's hugely important that visitors to the site are constantly reminded of how many dogs are awaiting to be rehomed and that while looking at cute puppy pics is all well and good, its well worth considering the rewarding experience of rehoming a dog that has so far not had the best start in life but may well be a very well natured dog and a perfect loving companion.

Not only that, but these dog rescue centers need donations and support in numbering ways, so if I can just help them out in the smallest way possible I'll be very pleased. The way I intend to do that is send them visitors from my web site.

I've contacted some dog rescue centers today via email and I hope I get a good response and that many will want to belisted on the Complete Dogs Guide.

First Dog Breed Page - the Shar Pei

My original plan was to hold back on any web site promotion just to see how many of my sites pages got indexed into Google without any links pointing to the site.

Anyway, after completing my first dog breed page, that of the very interesting dog breed, the Shar Pei I couldn't help but inform some other Shar Pei sites and hopefully gain some links partners as well as any extra specialist advice they could offer and well as some Shar Pei pictures.

Response was quick, along with compliments on the site and promised photos to come. :)

Nothing motivates me more than good feedback and actual responses and progress. Some of the sites I emailed appeared to have been up for years and you never know if the webmasters are actually still running the site.

Anyway, was a good start.

Completedogsguide.com Web Site Uploaded

Tonight I have uploaded the new completedogsguide.com web site. It's a good base for the web site to grow from. I'll now be adding to it constantly so its growing and improving daily.

I hope people like the design and layout ofthe web site. Of course it needs plenty more adding to it information and pictures wise.

First Website Visitor!!!

10 days into starting my blog and website, the site has been found by a visitor!!!

The term "Cezar Milan" the Dog Whisperer, BUT, would you believe it I spelt his name WRONG and it should be "Cesar Milan". I'm going to have edit the original post and correct the spelling. Can't believe I spelt his name wrong. SHAME!

I was actually found by google.se , which is the Sweden google search engine, so likely whoever found my blog couldn't read a word of it.

Website Progress - The Template

Today and yesterday I've been working hard on the website. If feels pretty slow going as I'm one of those people who wants to do 20 pages in a day but in reality can only do 2 or 3.

At the moment I've been working on the site template. I've had a draft in place for a couple of weeks but its not until I uploaded it that I spotted a couple of errors and then ideas for small improvements, which then have to be changed on other draft pages I've created.

My idea of a good website template for an informative site is :
1)Simple. The template is in the background. Without any content it looks really boring. The point being as soon as content is added that's what visitors focus on as the page content really stands out.

2)Easy to navigate. Whatever page a visitor is on my site any other page they want to visit is only 2 or maximum 3 clicks away. I have top horizontal menu of 8 main categories. Down the left I have a vertical navigational menu which features all the categories of the site.

3)Small file size so pages load fast as users browse the site. 8k - 12 k is ideal.

4)Headings to let visitors know where they are. Every page lets visitors know they are on completedogsguide.com and each page has its own heading for whatever specific subject that page is on.

5)Page is the width of the screen so every users screen is full of content of my website. Some sites have borders round the sides, just wasting space.

6)Simple, non bright colours. I've opted for standard white background, black arial text and blue link text. The site heading is a doggy brown colour with a blue base, (not my own design), but very suitable. Nice light colours, not to bold or bright. The doggy brown is also the colour used for page headings.

I'll have some pages uploaded in next couple of days for all to see.

Statcounter Added

Now that the site is indexed in Google it is theoretically possible, albeit unlikely at this early stage that the website may actually be found by someone surfing the Internet.

I have added an invisible Statcounter to the index page code and the blog template so I can see if the site does start to get any hits.

The statcounter is free, all you have to do is create an account and follow the basic step by step process. I opted for the free invisible statcounter and it generates a code which you then just add to the base of the page.

How long will I have to wait till my first hit????

Site Cached by Google

I checked my site in Google by typing "CompleteDogsGuide" and the site is now in Google, it was also Top 10 for "Complete Dogs Guide".

Surprising how quick Google indexed the site considering I've been posting a couple of days and don't have any links pointing to the site.

The domain itself was bought in early September and then a couple of weeks ago I just added a basic holding page.

Strangely the cache of the index page showed the my blog posts. Now, when I first posted the blog it did upload on the root index page, but that was literally for a few minutes until I worked out how to get the blog uploaded to the correct folder.