The Web As Retail

This is the retail part of web management. I am not above begging for content on a one-to-one basis.

Helaine and are trying to get our new website about celebrity sightings a little traction. Maybe I’m biased, but it looks great, functions well and has gotten rave reviews from nearly everyone whose seen it.

I’m trying anything/everything to get more celebrity stories. I’ve already written unsolicited emails to people whose stories I’ve seen on other sites. Tonight I tweeted a bunch of folks–again unsolicited.

This is the retail part of web management. I am not above begging for content on a one-to-one basis.

At this point each additional story is important. When someone hits the site I want them to see it as being an ongoing concern, not something brand new and still empty. And, I think it does look flush with content.

The coolest part of my simple analysis of our sparse traffic is the average visitor checks out nearly ten pages! I never expected that. That’s a lot. That’s a sign of compelling content.

Google, Yahoo and MSN, which had been restricted while the site was being polished, have now been unleashed. They are not as quick to index pages as I’d wish!

For instance, though Google acknowledges I have a sitemap up and my robots.txt file now allows them to roam freely, I have no pages indexed (other than the homepage) and see the old restrictive robots.txt file is still being followed!

“Googlebot crawls sites by following links from page to page. We had problems crawling the pages listed here, and as a result they won’t be added to our index and will not appear in search results.”

With time it will come, I suppose.

As always, if you have a celeb story I sure would like to see it on the site. Anonymous stories are fine.