TradeShark Diary, 17th January 2020

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”.