Twitter, Blogger, Facebook and LinkedIN happened!!!

When you interlink Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook and your own Blog, strange things happen.

LinkedIN – ‘The Professionals Social Network’

The Social Networks drive traffic to your blog, that sends them back to your Social Networks. The referral web traffic is just huge! A single LinkedIN Group article posting (super targeted audience!) can bring hundreds of people within a day to your site, and literally thousands within a 30 day period. Remember it is only the people within that LinkedIN group who see that link to your site so you actually see the LinkedIN Profiles of your incoming web site traffic.

Twitter – ‘The Time Waster’

Whoever tells you that he knows how to use Twitter for anything business related is probably smarter than people who invented Twitter themselves. There is no Cook Book on how to use Twitter successfully. There are lot of eBooks on how to use Twitter, but none is promising ANY success. No one can tell you how will Twitter positively affect your revenue. Anyone who used Twitter can tell you how Twitter will kill your productivity!

The success in using Twitter or the successes we (heavy users – with lots of time invested in it) all had are all sporadic and completely unpredictable. We cannot really define why any of them happened. This is why Twitter usage is unpredictable, and the success path is less obvious than with any other social network.

Just be aware that Twitter as well as LinkedIN drives extremely targeted traffic to your site. So use it wisely. 140 characters (minus the length of your URL) is a very short message space!

Facebook – ‘My Private Life and just FUN!’

The European usage of Facebook greatly differs from the way they use it in the US. On our side of the ‘pond’ we use Facebook for fun. Your Friends and Family are in your Facebook contacts far more often that someone you do or plan to do business with.

Niche Social Networking Sites

There are a lot of industry specific networks, based most often on NING or similar platforms. Those as well give you a chance to drive their web traffic to your site, but publishing articles on those networks inviting the users to come and see more info on your own site. This is again targeted referral traffic – so the highest quality visitors that you can imagine.

Inbound Linking

One aspect of the usage of the Social Networking sites for building web traffic is to get the referral traffic from them. The other aspect is the inbound linking. If the links on those sites are ‘Clean Links’, meaning no redirects or the nofollow tag used – those are nice inbound links to your site. Since the search engines just love the social networking sites, especially the ones where the whole content is ‘open to them’ – meaning no user login is required to read all the pages, the links from those sites are very good form the search engine perspective. A good social networker will therefore use the social networks to get the referral traffic, and in the same time place lots of one way inbound links to his site.

What does the recession have to do with it?

It is not really the question to answer. There are a number of the scenarios one can imagine:

1. There are less people working, so perhaps less people with the internet access.
2. People are more busy since their colleagues have been made redundant and their workload is spread on the remaining staff.
3. People just do not want to be seen surfing in the office – since they are afraid for their jobs.
4. People have better things to do but to surf endlessly.
5. …I am sure there are many more reason you can think of.

It is the first time in the history of the web (I am sure you like those ‘Biggest Recession’ phrases by now) that the overall Internet traffic volume is decreasing.

But don’t despair! If your traffic is falling, there is the SEO Consultant to get your traffic growing again!

To achieve this Google, and any other search engine for that matter has to make sure it does not contain more than one copy of the same site in its index. Bear in mind that the different images and different colours and font styles mean nothing to Google since Google is a text search engine. The fact that the web site can look completely different to the visitor means nothing to the search engine as long as the text on the pages is the same.

http://www.copyscape.com is a search engine that is looking for the sites that are similar to yours. It is actually connection to the Google API to find duplicates. If you feel you have a problem ranking your site it is worth checking if there is another copy on the web.

Why is my web site copied?

Web traffic has a value. Web traffic can be monetised. Google AdSense is one of the simplest ways to do it. IF you have a web site with visitors, Google will gladly become your partner and serve the ads from their Google AdWords customers on your pages.

The content of the page is the key of acquiring the web site traffic from the natural results in the search engines. This is why people copy your content to publish it to their own web site. Is it legal? Absolutely not. Does it hurt your web site ranking – in most cases yes. Should yo be doing something about it – yes if you intend to rank your website content high in the search engine results pages.

SEO Consultant (we) also provide the service of managing the duplicate content issues for the clients. Contact us and we can help you if your content gets copied.

Where did he came from?
What search phrase he used?
Where did he land on your web site?

The free questions above are the key of understanding your traffic. I lots of cases you will have to drill down further and answer questions like:

Where geographically is your web site visitor from?
What was your rank in the SERP for the phrase he was searching for?
How was your site represented in the SERP for the search phrase he was searching for?
Where did he go on your site?
Where did he go next?
How long was he on the site?

We all know that Google Analytics is the most used online web site log analyzer today. It is free, and Google is ingesting a lot in improving it constantly. But anyone who used it knows very well that although it is probably the best overall service it still lacks the capability to answer half of the questions listed above.

The result is that if you really want to understand your visitors you will have to use multiple web log analyzers. Especially if you have an active site where the content is dynamic and ever changing you will require a real time display of the activity on your web site to understand what do people actually read, when and why. The same article published in the different times of the day will not attract the same numbers of visitors. That and number of similar situations is where you are 100% helpless with just Google Analytics since it’s data is really far from real time, and is not even intended for such use (it is best used as an overview of the historical data).

There are number of tools that can help you to work with the real time data. You can analyse your raw log files yourself with software packages like WebTrends, or you can use the online services. There is a long list of them and each has a number of nice features so your choice will depend on what exactly are you looking for. The online web site visitors tracking services are usually free to begin with and then paid for when your traffic grows.

The ones I can recommend are StatCounter and the one with interesting features for bloggers is FEEDJIT.

This Google Analytics Motin Chart displays the number of the pages visited by the Returing Visitos (green) and the New Visitors (Blue). The display perios is 30 days, and each dot displays one day.

You can use the visualisation of your web site visitors data to analize and understand the visitors trends. Not only can you see that the New Visitors see more pages on your site thatn the Returning Visitors, but by playing the Motion chart you acn asctually see the trend in time as well.

How to get a Motion Chart like this for your web site?

Just open the below URL and replace the ID (red 1234567 in the URL below) with your ID. Where will you find you Google Analytics Property ID?

Profile ID
The profile ID of your account can be found in the URL of your reports. For example, if you select a profile from an account and view your reports, you may see a URL string that looks like this:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/?reset=1&id=123456&pdr=00000000-00000000

The profile ID is the number that comes right after the &id parameter. So, in this case, your profile ID would be 123456.

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/trend?id=1234567&rpt=VisitorTypesReport&cmp=average&ts=%7B%22showTrails%22%3Atrue%2C%22sizeOption%22%3A%22visits%22%2C%22stateVersion%22%3A3%2C%22iconKeySettings%22%3A%5B%7B%22trailStart%22%3A%222008-09-16%22%2C%22key%22%3A%7B%22dim0%22%3A%22Returning%20Visitor%22%7D%7D%2C%7B%22trailStart%22%3A%222008-09-16%22%2C%22key%22%3A%7B%22dim0%22%3A%22New%20Visitor%22%7D%7D%5D%2C%22iconType%22%3A%22BUBBLE%22%2C%22xAxisOption%22%3A%22bounce_rate%22%2C%22duration%22%3A%7B%22multiplier%22%3A1%2C%22timeUnit%22%3A%22D%22%7D%2C%22xLambda%22%3A1%2C%22yAxisOption%22%3A%22transactions%22%2C%22yLambda%22%3A1%2C%22colorOption%22%3A%22revenue_per_transaction%22%7D

Design a custom report to display the dimensions and metrics you want to analyze. For example, you can build custom reports to help answer questions like:
• How are my keywords performing in different countries?
• Should I target my site to Spanish users?

There is also a short video from Google:

Google Analytics Custom Reporting

How important is a domain name for your web site?
Hat impact will the presence of the important search phrases within your domain name have on your web traffic?
Is it important to have a search phrases in the domain name?

All interesting questions. The SEO gurus disagree completely on this, so here are the findings of the real life test of the site: http://www.irishjobsinireland.com/.

Here is a site that has a very descriptive domain name: Irish Jobs in Ireland. It contains the phrases Irish Jobs, and Jobs in Ireland. A site is published about a year ago. The site has some content as well. The number of sites are linking to it, so both Google and Yahoo visit it from time to time.

After a year the Google PR is still 0.

For the phrase: Irish Jobs in Ireland it is only on the 8th spot in Google.ie. For the Irish Jobs or Jobs in Ireland… it is not on the first page.

The concussion is that the search phrase in the domain name helps, but alone cannot do anything meaningful to your web site traffic from the search engines.