SEO Consultant Ireland

Web Traffic follows the patterns of the human activity. Here is how it looks like starting with the New Year:

Winter

Every January is probably going to be your record month for your web site visitors traffic. The first few days after the new year are going to be poor, and we all know the reasons. No one is at work, everyone is celebrating. There is a very few people online actually. Those that are online are sending emails to their relatives worldwide. Or talking to them on Skype lately. After the first few non working days the show is beginning. Traffic is just spiking from one day to another. Your best days of traffic ever are happening. Why is that? Well, no one is really working much. People are just fed up with work. New year resolutions, planning,… people will invent every excuse not to work. Instead they will surf the web. This is your hunting season. As a publisher you need to convert them and subscribe, to make sure they become the regular repeat visitors during the rest of the year. Think email subscriptions! February will mostly be the same. Note that the overall number will be smaller since it is a shorter month. So do not get shocked looking at the February statistics, it’s not a real drop – just a short month! Look at your daily averages.

Spring

Spring is actually your worst enemy as a online publisher. Days are getting longer, people want to spend more and more time outside. Web sites? Who cares! Let’s go out in the nature! Let’s do sports! Let’s start doing something with our body – put all those New Year’s Resolutions into action. The traffic will drop naturally. Your subscription customer base is the only thing that can save you. Remember – you will most likely not grow your traffic in spring.

Summer

Most of the people take their vacation in summer. During vacation 90% of the people have simply 0 online activity. But booking your summer holidays, well that is a super heavy activity before the summer. If you are in the travel and holidays niche like Sailing Boats Croatia site, this is your season. If not, just get used to it! Naturally your traffic will dip.

Autumn

It actually starts in the September when the kids are back to school, and it moves parents back to work, back in front of the computers, back to your web site. Besides the schools the nature is your best friend here. Days are getting shorter, and it’s getting cold outside. People naturally spend more time indoors and therefore with their computers. What do they do? They try to find something to do online. Social Networking is the main activity, so if your business can tap into that market – September web traffic will most likely be your record month. Think subscriptions of some shape or form in September as a visitors retention tool. October and November will be good naturally, all the way to mid December. Christmas, Skiing, Holidays… it all just kills your visitors in the last part of December. Don’t despair, remember that in a few weeks you will have your record day again…

This is how general web site traffic trends look like during the year. Again if your site content, and therefore your audience is linked to the certain activity that has its own seasons your traffic will differ. But this ‘General’ human behaviour will have impact on any web site.

The fact that my last blog post is about 2 months old is a sign that something happened to the blog, or actually happened to the author of the blog. So what happened exactly that made me effectively stop blogging?

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.

Anyone who has a web site where the traffic is crucial to the success of the web site is pulling his hairs in the last couple of months. Why? On average the total amount of the Internet traffic is falling. If you monitor the web traffic of 100 or more web sites, you cannot not to notice the negative trend. And the general trend is a decline.

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 make sure the search results are relevant and SPAM clean Google doesn’t rank well two web sites that contain the same content. This is to prevent the search results for a term being a copy of one another. Google wants to present a variety of the most relevant results – not copies of even the most relevant.

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.

http://www.irishjobsinireland.com/

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.

The latest Google Page Rank (PR) update ‘downgraded’ the SEO Consultant Blog to Google PageRank 4 from the Google PageRank 5.

The number of displayed back links in Google dropped to 250 inbound link to the SEO Consultant web site.

Impact in the web traffic? None.

Not even from the web traffic from the Google itself.

In the article: Good Google Web Traffic – Bad Google Web Traffic I defined some web traffic as ‘Bad’. The fact is that in most online businesses there is the traffic that the business will profit from and there is that ‘other’ web traffic.

The relevancy plays the crucial role. If the visitors are brought to the web site that does not provide them with what they come to find on the web site, they will leave. If they leave from the same page they have landed on – there is no benefit to the business from such a visitors. The only way such visitors could contribute to the business is to click on the advertisement on your web site. But that’s a whole different story…

The point is that having thousands of visitors on the web site is worthless if those visitors ended up on the web site ‘by mistake’. It is extremely important when purchasing the advertisement on a web site to analyze the traffic, and see where and how is this traffic ending up on a web site that is being evaluated. It is not only important to check if it is ranked high for the relevant terms, but to check the figures from the competition, and try to find out if it is ranked high for unrelated search terms – and gaining a huge traffic from such unrelated search terms. It seems like an impossible task, but a number of search engine ranking tools can help to achieve the task fairly quickly.

The definition of the Good Google Web Traffic:

A good web traffic from Google search engine is the traffic of the visitors from from Google and found what they have been looking for on the web site. What this means is that the text in the search engine results page (SERP) that has represented the site (title, two lines of text and the web address) was descriptive and it represented well the page where the visitor was brought. A visitor who found what he was looking for will not click ‘Back’ in the browser to see the search results again and choose a different listing, but will stay on your page. If the web page is related to the topic a visitor is interested in, and the content is well distributed under easy to find headings, the visitor will most likely open a few more pages on your site.

How to recognise a Good Google Web Traffic in your web log files?

A good web traffic is the visitor who comes to your page and does not leave your site from that same page, especially without visiting any other page. Check web site visitors paths through the web site, and where you see a path that contains more than one page on your site – it is an interested visitor. If the referring page to the page the visitor came to (landing page) your site is Google, it is the Good Visitor from Google.

How to recognise a Bad Google Web Traffic in your web log files?

If the visitor paths contain the entries where the landing page is the exit page it is a clear indication that the web site visitor did not find what he was looking for you the site and have left without browsing around at all. If you notice that there are number of visitors from Google (or any other search engine) who just come to your site – and leave straight away, it is a clear indication that the listing of your site the way Google represented it is not what the visitor found on the landing page. Check the way Google represented your page in the search engine results page, and compare that text with what your web page contains. If the visitor cannot quickly find those same words or phrases from the SERP on top of the landing page – in most cases you have just generated a Bad Google Web Traffic.