Monitoring Your Site Traffic

If you are not already monitoring your website traffic, then you really should be! But how can you do this and what do you need to know?

Knowing how many visitors are finding your site is excellent, but what when it drops or spikes? How can you reverse a drop? What can you do to repeat the spike? You need to know how people are finding your site and which pages they are arriving on.

The most simple form of this is just to look at your server logs. A simple log will tell you what search engine people arrived from, the search term and the page they visited. If you don't have huge mounds of traffic, then this is probably sufficient.

If you are a bit more technically involved, then you could right a piece of code to read through the logs and display counts of the above stats. Easy enough, when you know how.

For some of my own sites (those written in PHP) I have a small script that I can drop into the trailer of the page (all of my PHP sites have a trailer file, update the file for that site and every page on the site is updated). This little piece of code examines the referring page and if it's a search engine, then an email is sent to be telling me the page found, search engine and search term. Great for new sites, but more difficult when the sites are getting thousands of hits per day.

In that case you usually have to go to your web host and see what statistic packages they offer. Usually these will be all singing all dancing packages. My own host charges about £12 a site for these, so once the site is earning it can be a worth while investment.

Watching Your Traffic

How closely do you watch the traffic entering your site? I'm sure you have a good idea of how many visitors usually hit your site and the number of orders / sales / commissions, but do you watch for trends on your website? Do you take a look to see what keywords are working for you, what pages visitors are being sent to and if they are getting the information they want on those exact pages?

I admit, I don't do that carefully enough on my main sites. And it's only when the income drops for a few days that I look. By then,it's too late to see what's been working.

Yesterday I was looking at one site and noticed that a misspelling of AllianceandLeicester.co.uk generated a lot of traffic. So I took a look at that page and was surprised that it was a PR1, yet was only linked to from 1 other page on the site, which is a PR0.

Over the next few days I'll take a look at:
- how you could be monitoring your traffic
- why you should be monitoring traffic
- looking at what keywords are working and getting more from them
- learning from your succesful keywords

Come back soon!

Being Top Is Not Always Best

You would think that having a site in top position on Google for a major search term would be a sure fire way of getting plenty of traffic.

Recently I've had a site work up through the listings for the term Compare Mortgage Rates. It's hovered between 2nd and 4th for a while now, with quite impressive volumes of traffic.

But this week it's made top position. First site of 6,000,000 results. Very impressive indeed and a result after 3 years of hard work on the site. But strangely I've noticed a drop in the traffic this week!

Whether this is because the top place is immediately under the paid adverts and is ignored or whether the traffic generally for the keywords is currently down, only time will tell. Or maybe the site has dropped for lesser keywords. It's just so ironic and annoying!

Graphic Designer or Web Designer???

I was talking yesterday with a customer about the pros and cons of dedicated graphic designers against website designers.

He was telling me about a guy he knows that is a fantastic graphic designer and creates some really special looking websites. But they are all created in an art package, chopped down and published as images.

Not only are they impossible for the search engines to read, he and his customers find them hard to maintain. This story came from my telling him about a site I'd picked up recently, also designed by a graphic designer. This one used more code, but he'd panicked when asked to implement drop down boxes in a search and tried to charge £150 for the changes. So his customer came to me and I'd done the changes in 5 minutes...

But there is a balance. Whilst neither of these 2 guys produce the technical sites I can produce, I would never be able to produce sites with the class of graphics that they have. And I think, finally, I've got the answer.

A third graphic designer contacted me a few weeks back. He wanted a few simple amendments to a site he was building, but didn't have a clue where to start. And it looks like the 2 of us could be working together going forward. He's already put together an animation for me.

He'll be producing the layouts for the websites, along with all the graphic work, then passing me the work of realising that site. When needed, I'll also pass him work for creating graphics.

Everyone wins here. The customers get fantastic looking sites with a whole host of complexities and the two of us are getting paid.

So Graphic Designer or Web Designer? Neither - use both. But remember that you'll be paying for both of their time.

When Communication Goes Wrong

Recently I started taking on work through a new sales person. He's producing plenty of new work, but being the middle man between me and the customer does add it's complications.

At first the idea looked simple. He speaks to the customers, passes me their requirements, I build the site and he takes it back to them and talks about revisions.

On the whole this is great. But one site recently I produced an A and B sample for. Personally, I thought the A sample far inferior to the B sample, but he talked with the customer and they agreed A. I was concerned that it didn't look like it was trying to sell the product and it wasn't 100% great, but the customer is always right.

We produced the full site, they signed it off and we published it. Then about a month later, after I suspect the customer had shown their new site to a competitor who had also had a new site built, they came back to us annoyed that the site wasn't as commercial as their competitor's new site and showed us the site.

No doubt they had seen the link from the competitor's site to the web designer and seen that he charged fees starting at three times the price they had paid, but they were unhappy. We've offered to make changes to the site, for free, but getting material out of them for these changes is a long slow process.

The moral of the story - don't sign off work that you aren't happy with!

Case Matters

If, like me, you are used to working on a Windows environment for hosting your websites, then there's a chance that (like me...) you don't really pay too much attention to the correct case for file names. Why should you - they don't make any difference?

For example, page.html and PaGe.HtMl are both the same on Windows 2003.

But not on Unix!

If you try to access Page.html by typing page.html, it won't work on Unix.

What does that matter to us Windows users - surely it's irrelevant.

I've just had to move a customer's website to a Unix server because he wanted to use a new package on the site and it's not compatible with Windows. I started moving pages over and came across some pages where the case of the links didn't match the actual page names. I corrected the links, reviewed the pages and to my horror noticed the once PR3 pages were suddenly grey barred!

This was easily solved - I just had to change the page names (and revert the links) so that the case matched what Google had cached and immediately the PRs were reinstated.

So this leads me to draw an interesting conclusion. If your website is hosted on Windows and you aren't consistent with the case of page names, then you could have some links to page.html, others to Page.html etc. Well Google is going to see these as 2 separate pages and penalise one for being duplicate content, whilst only giving the other some of the internal linking benefit it should have.

If you are on Windows, make sure that you still follow Unix file naming!

Affiliate Linking In Blogs

What is the most efficient way to link to affiliate schemes within your blog?

Well here I'm not talking about the high earning affiliate for whom the blog is an essential sales tool - they know exactly how to work. I'm referring to those who blog for fun and then decide that a product or two could be included as affiliate links to try to earn a bit of extra cash.

Here's the way I would do it.

First, assume I have a successful marathon blog and have decided to buy a pair of shock absorbing soles - and they are available through an affiliate scheme. Well in one post I would say I've heard how good they are and am going to try them. From this post I would use an affiliate link to link directly to the item. Avoid linking to the merchant's home page - if someone is interested they might not find the product. Send them directly to where they need to go.

The next thing is that these fantastic products arrive. Another post describes them, what they look like etc before I've tried them. But this time the post doesn't link to the item, it links to the FIRST post, in which there is a link to the item.

Yes, this goes against what I've said on the first post - it's making it harder to find them. So, make the first post short & snappy and the link easy & clear to find.

But why add in this extra step? Because if you add in an internal link, expecially one using the product name as the anchor text of the link, you are building up your internal linking and this is good for the search engines.

Later, add more posts as you try the items, start to feel the benefits etc. In these again you always link to the first post, not to the merchant.

This also has other benefits. Say you notice the same item for sale cheaper, by a merchant offering more commission; or the merchant closes their scheme or changes the page name. Using this method you can just pop into the first post and update the link. Otherwise, you would have to search your blog and update every link.

Also, there's a theory that affiliate links can damage your page ranking (keep coming back and I'll tell you why I believe this). Therefore, by keeping the affiliate link to just the one page, rather than loads of pages, if there are any consequences they are limited to just the one page.

Hope this helps.

Getting Listed On Google

So just what does it take to get listed on Google and stay there?

You must have something that the search engines want - unique content. I've recently seen a couple of new sites that I've worked on appear on Google then totally vanish. Nothing that I try can get the sites back. But when I looked around the text used wasn't unique.

In one case the text on the site (a single pager) had also been used for a listing in a large directory. Although the directory listing was added after the site went live, the directory had been cached by the search engines long before the customer's site was registered and published.

It seems that the only answer to get the site listed is to get all of the text changed in the directory listing. Doesn't have to be much, so long as it looks different.

The other site that this has happened to slowly fell out of Google's listing. This time it was a blog publishing phishing emails and there's other sites doing exactly the same. The answer there is to add a load of text around the actual email and make sure that there isn't too much repitition (too many similar emails were also being published).

Give the search engines something new and hopefully they will treat you well. Give them what they already display elsewhere and you might find you don't have any traffic.

Why Link To Other Sites?

Well, I promised an idea that was a little more daring. Maybe a bit controversial.

And I don't want to disappoint you!

OK, so you have fantastic prices and you want to prove this to your potential customers. But checking every price on every item for all major competitors is a nightmare. So how do you show them how brilliant your prices are so that they buy from you.

Simple - you link to your competitor's website! What! (I hear you cry). This means that I'm sending traffic to my competitors and improving their page rank.

Yes, partially. But do you really think that potential customers are so loyal that they aren't going to look at other people's sites? Do you think that if they do they will certainly open a new browser window before looking at another site.

Here's the truth. Visitors will look at other sites. In doing so, they will probably just use the one window, which means they have left your site. Some will forget they saw your prices on your site and buy elsewhere.

Therefore, take control of the situation. Give links from your pages directly to the same item page on your competitor's site. Open the link in a new window and use the rel="nofollow" tag in the link if you want to prevent your site giving your competitor any PR. If you are really bothered, use javascript to open the page without the address bar, but I don't think that's required.

What does this give your site? Well, not only do you show your products, but you also show that you are happy for your prices to be compared. The visitor can quickly compare prices and leave the other sites whilst your site stays open.

Best of all, some will find the experience enjoyable and easier than normal. These people will come back to your site next time they are shopping knowing that it is easy to navigate to the other sites from your site than working it out for themselves.

Not only are these people customers for the initial purchase - but they have become loyal visitors for the future.

Now, does linking to your competitors sound quite so daft?

Converting More Customers

How carefully does your website portray your major selling points? Have a look at your site now and think about it?

What is your major selling point - why should customers shop with you, not the next seller? If you sell a unique product or service, then it's likely that the answer is that no-one else sells it, else you really need to think about this question.

You might offer a superb customer service, or prices that beat everyone else. Maybe you offer free deliver and fancy packaging. Is this obvious when the potential customer opens up the website?

If you offer gift packaging then show a well packaged item on every page of your site. If it's exceptional customer service then on every page show the phone number, tell them when the lines are manned and spell out your operators are there and have the time to talk.

But what if you offer fantastic prices? Well why not take a leaf out of the supermarket's books and research for key products what your competitors are selling them for and display this information on the pages. This saves them hunting around on other sites to compare prices and maybe forgetting where they saw your fantastic prices. Just make sure that the prices are regularly checked by you!

Tomorrow, we take this though one step further. Very daring, very cheeky. But worth a read!