gplivna.eu domain has lived already a year now

My provider has provided a wonderful feature - collecting various statistics about visitors of my site. I really suggest everyone to find such provider or at least use Google analytics to collect various stats about your site.

I started my site a bit more than a year ago on May 2006. In the first month I was the only visitor testing how it looks like and adding some content. In the second month (June 2006) I had already 65 unique ip addresses visited my site. It was a real advancement :) Compared that to today - this is normal weekday rate for my site. Of course on weekends attendance drops.

Statistics provided by my Internet provider gave me interesting possibility to create a world map. All countries having at least one person visiting my site has been coloured more or less black. More black - more visitors. Colouring the map was interesting task - I even had to look in world atlas for some countries, shame on me - but just using skeleton map I was not sure exactly which country Ghana, Dominican Republic and Guatemala are. The most lovely were countries like Indonesia, Canada, Philippines and Russia - having so many islands and each one has to be coloured separately.

So what are the lessons I've learned this year?

1. Don't make fun with Google! It can give you so many hits. And it also can be annoyed and give you nothing. Annoyance for my site was because of two reasons:
1) changing content too rapidly
2) having the same articles in 2 different formats - html and doc.
So the medicine was think more about content and change it only once and place deny on robots.txt for doc files.

2. Google webmasters tool is really useful. One can submit sitemaps, so decreasing the time for Google to catch your new page, view restricted pages by robots.txt and a bunch of other features.

3. All other search engines unfortunately at least for me gives almost nothing. Even yahoo is almost dead for my site.

4. Placing valuable content is as critical as thinking about titles and words in your articles at least for Google.

5. Writing articles that hopefully are usable also for other people aren't so easy therefore I even more admire people having written books with precise technical info like Thomas Kyte and Jonathan Lewis for example.

So one month May 2007 gave almost the same stats as all previous year together (actually half of the year because June was the first month for wide public). Let's hope the trend in the future will be the same :)