review plugin for wordpress
Nov 12

You Know You Are Too Far Into Online Marketing When…

Doodling, Feed the Spiders, Google, Heavy construction, Mind over Pixels, Techniques, Trailers, WebWriMo challenge 1 Comment »

…internet tool developers send you insider information without you asking for it. Jeesh, I have really gone native.

Spydermate, an seo and website analysis web tool is getting a facelift, and a bunch of new features. The penguins who are developing it are adding new analysis graphs. Here is a sneak peek:

glowleaf-sneak-peek.jpg

The green is my blog (duh!), and the red is the average of the most recent crawls for every domain ever crawled by SpyderMate.

All of the data points are percentiles of the overall data set, meaning that everything is in scale, not actual numbers. Let’s not see anyone comparing the Google PR graph with Alexa rank, shall we?

The fact that the average is dynamic, is both a good and a bad thing. This is the same case as the Alexa rank, where it skews the data towards sites in US and who are tech savvy orientated.

Same goes for this case, only SEO’s will use this tool, so this average will be derived from all of our sites, and our competition :)

Anyway, even if it misses a percentile, who cares. This is a neat feature, and coupled with the other overview tabs in Spydermate you have a complete general picture of a website. What this analysis shows is that I should have a higher PR and Google neglected me…

As I said in the review post, experienced SEO’s find the site compare ability priceless.

The tool is getting some final finishing touches as we speak, and it will be live for the public very soon, maybe within the month. Go bookmark it now.

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Popularity: 23% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Nov 05

Google Analytics is scrubbing your data

Blogs, Doodling, Google, Heavy construction, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, RGBhat, WebWriMo challenge 5 Comments »

I had a recent talk with an advertiser, who was interested in buying banner space on this blog. The discussion reminded me why I didn’t want to bother with individual advertisers in the first place. 

I was trying to tell him that my blog gets 400 uniques/day, and his argument against that was that my Alexa rank was not high enough, and that I was not getting that many visitors in reality. Here is my Alexa traffic rank, it is all public information anyway.

As I was saying, he claimed that a blog with a rank of 330.000 could not get so many visitors, and I was trying to explain to him, that despite the skewed Alexa data, the number you see there is the overall traffic rank. If you look at the bottom of the page, you will see a little graph that shows 65% of my visitors are from the US. And the chart right below that, shows my alexa traffic rank for the US, 73.000.

EDIT: Just to prove how irrelevant Alexa is, look at what Alexa shows as a relevant site to mine.

An analysis changes a lot depending on how you look at it. The pitfall here is when you look at the wrong kind of data. For example, people want to buy links from high PR posts omitting the new posts on authority blogs that are bound to get PR in a few weeks. Dumb, yes, but people do tend to think like that.

It is a good thing to check the numbers, but make sure you are looking at the right ones.

And now a fact I have wanted to point out for a long time: Google Analytics is scrubbing your data.

It really is. The analysis for glowleaf.net shows 1/10th of the visitors! That is a huge gap, it goes far from a simple discrepancy. Just to make sure, I used another 3rd party analytics script, and the data it showed were pretty much the same as my hosting tracking report. Losing 90% of my visitors is a crappy way to report my traffic…

Despite the crappy tracking, the Google Analytics tabs have a lot to tell me about my blog.

 

Traffic sources, all traffic sources:

 

Source/Medium Visits Pages/Visit Avg. Time on Site % New Visits Bounce Rate
1.
(direct) / (none)
 468 1.77 00:05:15 49.57% 71.37%
2.
wickedfire.com / referral
 91 1.32 00:01:15 52.75% 79.12%
3.
google / organic
 70 1.34 00:01:17 64.29% 75.71%
4.
blindapeseo.com / referral
 14 1.57 00:02:30 35.71% 57.14%
5.
forums.digitalpoint.com / referral
 14 1.07 00:00:12 85.71% 92.86%
6.
cull.gr / referral
 11 1.09 00:00:35 100.00% 90.91%
7.
bobit.gr / referral
 8 1.12 00:03:29 75.00% 87.50%
8.
bluehatseo.com / referral
 3 10.67 00:51:53 66.67% 33.33%
9.
yahoo / organic
 3 1.00 00:00:00 100.00% 100.00%
10.
adbrite.com / referral
 2 1.00 00:00:00 100.00% 100.00%
11.
contempt.me / referral
 2 2.50 00:02:44 50.00% 50.00%
12.
insomnia.gr / referral
 2 1.00 00:00:00 100.00% 100.00%

The avg time on site column is what I see as the most important, and it is worth noting that a simple comment on bluehatseo gave me a loyal reader. 5 minutes on average for the majority of my visitors are enough for me.

Visitors, depth of visit:

 

Depth of Visit Visits Percentage of all visitors
1 pages 520.00 73.97%
2 pages 94.00 13.37%
3 pages 33.00 4.69%
4 pages 22.00 3.13%
5 pages 13.00 1.85%
6 pages 2.00 0.28%
7 pages 9.00 1.28%
8 pages 2.00 0.28%

Here we see that my readers are shallow diggers, with hardly more than one page visited on average.

Visitors, Loyalty:

 

Number of Visits Visits Percentage of all visitors
1 times 384.00 54.62%
2 times 44.00 6.26%
3 times 20.00 2.84%
4 times 13.00 1.85%
5 times 12.00 1.71%
6 times 9.00 1.28%
7 times 8.00 1.14%
8 times 7.00 1.00%
9-14 times 39.00 5.55%
15-25 times 45.00 6.40%
26-50 times 40.00 5.69%
101-200 times 66.00 9.39%
201+ times 16.00 2.28%

This table on the contrary, shows us that half the visitors are repeat readers, with a nice percentage of ~20% coming back for more than 20 times. The information we derive from this table and the previous is that the shallow diggers we saw earlier are basically repeat visitors who stay updated on every post.

A thing we can do to fix that problem of shallow visitors, is to use plugins that show relevant posts etc.

Visitors, length of visit:

 

Length of Visit Visits Percentage of all visitors
0-10 seconds 522.00 74.25%
11-30 seconds 9.00 1.28%
31-60 seconds 10.00 1.42%
61-180 seconds 39.00 5.55%
181-600 seconds 49.00 6.97%
601-1,800 seconds 44.00 6.26%
1,801+ seconds 30.00 4.27%

This table shows us something interesting. While 75% of the visitors barely skim the site (maybe its the big fat smileys on top that deter them, but who cares…) we have a loyal percentage of ~20% who are definately reading the posts, and when we factor in the repeat visits from the other tables, we see that they do so often.

Traffic sources, keywords:

 

4.
wickedfire skittles
 5 2.20 00:08:19 40.00% 40.00%

I just had to write this, it is so funny that I cannot bear it! Average time on site 8+ minutes from the “wickedfire skittles” google search, making that keyword the biggest avg time on site on the keywords page…

All that data, gives me the information that 20% of my readers, that is 80 out of the 400 daily visitors, are my loyal readers, who keep coming back for more (no idea why…)

Sounds good enough for me. Now, where can I find an advertiser that will rent adspace based on 80 loyal uniques/day?

Screw that, I am just waiting for these guys to go live… (crappy anchor text courtesy of their non inclusion in their beta phase of my blog)

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Popularity: 20% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , ,

Oct 24

Arachnophobia…

Feed the Spiders, Heavy construction, Inorganic agriculture, Internet Marketing, Noobs 1 Comment »

There is a beta tool online, about site assessment and SEO called Spydermate.

It doesn’t seem to do much at a casual glance, but it’s actually a neat analysis tool.

First of all, you need to register, because the unregistered crawl goes up to 25 pages only.

Crawl your site, and check out the analysis.

You can skip the summary page, it is kind of worthless. The first section informs you if your site is linked from edu or gov sites, as if that is an important SEO factor… The most useful info here are the broken links. Fix them.

The analysis tab is more of the same, just for a quick view of the Alexa rank and Yahoo linkdomain. Again, the tool insists of informing you about edu links. The most significant number here is the Average Page Depth, which should be as close as possible to 1. Something like 1.25 is more realistic.

And finally, we get to the juicy parts, the Link Equity tab. This tab, is pretty much useless unless you click on the “show rows: 1000″ (and of course had your whole site crawled, not just the 25 pages).

And now we see some cool things. First of all, this page, unless it times out, shows you a great overview of your website. Each and every page, analyzed, PR, backlinks, broken links. An experienced SEO, can simply glance at this page and predict the rankings… Especially if you click on “Targeted Keywords”.

The keywords it shows, link to SEOBook’s keywords research tools, which I personally find useless, but it’s there if you want it. No idea why.

If you don’t see the value in the Link Equity tab, go do some more reading, you still have a lot to learn.

Next comes the Scheduled Crawling. Another thing I personally have no use for, but others might want it. It does what the name says. Figure it out for yourself.

And the second useful feature of this tool, the Compare tab. Simple, when you are registered, it automatically saves your previous crawls with a timestamp. With literally two clicks, you can see an overview of your site between point A and B in time. Awesome, fast, easy and useful.

EDIT: It seems that I have to spell that out for some people. You can compare two different sites.

Some might think that I bury this tool in this review. Actually I am not. As I always say, I am a person that looks for the 80/20 rule in my tools. Well, while I have no use for the silly tabs in Spydermate, I have great use for Link Equity and Compare Crawls.

Honestly, this tool has become the mate (pun intended) for my SeoQuake plugin, another amazing website overview tool. With those two, I can easily skim through the stats of other websites, see how good their SEO is, how “stable” their rank is, what their weakness is. By comparing the overview of the competitors to my sites, I can find out what to do to outrank them.

As I said above, if you don’t see the value here, go do some reading. No, NOT EBOOKS. :)

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Popularity: 15% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Oct 18

Glowleaf.net X-rayed again a month later

Blogs, Doodling, Feed the Spiders, Google, Heavy construction, Inorganic agriculture, Mind over Pixels, Noobs, Techniques No Comments »

Here is an update, a month after my original post Glowleaf.net x-rayed for data analysis.

It had:

  • PageRank: 3
  • Indexed pages G:128 Y:199 M:85
  • Links G:11 Y:653 M:0
  • Technorati authority 199
  • Technorati rank 22,922

Now:

  • PageRank: 3
  • Indexed pages G:387 Y:384 M:128
  • Links G:21 Y:693 M:0
  • Technorati authority 112
  • Technorati rank 49,657

It had:

Page External links
All pages (total links) 855
http://www.glowleaf.net/ 851
http://www.glowleaf.net/famous-failures/ 1
http://www.glowleaf.net/google-black-hole-the-lite-version/ 2
http://www.glowleaf.net/oldest-domains-on-the-net/ 1
All pages (total links) 855

Now:

Page External links
All pages (total links) 1,954
http://www.glowleaf.net/ 1,122
http://www.glowleaf.net/a-small-collection-of-icons-for-you/ 7
http://www.glowleaf.net/anarchy-online/ 71
http://www.glowleaf.net/building-your-seo-empire-the-glowleaf-way/ 1
http://www.glowleaf.net/famous-failures/ 1
http://www.glowleaf.net/how-to-shoot-yourself-on-the-foot-or-how-to-kill-your-own-viral-product/ 15
http://www.glowleaf.net/sustain-the-flame/ 6
http://www.glowleaf.net/tip-of-the-day-creating-youtube-backlinks/ 10
http://www.glowleaf.net/to-innovate-or-to-immitate/ 721
All pages (total links) 1,954

And also some great rankings now,  but I am too bored to analyze them. As if Google would leave their SERPS alone long enough for this post to make sense. Lets just say that after a whole year my site finally gets organic visitors…

I think it is a great improvement for just a month, right?

Take into consideration that the technorati stats are skewed due to my site getting slammed by the Digg mob at that period.

Wanna know what I did to get those results?

  • Installed pingcrawl, and put 3 relevant tags on every post.
  • Submitted my itty witty posts, to digg, delicious and stumble with itty witty descriptions.
  • My theme is SEOed.
  • I submitted site and sitemap to Google Webmaster tools.
  • Burned my feed with Feedburner.
  • Made sure my titles have keywords in them, while keeping them catchy at the same time.

That is all. What did you think, that this is rocket science? That I was going to sell you a crappy ebook on how to rank?

(And since I am heated up about this issue…)

  • Also, I used wordpress.

Try doing that with your crappy fucking Joomla.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , ,

Sep 18

Glowleaf.net X-rayed

Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels 1 Comment »

As I mentioned in the previous post, I will analyze the data from this blog, in order to show you how I do an analysis for a client, and how you can learn to do the same for your sites by example.

And, no, I am not ashamed to post the real data here. Why should I be? Most of the SEO data can be seen externally, and I am not ashamed to post my measly traffic stats neither.

Please note, this is not the SEO analysis, it’s the data analysis of the traffic, its origin, and behaviour.

But, since SEO is quite important, lets devote a paragraph on it to take it out of the picture.

The site glowleaf.net has:

  • Domain age: 2004
  • PageRank: 3
  • Indexed pages G:128 Y:199 M:85
  • Links G:11 Y:653 M:0
  • Technorati authority 199
  • Technorati rank 22,922
All quite normal up to now. MSN never shows much anyway, so no need to bother. Almost 80% of the pages are indexed, and all exist in the supplemental index. Except linkbuilding, there is not much we can do for seo.
But then we have this table of incoming links from Google Webmaster Tools:
Page External links
All pages (total links) 855
http://www.glowleaf.net/ 851
http://www.glowleaf.net/famous-failures/ 1
http://www.glowleaf.net/google-black-hole-the-lite-version/ 2
http://www.glowleaf.net/oldest-domains-on-the-net/ 1
All pages (total links) 855

 

Oh, this is bad. Sure, 855 incoming links are all fine, but there are almost none to the internal pages. We can squeeze out some information out of this.

This means, that we have no “popular” page, a page that you are quite known for. What do I mean? Take for example Bluehat Seo Empire post, or the Wickedfire Skittles thread, or Yoast’s Wordpress SEO guide.

Most popular sites, have similarly popular pages like the above. I had it in the back of my mind to create something like that, and this popped up unexpectedly, my TLA  vs TNX  review got popular.

I did want to make something like that, but this one happened by accident. The page got links from various fora, but the Google Webmaster Tools have not updated yet. Of course, it still has a long way to go regarding popularity, but its something.

So, how do we fix our deeplinking problem? One simple way is to simply submit every article we write on social bookmarking services. I do that anyway, and as you see, they don’t show on the table above.

Another way is to use Bluehat SEO’s Pingcrawl Plugin. It creates deeplinks on every one of your posts. I am using it now, the deeplinks will take some time to show up.

The obvious way is to build links to our internal pages, but I am a “fire and forget” person…

Next post will be on traffic analysis.

Popularity: 12% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,