MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over

Google Mayhem

Jan 31, 2009 A Good Laugh, Search Marketing

Google Malware

Notice that every site in my search engine results (SERPs) say “This site may harm your computer”. So I do what any normal geek would do. I turn on Twitter. Sure, enough there is chatter about Google Mayhem and a hashtag to go with it.

Twitter Conversation Google Mayhem

Tech Crunch has also announced the story. I suspect by the time you are reading this post it will be fixed.

I wonder how Google will explain this one? What spin with the PR folks put on calling the entire world wide web Malware…How did this happen? Disgruntled employee? One Tweet suggested “Google update: – Homer Simpson has been replaced as chief technical officer and been replaced by George Bush. The world is safe once more”

Ah, well will Yahoo! for now.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Tags: google, google mayhem, malware, news, search resultes, search results, twitter

Google Analytics for Bloggers Part 4: Great Reports

Jan 28, 2009 Digital Marketing & Metrics, Search Marketing, Web Analytics

So by now you should know why you should use Analytics for your blog, how to set-up Google Analytics, and have a basic understanding of the dashboard and the terminology.

Time to see what analytics can tell you about your blog!

Note:  There are some differences as far as measurement for a blog than for a standard website such as a corporate site. The biggest difference I spoke about in Part 3, and that is bounce rate. Bounce rate “represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.” (Wikipedia) Don’t be discouraged to discover that you have an incredibly high bounce rate on your blog, someone can visit your blog read the entire post, or even multiple posts should they land on your home page, not click anything and then leave. Despite the fact that they read every word – they will be counted as a bounce, simply due to the fact that they didn’t click on anything.

The stats available on Google Analytics can show you:

• What are the top posts and pages.
• Who are your referrers and what are your incoming links
• What search engine terms did people use to get to your blog.
• What links people are clicking on within your blog.
• What is the busiest day to-date for your blog.

I suggest looking at 2-3 month period to get a good look at your data the first time you do this. Once you have an idea of how your site performs, I am sure you will be checking it daily…but for now 2-3 months should give you a more meaningful look at traffic to your blog.

What are the top posts and pages?

Directions -  Content: Top Content or Content by Title

Top Content: Will show you this information by URL. This may not be helpful if your posts use the standard URL system used by Wordpress where each post is given a number example = 303. Unless you have memorized your posts by numbers, you will have to go back and forth to figure out which post Analytics is referring to.

Content by Title: Will give you the same information, however it will list the content by the page Title. Page Title is what appears at the top of your browser. For example if you are visiting my blog to read this post (rather than reading it in an RSS feed reader)- the title on your browser will be Google Analtyics for Bloggers Part 4: Measuring Success: MEGO My Eyes Glaze Over. If you aren’t using an SEO Plug-in that allows you to add titles, consider doing so – titles are more than just pretty – they are important for SEO purposes.

This will give you your top content listed in descending order. It is likely that your most popular page will be your home page or “/”  will be your number one page. You can sort this list by a few different metrics, I usually use Unique Pageviews to get an idea of quantity of visitors to that page. If you have goals set up sort by $ Index column ( average value for a page that a user visited before landing on the ) to get an idea of which posts are converted your visitors. Watch for more on Goals in Part 5!

Questions to consider

Do you notice any trends surrounding the topics at the top of the list? At the bottom? Are they what you expected? Are these same blogs ones you have had more comments on – or less? If you are using goals, are the top posts by Pageviews the same ones converting?

Who are your referrers and what are your incoming links?

Directions- Traffic Sources: Referring Sites

Google Analytics Referring Sites

Referring Sites: This is one of my favourite pieces to look at! I believe, it is also one of the most important factors to take into consideration when “pimping” your blog as well. It can tell you what is working, and what isn’t!

Once again you can sort this chart in a number of ways.

Visits: Number of visits the various referrers drove to your site.

Page/Visit: How deep did those visitors go? Remember if they landed on your home page, they didn’t need to go far to read multiple posts, so you might want to figure out where the referrer linked to first. You can do this by clicking on URL listed, it will show you the URL on the referring site, then pull down Dimension and choose Landing Page (see image).

Dimension: Landing Page

Average Time on Site: Sort by time and you will see which referring sites send traffic that sticks around.

Questions to consider

Which sites are sending the most engaged visitors? How did you get that referral – was it due to a shared item on Facebook? A tweet you made on Twitter? A comment on another blog? A link back on someone elses blog? Again, what was the content that attracted the visitors? You also might want to segment by Returning and New visitors by using Advanced Segments (top of dashboard).

What search engine terms did people use to get to your blog?

Directions -  Traffic Sources:  Keywords

There are three ways a visitor will make their way to your site: direct (type in your URL), Referring site, and Search. From your dashboard or from the Traffic Sources: Overview you can see what percentage comes from each. Search can help drive new traffic your way, or help folks who are looking for your particular blog find you. A blog, due to the content rich nature, tends to be fairly “Search Engine Optimized” to begin with, but there are ways to help it along (please refer to SEO for Marketers).  The Keywords report can help you find out what words your visitors are using and clicking on to get to your blog. By looking at a three month period or more you may see words that repeatedly drive traffic to your blog.  Are they indicitative of what is on your site? Are they words that fit your blog objectives and goals? Are people searching for your blog name? Your name? What keywords are missing? Is your blog about children’s books, but keyword “kids books” isn’t driving any traffic? That could be because there is a lot of competition for these words, or perhaps when you talk about books you refer to “Children’s” rather than “kid’s” more often?  Looking at your keywords can help you understand your visitors, what content they are visiting for, what keywords may be trending in your niche, and where you might be losing visitors due to keywords not reflecting in your content.

Questions to consider

Are you missing traffic from a particular engine? Are you indexed by that search engine? What keywords do you want to place for in the search engines?

What links people are clicking on within your blog?

This is really important on a corporate site or E-com site, to give you an idea of how your navigation is working, give you and idea of where to place your key links, and if your visitors are not finding what they are looking for. Blogs, usually have a limited navigation, but it can still be helpful to see what your visitors are doing on your site, what outgoing links they might be visiting, and what pages within your site they are checking out.

There a few ways to get this information. I will just look at the more simple views for this post.

Directions – Content: Site Overlay

Google Analytics Site Overlay

Google Analytics Navigation Summary

What is the busiest day to-date for your blog?

Directions- Visitors: Visitor Trending: Visits / Absolute Unique Visitors

This will show a bar graph of visits by day. This is a great way to visually see your site’s traffic day by day. You can also look at Unique Visitors in this way to get an idea of how many different visitors come to your blog on a given day.

Questions to consider

Are your busy days reflective of when you added new posts? Is there a trend in most popular days of the week?

Watch for Part 5 coming soon where I will go over Goals and a few other ways to look at your success.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Tags: google analytics, reports, Web Analytics

#GNO with @jessicaknows: A Summary of Twitter’s Girl’s Night Out

Jan 7, 2009 Advertising, Blogs, Books, Consumer Brands, Digital Marketing & Metrics, Microblogging, PR, Search Marketing, Social Bookmarking, Social Media, Web Analytics, social networks, word of mouth

Jessicaknows

I missed some of the #GNO (Girls Night Out) discussion on Twitter last night so I went into Twitter Search and read the discussion. As always, it was a bit of a dizzying conversation last night – trying to keep up with the multitude of posts. So, it was difficult getting all the tips from @jessicaknows during the discussion.

I tried to pull as much as I could into this compilation. I hope this helps others as well.

Attracting PR Peeps for your Blog

A lot of participants were interested in reviewing more products and wondered how to go about doing this more often.

@jessicaknows said that she doesn’t think that there is a magic number with regards to traffic on your site in attracting PR. She noticed a lot of attention once she had about 20,000 monthly visitors to her blog. However, she suggests if you write about the products you are passionate about the PR folks will follow.

My two cents: She is absolutely correct, while the PR people will look for an engaged community the numbers may not matter as much if you are passionate and are considered an “influencer”. In this case, your review would simply be the tip of the iceberg. An influencer will tend to spread “word of mouth” throughout a variety of networks online and offline -giving a lot of added value to the campaign – beyond the blog post.  I hope to write more posts on books in 2009 since that is my passion. I don’t have 20,000 monthly visitors – but I have already received two books for review in the past. (Dan Ariely – Predictibly Irrational and Don Tapscott – Grown Up Digital)

Use Social Media to Build Your Own Community

@jessicaknows suggests that you pick 3 social media tools & be consistent use them everyday. She uses three social networks: Twitter (obviously), Facebook and LinkedIn. She also uses StumbleUpon for bookmarking regularly. She uses LinkedIn to connect with lots of PR folks, and mom owned business she can partner and work with in the future. On Facebook she prefers to “friend” people she knows in real-life and friends she has met on other social networks (Twitter for example). For users concerned with privacy and sharing with virtual friends she had a great idea to have a user profile for personal use and a Fan Page for your business/blog/website. While the Fan Page will show you as an author, “fans” will have to request to be a friend in order to see your Facebook profile.

My two cents: I post all blog posts to Twitter and Facebook. I try to avoid using the robot when I have the time by personally summarizing the newest post in my status/tweet.  Twitter is also a great place to promote DIY or How To Posts to people who are looking for specific help. I use Tweetburner to track click-through, which can give me an idea of how successful the tweet/status was. Note – don’t just do self-promotion, make sure you tweet other content outside of your own that you think your followers will find value in.

I have just started using StumbleUpon but I have definitely seen some traffic to my site through my profile. StumbleUpon allows you to find “friends” that have similar interests to you which is a great way to find new and interesting websites. Stumble others and perhaps they will Stumble you. All about Karma!

Couple other thoughts on Social Media:
- Use Video to promote your site by placing your URL in videos posted to YouTube
- Participate in Forums and Discussion groups in your topic area
- There are niche Social Networks that you can be involved in TwitterMoms, ClassyCloset and more…Create a profile and participate in the community
- Comment, comment, comment on other blogs. This is an easy way to promote your blog on other similar sites, and show some love to other bloggers.
- Try to link to other bloggers in your blog posts when possible. Give credit where credit is due, and share great information with your community.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There was a great discussion around SEO last night during the #GNO.  There were folks on all ends of the spectrum – from questions such as “What is SEO?” to helpful tips from experts. @jessicaknows suggests that this is an important part of driving traffic to your website. For Wordpress bloggers she recommends the SEO Plug-in, and she has signed up for SEOBook training to get up to speed on SEO.

My two cents: Having attended SES Toronto last year, I am a believer in SEO for building traffic to your site. I use All-in-One SEO Plug-in for my WordPress blog. I use H1, H2, H3 headers where possible in my blog posts, and try to include Keywords without sounding “canned”.  SEO is great, but you also must use Analytics to compliment your SEO work.  If you aren’t following your stats you won’t be able to measure your success, see what is working and what isn’t, and see where you might have holes. Your Analytics program can also tell you before you start SEO efforts what Keywords are driving traffic to your site, and later on you should follow data for trends in keywords and content that you may not have noticed otherwise.

My SEO for Marketers post is a good SEO 101 for new comers, and watch next week for my Google Analytics Series for Bloggers. Also, take a peak at my “learnings” from my analytics a little while ago

Blogger Relations and Onsite Details

A lot of blogger etiquette and on-site promotional ideas were brought up during the discussion, here are some of the points:

• It is all about helping others: @jessicaknows says “I establish relationships by learning about other ppl’s goals & what they’re all about & then introduce to each other”. This includes helping to promote blogs she believe in the most through her sites. I love this quote from her “it’s so easy…the key word is SOCIAL…use the “have a friend, be a friend” mantra in business and you can’t go wrong”
• Write often, and be consistent. She tries to write daily if she can. Obviously that isn’t feasible for everyone – but I know if I blog 2-3 times a week my traffic remains higher than if I blog 1 time a week. Perhaps that is just a no-brainer.
• Encourage conversation and open up channels for two way conversation.
  
• Show personality in your posts
  
• Offer Blog giveaways (check out @jessicaknows 15 days of Marketing Post on Giveaways)
• Attend offline events (Tweetups, Conferences)
  

For those of you who were at Girl’s Night Out – did I miss anything? Any other hints and tips to encourage traffic?

Popularity: 36% [?]

Tags: #gno, blogging, girls night out, jessicaknows, marketing & communication, promotion, seo, traffic, twitter, Web Analytics, web traffic

Lessons in Driving Traffic and Engagement to Blogs

Dec 29, 2008 Blogs, Digital Marketing & Metrics, Microblogging, Search Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics, social networks

The Lineup: Courtesy Stock.xchng KLatham

Traffic and engagement are not the same thing. Likely you know that. Quality vs Quantity…

Having people visiting my site looking for Chia Pets and Chicken Recipes and Fred Flinstone is ultimately not my goal.  People who visit my site using these search terms don’t tend to stick around very long, but they show up in my ‘traffic’ report nonetheless.

Quite some time ago Avinash Kaushik from Occam’s Razor gave me access to Google’s Custom Reporting and Advanced Segmenting which were at the time in beta. I had played with the new features quite a bit with my work websites, but not with my blog.  I decided it was time to do so, with the goal of figuring out how to grow my community of readers, and engage those of you who are regular visitors – for example getting you to comment, visit regularly etc. Using the extra reporting functions I was able to find out some interesting stuff:

• My most valuable new visitors were referrals (visiting from another website) and most were visiting from blogs I had commented on. These visitors, over visitors from Facebook, Twitter, Technorati or Blog directories; spent more time on my blog and visited a higher number of pages.
  LESSON
  - Commenting on other blogs drives interested and engaged traffic and hopefully subscribers
• Most returning visitors (those who aren’t subscribed via RSS, visiting directly or via a bookmark) visit again from Facebook, Twitter, Google and MichelleKostya.com
  LESSON
  - It is worth promoting blogs on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter by linking new posts.
• The keywords that drove the most valuable search traffic (pages/visit and time spent) to my site over the last few months were to posts on politics.
  LESSON
  - Posts on current events drive traffic.
• Keywords including “mego”, MEGOAgain”, “Mego Michelle”, “Michelle Kostya” etc spend the most amount of time on my site compared to site average. Duh…they were looking for me. Other keywords that engaged my visitors: Facebook advertising, Facebook ignoring friends, jetblue twitter duty, corporate tweet, Loblaws, Sony, Sheridan
  LESSON
  - Optimize site and posts around keywords that engage.
  - Brand names are often searched and can drive traffic although not all engage readers enough for them to stick around.
  - Continue to write posts on social media and Web 2.0!
• Unfortunately, since most return visitors came directly to the main page it is hard to determine what content is driving them back via Google Analytics. However, if you I look at my Feedburner stats and refer back to the articles posted around that time my readers enjoyed these posts over the last 30 days (why does Feedburner only allow me to break data by 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or “all time”?) the most popular posts to my return visitors are:
  - Social Media’s Next Victim
  - Kid’s Say the Funniest Things #2
  - My Top 15 Web 2.0 Sites
  - 5 Tips to Organize Google Reader
  - He Sleeps! A Miracle
  Interesting – a mixed bag of social media posts AND parenting.  However, one thing I do know about these posts is that they were either short or broken up by bullets or subject headings.

  LESSON
  - Short is good
  - Break long posts into sections or use formatting to break the post up into smaller bites!

• I have been racking my brain to find ways to encourage commenting, this is a good sign that readers are enjoying what they are reading on my blog. However, this is not the only way to measure this.
  LESSON
  - Measure depth of visit, number of pages/visit
  - Time spent on site
  - Return Visitors vs. New Visitors

What kind of lessons can you share about building your blog community? Where do your readers come from? How do you measure engagement?

Popularity: 18% [?]

Tags: analytics, avinash kaushik, Blogs, commenting, community, engagement, facebook, feedburner, google advanced segments, google custom reports, keywords, search terms, seo, twitter, web 2.0, web traffic

Chia Pets Are Not Sold Here

Dec 21, 2008 A Good Laugh, Search Marketing, word of mouth

I am probably doing myself a disservice…but what the *bleep* is with Chia Pets.

A few months ago I wrote a post called Ch-Ch-Chia in hopes of winning a ticket to the Canadian Marketing Association’s Mass to Grass Conference (note: I got tickets). The post was a Word of Mouth campaign for Chia Pets.

Because of that post I get oodles of traffic from people looking for Chia Pets. This is just from the past 30 days.

I did a quick Google Search to see why so many visitors came to my site due to this rather curious key word and this is where I show up in the Search Results:

Make Your Own Giant Chia Pets: 9
Giant Chia Pets: 2
Chia Pets: not on the first 5 pages
Chia Pet Retailer: 3

All these visitors bounce right off my site of course, since obviously my site is not what they are looking for! So perhaps, I can make this post more popular than the original…and it will be obvious from the title that Chia Pets Are NOT Sold Here.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Tags: chia pets, Search Marketing, word of mouth

SEO for Marketers

Dec 18, 2008 Digital Marketing & Metrics, Search Marketing

A lot of marketers are under the false understanding that SEO is just for the tech folks. And, sure it is the web developers who implement and add the meta data, the header tags and such…but Marketing must play a role in SEO.

Whether marketers work directly with web developers to build and create a website, mini-site, or microsite or if they are the content creators – they need to understand search engine optimization (SEO – for those of you who have read to this point without knowing what I am talking about!).

So what does a marketer need to know about SEO?

The basics

Golden Triangle:

Based on an eye-tracking study in 2005 by Enquiro studies they discovered that the the key location on Google for visibility is a triangle that “extends from the top of the results over to the top of the first result, then down to a point on the left side at the bottom of the “above the fold” visible results. This key area was looked at by 100 percent of the participants.” Basically, this area will include the top sponsored and top organic results. Visibility dropped quickly for the rest of the page. Anything below the fold was viewed by less than 50%.

Universal Search

I suspect the Golden Triangle rule has changed somewhat with Google’s Universal Search, which essentially highlights listings from News, Blogs, Video and other verticals.

For example; Google George Bush and you will find:

Popularity: 12% [?]

Tags: Blogs, bots, golden triangle, google, marketing & communication, meta tags, Search Marketing, sem, seo, spider simulator, universal search, Videos

Why I LOVE Web Analytics…(I am such a geek)

Oct 30, 2008 Search Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Tools & Applications

I know my mother would say I am creative – but she is talking about my propensity for the dramatic, my flare for the arts, and perhaps my ability to write (that may be subjective of course, and a mother always thinks her child is the best). But, I would beg to differ. If there were a balance between a “Creative” and an “Analytical” marketer I believe I would fall squarely on the side of “Analytical (and, I would have to thank my father for that trait).

When it comes to projects such as signage, ads, or other “artsy” pieces I rely on my ability to portray what I need in a creative brief, including the key messages and some ideas on where inspiration should come from. I let the creative department do the rest. Once a project comes back to me for approval I can tell the art director that I love it or that there is something not quite right, but how to fix it is where I struggle! Don’t get me wrong I know the design fundamentals of balance, space, and colour but when it comes to developing the full blown concept beyond the verbage, messages, emotion I want to evoke, and key objectives of the piece – I am at a loss!

I am much more at home in the role of marketer when I am working on marketing strategy, thinking about how to meet the marketing objectives most effectively and how we will measure its success. While a project is running its course and when it is over I love analyzing the data – the clicks, the sales, the phone calls, the number of mentions in the press – the results! I love seeing how things fit together in a marketing program, what works and what doesn’t, and building the next steps!

Perhaps this analytical, systematic and logical side is why I love Web Analytics. I could spend hours delving into Google Analytics (and often do!) both on my blog (I’m watching you!) and on the web sites I manage at work. I love seeing where people are coming from who visit my blog (examples: Sheridan College, Microsoft, Royal York Hotel, India, Japan, and the UK), what search words are they using to find the corporate site (since they are lucky to locate it at all – the site is not exactly search engine friendly as this is a project I am still trying to get webdev to work on!), and what pages are they visiting once they get there (Contact page, service center locations, grills – these all tell us a different story).

So, when I read Avinash Kaushik’s post on new features to Google Analytics I was so excited. Sadly. the features aren’t running yet (only in beta for select people) but I am ready when they are…I have watched the videos and read the many blog posts on the Custom Reports, Visitor Segmentations and motion charts. I won’t go into detail about the upgrades (better people than I already have- see the many previous links!) I can’t wait to start playing around with these features for work and for my blog.

So I am out of the closet with my love of Web Analytics. Are you a geek? Share your geekiness!

Popularity: 8% [?]

digital marketing – the new frontier in the job market…

Sep 30, 2008 Marketing & Communication, Search Marketing, Social Media, social networks, word of mouth

While I am on maternity leave, I am still in constant contact with my workplace. Answering questions, helping forge ahead on a number of projects that I feel are important enough to keep one foot in the door. Some days though I wonder why I bother. I wonder sometimes if my evangelism for digital media and word of mouth just rests on deaf ears. One step forward, two steps back. Approval. Then budget is cut. Approval. Then they freeze hiring for required resources. Approval. Then disapproval. But is any other company different? Is frustration just destined to be part of my working life? Perhaps this is simply what life is like when you are passionate for change, and a little impatient!

So while I am not currently looking for employment, some days I think back on Seth Godin’s book “The Dip” and wonder if I am stuck in a “cul-de-sac” where no amount of hard work will lead to success. On other days, however, I think I am just in a “Dip” and if I push forward I will make it to the other side, successful and triumphent in the completion of my career goals. When I see interesting job postings, or a recruiter calls I wonder if the grass is greener…

I saw this posting on a blog I read:

Sheridan College prides itself on its leadership in the field of digital media studies.

We are now looking for an accomplished and creative Online Marketing Manager with exceptional project management and communication skills to manage our own online presence.

Working with internal clients, a team of web developers and external resources, you will help Sheridan maximize its online impact by planning, implementing and measuring ongoing initiatives in support of our strategic objectives.

Responsibilities:

• Managing Sheridan’s website, monitoring and enhancing its performance;
• Managing extensive online advertising campaigns, social media activities and e-mail marketing programs;
• Collaborating with colleagues, internal clients to develop effective online strategies;
• Tracking new user trends and IT developments and leveraging them for our online impact.

Requirements:

• 3 year diploma/degree in E/Marketing, Advertising, Business, Web Design, E-commerce, or related field;
• Min. 5 years experience in E/Marketing, Advertising, Business, or related professions;
• Understanding of effective website design and online marketing, including SEM and SEO principles and social media;
• Experience with web analytics tools/metrics management.

Wow! A job posting that is looking for SEO and SEM experience, someone to work on social media and e-mail marketing, someone to forge ahead in new media. They “get” the new space, and want some one to focus entirely on Digital Marketing, rather than divide their time between online and offline marketing. The last time I searched the job postings I didn’t see positions like this (it has been awhile!) and it is exciting to think that Digital Marketing is slowly becoming its own discipline (even in smaller companies and organizations like Sheridan College ). A quick search on Workopolis found 4 Digital Marketing Manager Positions, 4 mentions of “Social Media” in a job description, and 7 “e-marketing” positions – all in the last 30 days! So, I suppose based on this I can hope that someday I will be able to focus entirely on this area tactically, and strategically work with other marketing disciplines; rather than being the jack-of-all-trades, evangelist for digital marketing, and occassionally frustrated worker-bee, that I currently seem to be! I can hope that someday this will become so important in my own company that “approval” remains approved. That resources find their way to the department. And, instead of talking to myself…banging my head against the wall on occasion…I will find that people are saying the same thing to me!

Popularity: 10% [?]

Tags: career, Digital Marketing & Metrics, Dip, job descriptions, jobs, Marketing & Communication, Seth Godin, social media, word of mouth, Work

Burning Questions about Feedburner

May 18, 2008 Blogs, Marketing & Communication, RSS, Search Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Tools & Applications

I am not sure if it is simply a symptom of being a junior blogger (I have been blogging for less than two years) or if all bloggers suffer from analytic-obsession-disorder.

On a semi-regular basis I check Google Analytics to see who is visiting my site. I look for the following information:

• View the map to see where my visitors come from (last month 29 different countries, majority from US)
• I love to look up Network Location to see if any interesting companies have been visiting, especially to see if any companies I may have written about came to see what I said.
• Traffic is fascinating (really it is!). How did people come to find me? Was I already on their list and they came direct? Did they search for MEGOAgain? Or for my name? Did they search for something truly bizarre and happen to locate my blog? (Most bizarre this month “cliff stoll by coats” and “animals that work well together”)

I also check Wordpress plugin “Wassup”, which gives me stats for the last 24 hours, 7 days, month or year. Most of the time these stats don’t match up with Google Analytics and vice versa. But it gives me an idea of traffic to my site.

Then there is Feedburner. Every couple weeks I will login to Feedburner. My understanding is that Feedburner should show me my subscribers. And, it will show me how they are subscribed (Bloglines, Google Reader etc). What I can’t figure out is why it fluctuates on a daily basis. If I had thousands of subscribers I could understand that frequently subscribers would add you or remove you..and you would see a drop or an increase everyday. However, I regularly see an increase or a decrease of 10-20% from one day to another. On days when I post it always increases…so then I begin to think perhaps it is showing me those subscribers that visit that day – rather than subscribers that exist on that particular day.

According to Feedburner help: “FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period.” – So does that mean that within the feed aggregator  a person clicked on my blog to read it? Or does it mean that the feed aggregator tried to update or retrieve any new posts?

Can anybody out there shed some light on this for me?

Popularity: 7% [?]

Fun with SEO

May 6, 2008 Search Marketing, Web Analytics

I am not sure how many people would actually call Search Engine Optimization “fun”, but it is a challenge and a puzzle to me that I find fascinating.

I am no expert by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it has been only recently that I have really spent any time trying understand the ins and outs of SEO. Prior, I had read a few blogs on the topic, E-Marketing Performance, Online Marketing Blog, Search Engine Guide, and Small Business SEM. About a while ago I asked my Twitter followers for a suggestion on a good book to read. SEO for Dummies and Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day were suggested.  Lucky for me they were a package deal at Amazon!

In January our corporate website received only 9% of its visitors via Search Engines. Just to give you an idea of where my team is when it comes to SEO – not only am I a newbie – but when I told the web master what we were going to do- he said “What is SEO?”. Nonetheless, over the past few months or so I have been working with our web guy to make some changes in order to increase search engine traffic.

• We have set up a 301 redirect so that we avoid duplicate content between www.cuisinart.ca and cuisinart.ca.
• We have checked the site in Spider Simulator where we discovered that our Site Map wasn’t actually seen as a “Spiderable Link”.
• We removed our entry page, “French or English” and opted for an English main page with the choice to choose French from there.
• We added H1 tags to our category pages. I hope to add H1 tags to all pages, and H2 pages to some of the pages.
• We of course added a description so that when the site comes up on Search it says more than “choose french or english”!
• We put titles on each page describing what was actually on the page.

We still have a lot more to do. We have to make up for the fact that our site uses a flash menu, we currently lack vast amounts of content, and our site is dynamic – which apparently can cause some problems in indexing.

We have had some success, our Search Engine Traffic has increased steadily over the past few months from January’s 9%.

February 9%
March   12%
April     35%

On the other hand, before we did some of the work we ran the site through Website Grader and got a grade of 42 – ugh. At that time it showed that we had 451 Inbound Links amongst other factors. Now, after the above changes, we have a grade of 54, but it only recognizes 1 Inbound Link. No idea what happened to the other 450!  It is also not recognizing how old the domain is anymore. So frustrating.  Puzzling. Yet, as I mentioned strangely fun!

Oh well back to reading Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day!

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