Diary

It has been a fairly standard week. The 3 ATP tournaments were all ATP250’s so top players were thin on the ground. That doesn’t really cause many problems to traders in WTA tournaments but for the ATP it feels like you have to work a bit harder for your profits. You get a few more unexpected results.

The storm that was forecast seems to be building. The wind sounds pretty strong. When I took the dogs out around 10:30 last night it wasn’t a pleasant walk with the wind straight into your face. Today the winds seems much stronger and you can feel it battering the house yet nothing on the street is getting blown around. Usually when we have high winds you will see wheelie bins and kids toys blowing up the road. That doesn’t seem to be happening. Weird as it sounds like the house could blow over!

I have made some changes to the sales page. I’m always messing about with one or all of the sites. I also have betfairtennistrading.com. My SEO education continued this week. I looked on a site called the wayback machine. It shows you versions of sites from the past. Looking at mine showed me the SEO side of things (site title and description) barely changed in many years. I’m starting to understand what Google is looking for. If they don’t “like” your title and description they make one up based on old descriptions or from content in your pages. Sometimes what they choose better matches the search term that the searcher used but I would rather be in control of what shows up next to my site in Google searches.

Having a bit of a chill out day. Not really up to much. It’s good to give my brain a rest from tennis for a a few hours after I have completed the trading tips email obviously!

 

It has been a few weeks since my last diary post. I’ve been a bit busy! It’s nice to get the night shifts out of the way early in the year. I try to keep my working hours as close to “normal” as I can but it has still been 2, 3 and 4am finishes. That also limits the number of matches I get to trade. I have made more than normal per match which balances things out a bit.

It’s been a decent tournament this year. Kenin fought hard to take the Women’s title from Muguruza. Nice profit on that one to add to the Thiem v Zverev match yesterday. I haven’t done the write up for the men’s final yet. I’ll be doing that along with the youtube video a bit later.

I was a bit quick to think I was some sort of SEO wizz. It took me less than 2 days to cock it up. All good experience I suppose. I have learned a huge amount about Google and how they view and index websites. They “crawl” most sites with a mobile bot these days so your site has to work well on mobile phone screens. I had set up a page specifically for mobiles. If someone visited www.tradesharktennis.com on a mobile they would be sent immediately to mobile.tradesharktennis.com. Now Google don’t like sites to have identical titles and meta descriptions. You can tell Google which site they should give preference to when ranking pages and I thought I had things set correctly. I didn’t. I was close but close isn’t good enough. I corrected the error but while I was waiting for Google to re-index the 2 pages I thought I would be better tweaking the desktop version so that it displays on mobile screens.

That seems to have worked a treat! Google actually say that if you have a mobile version of your page you should have their titles and meta descriptions as well as content identical. It seems that as I didn’t do that before my pages were probably competing against each other for Google ranking places. Now I have just 1 page for both desktop and mobile users it seems to have improved the ranking.

Hopefully now we are back on better hours with the tournaments I can get back to recording some trading videos and I’ll get back to more regular diary posts.

its time watch a bit of football before start working on the Men’s Oz Open final.