This web directory blog is a new addition to this website. I'd like to use the blog to a) keep everyone informed about what we are up to with this directory and b) keep track of link building initiaves on my never ending quest to promote this website. And last but not least I'd like to use this blog to give webmasters the opportunity to see our statistics . For now we do not accept any comments to this blog. If you like to comment a message, please use our helpdesk to submit a ticket with your comment.

Latest Blog entries

08-26-2006

The month is slowly coming to an end and it looks like we will easily beat the amount of traffic we had in July. So, keep your eyes open in early September when we will post and analyze the August traffic. Our advertising efforts are still in high gear for the month. We recently added forum advertising over at Digitalpoint.com to our ways of advertising. We now have a total of 4 forum members carrying advertising for this directory in their forum signatures. We also added some more external advertising links from other 3rd party websites to gain more traffic. We hope to see the results soon.

08-18-2006

If you monitor this directory closely you might have noticed that we retired some categories, created new ones, and are filling the directory with high quality links to authoritive websites. The efforts are to fill each category with at least one listing so that search engines can spider us properly. When I checked Google this morning I saw a total of 866 pages indexed.

08-10-2006

Our submission to the Joeant.com directory has been accepted and we're looking forward to see if it results in actual traffic. We have also secured additional text link advertising today. A link to this directory has been placed in a nicely visible spot on a busy forum.

08-07-2006

August Advertising started

We started our round of spending money for permanent advertising this week. A listing in Joeant.com and Alivedirectory.com have been put on the way. Still waiting for the JoeAnt.com confirmation. Alivedirectory.com was much quicker to approve our listings. We will monitor closely how much traffic we will hopefully get from both sources.

8-03-2006

Software Upgrade

We upgraded our directory to the latest available version of PHPLink Directory this evening. Except for some minor stuff the upgrade seemed to have worked great. If you run into any issues, please use our official helpdesk to report the problem.

8-01-2006

Traffic Review - July 2006

It's the first of the month and we are going to review the traffic stats of this directory for the month of July. Just to recap - the domain "the-usa.net" was a non-promoted web directory since 2005. Early this summer we decided to scrap the old, non-se-friendly directory and replace it with the latest version of PHPLinkDirectory and to start promoting it. We expect to see the real results of the promotion to kick in later in August and of course when it comes to the next Google Page Rank update.

1) Overall traffic month to month

You can se a clear trend here. In June we started from scratch with the new directory and announced the availability at the webmaster forums at Digitalpoint.com. We asked for submissions and of course the traffic went up fast. Before we reached July we stopped to accept free submissions and started building inbound links and placed advertising on different websites on the Internet. No forum announcements were made in July. A traffic increase of over 200 visitors more compared to June was achieved. Even better - the number of visits went up by 445. The number of page views grew by 4,214 compared to June. These are pretty good results considering that it takes a while for link campaigns to kick in unless you buy really expensive ad space. We did not do that, but rather concentrated on long-term link building.

2) Traffic Source

Where does our traffic come from? The next screenshot shows the different traffic referrers that send people our way. While it is a little disappointing to see that there is almost no traffic (yet) coming from Yahoo or MSN, it is good to see Google to be a good source of traffic to "The-USA.net".

The referrers overwritten in red are some of my other websites that I use to link to the directory. Please disregard those.

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