Diary

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.

   

Australian Open starts next week and how has the season been so far?

A belated Happy New Year to you all!

I probably had my most relaxed off season since I went full time at trading. I was more organised and got a lot of my off-season tasks out of the way early so i didn’t have a mad panic in the last week of December where I realised I still had lots to do.

I always use December to update the sites. For the sales site I have spent a lot of time working on the pages SEO. Google take forever to update sites in their index. In reality it was only 2 weeks but when you’re waiting to see if you have improved your site or wrecked it with the changes you have made, 2 weeks is a loooong time. They finally updated last night and ranking positions were immediately improved. it ranked pretty well before which is why I was worried about cocking something up but on some of the popular search terms I have moved up.

Something I did notice is that in the meta description I managed to mis-spell “strategies” as “srategies”. Crap! How did I miss that? Hopefully it won’t take another 2 weeks before they update the indexed version of the page.

I also looked at the SEO of the blog and looked at the design. I have opted for a static page rather than leading with the blog posts. The bounce rate of the blog had been around 70% to 80% so if the first page grabs people’s attention a little more and also if they have to click to get to the main content that will improve the bounce rate. Bounce rate is how often someone visits a site and leaves without clicking anything. As the sales page is just 1 page it will always have a high bounce rate. I don’t really want too many links taking people away fro the page.

On the blog I really want people to find enough of interest so they click through a few pages. Having the new front page has improved the bounce rate from around 75% to below 55%. it also means people will spend more time on the site which in turn helps SEO ranking.

SEO is fascinating once you get into it. Honestly. It is!

The season has started pretty well if you ignore the fact that we always start with late nights. The Australian Open starts on Monday. I have been thinking about writing a preview of the men’s and women’s draws. I used to do it for every grand slam. To be honest I used to dread doing them. They are SO tedious to write. I decided that if I found them so dull then surely the readers would too. I’m not doing one.

I will be doing my usual YouTube videos previewing the day’s matches once the tournament starts so please join me for those!

I saw a photo on Pinterest so thought I would leave this for my wife when i went to bed at 3am. She always gets up during the night for a pee.

The image I saw used a white toilet seat so I wasn’t sure if it would work as well with the pine. When I set it up I was almost crying with laughter.

When I woke up I went into the bathroom and saw the toilet rolls had been removes but the bottle was still there. Surely she had had a piss with that still there. I asked her if she saw the face I left for her in the bathroom. She looked at me blankly. I wonder why I bother sometimes. I went back upstairs and put the eyes back. I took a photo and showed it to her.

“Ooohhh I wondered why you’d put toilet rolls on the seat! I just thought were having a moment”.