Website improvement plans

This blog effectively is more like a personal diary that I’ve made public but told no one about at the moment, so this blog post is likely far more useful to myself than it could possibly be interesting to others. The only traffic to come in so far has been from one comment I made on one blog of someone doing this successfully, I read a few of those blogs so perhaps I should become a regular commenter when I want to start getting traffic (probably later this month when I start doing more useful posts about link building, time management, etc).

Anyway my plans so far are:

• American Presidents site: The site is doing quite well, I just moved it over to wordpress from static php (using includes) and it has a brief issue with losing ranks that it now seems to have regained (I kept the URLs the same, I think the lost rank was from the title tags changing as a revert moved me back). While it ranks well for some keywords and gets most of its traffic from them, there’s a lot more keywords out there it’s on the second or third page for which have far more traffic and I’ve never actively built links targeting. Plus there’s a lot of related keywords I don’t have pages for, notably for Quotations and Timelines. My plan for the quotations is rather than just put up the same quotes you find everywhere to put up quotes with verified sources and use this to gain links (most quote sites have lots of quotes that seem improbable, thus I think this would be a good differentiator). I’m also going to add galleries to get traffic from Google Images searches. The biographies on there weren’t written by me and a few of them I’m rather ashamed of. I plan to rewrite these and use the rewriting process as a means of getting links (I’ll remember a lot about the Presidents as I re-write each one so can use this to my advantage).
• URGames.com: I just recently changed the CMS on this and redesigned it, revenue has leaped, but the site needs far more games added to it. This will be tedious and boring work but it needs doing. I also realised a lot of the games I distribute with my links in have links which don’t seem to work (i.e. they don’t even click) anymore. I’ll have to find the original flash files and sort this out. I’m also planning on going through those flash files and seeing if I can make new versions of the games from this, a popular one is this set of games where you click a country on a map when the game tells you it’s name. I could adapt this to things like areas of cities, etc. I may also redesign another one of my games sites, but in general this is probably a shrinking market given the rise of facebook and smartphone gaming, and online games just aren’t the interest they were to me when I was in high school.
• HistoryEmpire.com: To be honest this site is pretty much a non-site with only a few articles, the odd few I wrote recently but most I wrote back in 2007 (I think). While it’s not an obvious area for advertisers, it’s a strong interest and there’s a lot of traffic out there from high school students (it fluctuates with term times). I’m going to stick to writing about 20th century history as it’s what I’m mainly interested in (and has most traffic) for now and slowly expand the site and build links as I write each article (Dmoz submissions, etc).
• PhysicsPlanet.com: I’m not sure why I made this as my interest in the topic isn’t that great, but back when I was making a lot online in high school I commissioned a lot of articles to be written for it, so this site exists. It makes money too – about £50 on adsense last month from about 400 visits a day. It has some pretty good ranks – jumping between 3rd and 4th for a keyword with 18,000 exact searches a month, and between 20 and 30 for the term fibre optics, which gets even more searches and adwords tool tells me is worth about $5 a click to advertisers. The site could do with more articles on related topics which also have good amounts of searches, although my interest in this is low so I’ll probably target writing just one a month.