Finding Underlying Issues with SEO; Rejected Article
My second article to Street was rejected for issues with the links. Despite my efforts to create an article that is totally content based, I was not sure how to form the links and in my efforts to not make them promotional, it fell right into that. Even after having read the documentation in Street Articles on it, I'm still not sure.
It took me considerable time (2 hours) to figure out why I already had a sitemap verification (found an .xml file with a similar number already uploaded) but could not find the email address I used for it. Upon breaking down and just re-verifying the site again, it show under the email account I used to do this a previous attempt at verifying the site. It reports 88 days ago and it was successful...so this was the email account I used. The site was not coming up in the list of verified sites (in fact, none of them were until I verified, and if by magic the two sites having been verified came up (includes the new verification and that of a different site.
Finally! I have my sitemap submitted to Webmaster Tools. Thanks Neil and Mark, who brought this up in their comments! This will help make those graphs start going up!
During this excursion, I found, in the stats, that the average visit to my site is about 2 seconds. There are a LOT of bounce-backs! People don't seem to be liking the site. Though there are a few unique clicks, most of the clicks to this site are not.
I have begun writing a post for underwater lighting for the GoPro cameras. I thought this necessary as the rejected article had links to the camera itself rather than the lighting kit, and the link to the front page seems rather off topic, so the solution is to promote the lighting kit as an accessory to the camera, rather than the camera itself in this instance.
This is great for further down the Course, as it is work already done. I then, need another article for the landing page besides the one already approved.