To my 24 new followers – welcome

Welcome, all! I’m glad you’re here.

I have been looking at my WordPress stats, following up on who has recently followed this blog.

In the last 2 weeks, 24 of you have joined me on this journey (22 via WordPress, 2 via email), so welcome. I don’t mean to be rude or take you for granted — please know that I appreciate you following, and I hope I bring something positive to your life.

I’m about to go out for my morning walk on an amazingly beautiful day, and before I do, I just want to say:

Whatever brought you to this blog, was probably for a very good reason. People come here all the time, not knowing what they will find, then they discover something that helps them. It’s both by accident, and by design. I don’t have any particular “content strategy” in mind, other than writing about the things that matter to me, as a TBI survivor dealing with an invisible set of difficulties, a regular person trying to build the best life possible, and as a member of the larger community who is sure that I’m not the only one who feels this way.

There are times when I am annoying, I whine and bitch and complain and am not my best self by any stretch of the imagination. I can be petulant and cranky and self-absorbed, and I can be a real trial at times — especially to myself 😉

Be that as it may, I have an incredible amount of goodness in my life, and I want to share that experience, as well as show others how I’ve gotten there through a combination of hard work and perseverance, and using my noggin to determine if what I’m doing is actually working. The times when I fail are the biggest lessons — and at times the most valuable.

I’m not afraid to fail. I just get a little tired of getting back up all the time.

But then, don’t we all…?

I know I am not alone in my frustrations and challenges. I’m human, and whether you’re dealing with a brain injury, another sort of injury, past trauma, ongoing difficulties in your life, or a hidden condition that others can never suspect is going on, we are all in this together, and we all have so much to share, if we take the time and put forth the effort.

The effort is not easy. But it is worth it. I start most of my days on this blog, because I remember all too well what it’s like to go through life in pain and frustration and despair, and feel so terribly alone. Some days I’d rather be doing something else than typing into a machine, and I can go for days without writing a word. But I know this is important — to me as well as others who find their way here and really value hearing someone else talk about life in ways that they can relate to.

That happens all too seldom. But I hope it won’t happen here.

Joining us today from…

So, to all of you — followers, as well as new readers from all over the world — thank you for your support. I’m happy you’re here.

 

 

 

#Mobilgeddon works for me

See? The web world did not end.

So, a week ago on April 21, Google released an update to its search algorithm that gives a boost to mobile-friendly pages in their results.

At first, web mavens reacted with dire warnings, as though the end of the world were nigh. Some said over 40% of top websites could get dinged and lose visibility. Yet, over a week later, the collective response has turned into more of a shrug (sorta like Y2K), with people either realizing that they’re doing okay, or they set out to make additional changes that they really should have made, anyway.

For me, I think the results have been favorable. Already, on April 22, the day after, my page views went from numbers that hovered in the mid-200 views per day, to over 300 views per day.

Overall page views – before and after “Mobilegeddon” – click the image to see it full-size

It’s still early, but I’ve seen a 20-35% increase in daily page views that inexplicably happened, starting after 4/21.

Overall page views – the day after “Mobilegeddon” – click the image to see it full-size

And on top of that, it seems that WordPress may have made some changes on their side, because a week later, three days in a row, I had a sizeable boost in traffic – close to 400 views per day. From me doing nothing different from my usual posting – if anything, I’ve been posting less, because I’ve been so danged busy.

Overall page views – the week after “Mobilegeddon” – click the image to see it full-size

So, what does this tell me?

First, WordPress is on top of things.

Despite all their “interesting” choices for how to render their sites that just get in the way for people who aren’t 24 years old with a Mac and a broadband connection, they still manage to keep the platform running. It’s reliable, and considering everything that could go wrong, they do a decent job of keeping up. The fact that my stats jumped another 50 views/day as a result of me doing absolutely nothing different from usual, tells me something happened behind the scenes. It had to be WordPress updates. 50 views a day is not a lot by big-business standards, but it’s 1/5 of my usual 250-views-per-day traffic. I’ll take that 20% boost, thank you very much.

Second, my “content strategy” is working the way I want it to.

I’m just a solitary individual seeking to educate others about concussion / mild traumatic brain injury and provide support to those who suffer from persistent symptoms by sharing my own challenges and successes. I don’t have an editorial calendar, and I don’t do a ton of keyword research and write my content to be super-Google-friendly. I just write what is in my heart and head, and do my best to provide something of value. Considering that I’ve had over 382,000 total views on this site since around 2008, that seems to be getting some notice — and hopefully filling a need.

Third, when it comes to optimizing for a machine, your best friend can be another machine.

That’s what Google is — a machine. It does what it does with an algorithm (a magic formula of logic), and it does it automatically millions, if not billions, of times a day (or hour? or minute?) It “speaks its own language”, and it looks for web pages to be consistently formatted in ways it understands — work which is best done with a platform like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or some other templated content management system.

Back in the day when I was building web pages by hand, there were very few reliable content management systems available. The ones that were on the market, just sucked. I know, because I evaluated a bunch of them for an employer. None of them were worth the price their inventors were asking. So, you had a vast sea of “creatively” built web pages filling the web — not always by people who knew how to code properly or organize their pages in a way that made sense to anyone them.  Especially not Google.

But nowadays, there are so many content management systems out there, and there is so much need for consistency of design and reliability for all the devices and search engine requirements, it only makes sense to use a content management system like WordPress (or the others I mentioned above).

That goes especially for the hosted versions (like this one), which is continually updated and kept spiffy by the folks behind the scenes. If you know what you’re doing and can keep your WP instance up to snuff with all the continual updates, database backups, etc., then good on ya. But if you’re a solitary blogger trying to get the word out about your ideas, educate others, and provide something valuable that will help others, and you don’t have time to spare to maintain your infrastructure, website platforms that others build and maintain can go a long way towards helping you.

So, “Mobilegeddon” didn’t ding me. If anything, it appears to have helped. So did WordPress, I believe. And that makes it possible for me to help even more people — I hope.

Onward.