Weekly Update ~ Week 4

Last week was a busy week in some ways, but slow in many others. I wasn't able to do as much advertising which may have affected my sales. On a positive note, I was able to finish processing three big orders at the beginning of the week, but since they were from previous weeks I don't count them as sales for last week.

I'm still bummed about the magazine not mentioning my name in their 3 page spread. Actually I'm really disappointed. I've been waiting on this magazine to hit the stands since the beginning of June. Now it is the beginning of August and I find out my excitement has been for nothing. The lady I have been working with at the magazine should be back to work tomorrow so I'm going to contact her to see what she has to say about me not getting credit for my pictures and products descriptions that I sent to her.

I'm wondering how this week is going to play out. I paid a company $450 last week to validate my website. I've read in many search engine optimization newsletters that it is a good thing to do. Google's (where I get most of my business from) spiders can crawl a site without it being validated, but many other search engines can not. As of today I'm listed near the top of the second page for 2 of my keywords on Google, but I'm on the third or fourth page for the same keywords in Yahoo & MSN. Go figure since it is much easier to get ranked high on Yahoo & MSN.

Validating your website is supposed to clean up any code errors, but I still have a lot of errors showing up in the inner pages of my site. The company I hired said the errors showing up had to do with the design of my website and weren't important to the search engines. The changes were completed last Wednesday or Thursday. Google crawled my site on Wednesday and my page rank dropped from a 2 to a 1. Awesome!! I'm trying to increase my page rank not lower it!