FabulousEntertainment

A few months ago I bought a MacBook Core 2 Duo with 512MB memory. I think that the Intel switch is beginning to settle down and it looks the initial teething problems have been resolved more or less (although Microsoft Office and Photoshop are still not available as native Intel binaries).

However I was seeing the spinning disc of death just a bit too much so I decided to upgrade the memory to 1 GB. The MacBook has two memory slots but unfortunately for performance the Duo processor likes evenly matched banks so my MacBook shipped with 2 x 256MB so to upgrade I needed to buy 2 x 512 MB chips.

Installing the memory seemed straight forward however in the process of upgrading the memory I somehow messed up the power so the battery wasn’t charging. However I reset the system management controller and that seemed to fixed it.

The new memory has absolutely transformed the computer and certainly as far as I’m concerned 1 GB is really the minimum memory required for a MacBook.

Recently I’ve switched my focus somewhat from email marketing of the site to SEO. The email marketing so far has done okay, and is reliably bringing in between 100 to 200 members a week which is keeping the site fresh and interesting for the members. However to reach my 1 million members target at 200 members a week would take 96 years!

The only way I can get a step change up to the 1000 per day level or more that I need is through getting a chunk of the huge volumes of searches done on swinging-related topics. So, I’ve just been busy re-working the titles of my member profiles to include the city and state which I think should help us score on city searches which are pretty common. I’ve also made sure that every profile has got a unique meta description and unique meta keywords. To be honest I’m not sure how effective that will be but it won’t do any harm.

The SEO is beginning and I am now getting sign-ups from Yahoo and MSN (on MSN Fab Swingers now comes up on page 2 for searches for “uk swingers”!) so I am making some progress. Nothing really happening on Google yet though but I’m sure that is just a question of time.

Finally, I’ve been continuing with the link building. It’s quite tedious but I am getting there one link at a time. I’m not bothering at all with the lower-quality sites, I’m going very much for quality over quantity which I’m sure will work out much better.

Here’s the latest ranking done today. The higher the Alexa Rank, the more popular the site is with the most popular site on the internet having a rank of one. The PageRank varies from 0 to 10 with 10 being the most important site.

This month I’ve taken Informed Consent out of the rankings - it’s a brilliant site but it’s not a swingers site so it doesn’t really belong here. I’ve added UK Swingers.

It’s been great progress with Fab Swingers moving from a PageRank of 0 to 3 and the Alexa Rank moving from 802,365 to 417,388. All of the other competitor sites we are tracking have fallen down the rankings - I’d love to believe that we’re responsible!

I’m very keen for Fab Swingers to be the UK Swingers site and to be on page 1 of the search engines for this term.

Here’s how it’s performing right now:

• MSN: Page 9
• Yahoo: Page 12 (Result 115)
• Google: Not in top 30 page

On Google the first five sites returned have PageRanks of 4, 4, 2, 3 and 3 respectively so once I’ve built a bit more trust there’s no reason why I can’t get on page 1.

I suspect that the main issue on Google is that the site isn’t old enough yet, the consensus seems to be that a new site needs 6-9 months before it’ll rank on competitive terms on Google.

Finally, I’ve also kicked off a blog, the UK Swingers Guide which I’m going to use to talk about the subject and hopefully build up a bit of readership.