GeeG News

To Start Things off, the traffic this month has been stellar. I'm amazed every time I look at the stats engine. I've had to switch to using the blog engines stats reporting as the old ones do not take into account RSS Feed readers. There's been 9002 RSS readers since 10/03 and those visitors are an important part of the picture. Geeg has had 9571 browser visitors on top of that since 10/03 - so combine that and now you have 18,000 page readers where my old stats engine would have just reported 9000.

The blog stats engine is great at telling me hits and referrers but as far as other data the stats are lacking so I've just today installed Google's Analytics so I can get some more granular data about who is visiting.

The data from Goggles engines won't be prominent in this months roundup as it's not a full months view. Look for a full writeup in Decembers end of month and I'll be able to give you all a breakdown of Google's new Analytics features while I'm at it.

Rob

October Roundup

This is the second full month of operation for GeeG and in this article I'll give you a rundown of how last months SEO affected the traffic and I'll give you a few Ideas for your own site that you can take right to the bank.

This months Tips –

First thing that was a problem this month was I-Frames. I-Frames = bad , I knew this – but to be honest I slapped the initial build of the site together fast and cheap and the radio, contact links, link partners, an a few other things that looked like they we're built into the skin.
I forgot about it really until I used a commercial software package called Web CEO to analyze the site. What it found was 6 page titles, 7 meta tags, descriptions ….etc –oops! This gets you penalized by the search engines. Yup I had the html declaration and meta lines in each file that was I-framed. I changed those all to PHP includes with no markup.
( Rule here is never use I Frames Ever – Either use PHP or ASP Includes )

So This month I used the magical php include to add the Feedburner Section. – Yup, Feedburner. – Having an RSS or Atom feed on your page is good. Syndicating to specific readers is even better. There's going to be some users that aren't going to use the built in RSS feed – if you give 'em a link that adds the feed right to their favorite reader you're more likely to pull a conversion – that is turn someone who might have only visited once when they followed a search result – to a long term reader that follows your feed. ( best placement for Feeds section is top right of the page – keep 'em prominent on page load )

So – 1 Use includes 2 – Get a Feedburner account and syndicate.

Stats - Month to Month

Ok, Traffic this month almost topped over 10,000 visits – for the second month of operation that’s mighty fine.

September -Total Visits = 6694 Total sites visiting = 1757 Average 223 visits / day
October - Total Visits = 9737 Total sites visiting = 3509 Average 314 visits / day

The chart below shows our growth rate over 3 months – the yellow being visitors – the orange is the unique sites of origin ( ISP or provider )

Most popular hour has moved back one hour to 4 'O clock – is this a season change thing ? It'll be interesting to see how this trends.

New Countries visiting / Organizations

US Military
Whitehouse.gov
Senegal
Jordan

I have no idea what the whitehouse address likes here – but hey all are welcome.

Get this- we got hits from Old style Arpanet (arpa)
There's still an Arpanet? Wow.

I've changed the meta description tag a bit – remember how I said the meta description is like free advertising? Look at the image below and you can see why meta description really does matter.

I've also changed the title tag – before it was just GeeG and this is fine if people are searching the net for GeeG, but not anything else. So the new title has my meta keywords in it. Title: GeeG - Technology Gadgets Food Toys Fun Games

So rule of thumb put the highest relevant keywords into your title -

Website Grader score went up from 64% to 79% !

Month to month comparison September – October

Google page rank is still a 1 though I think we're on the brink of a 2 –

Google Indexed Pages: Sep 223 - Oct 511 Google still loves us.

October Alexa rank 2,737,880 which is in the top 8.91 % of all websites.
September Alexa rank 7,367,300 which is in the top 23.98 % of all website.
( big improvement there! )

October Technorati rank 1,238,806, which puts it in the top 1.77% of blogs tracked by Technorati.
September Technorati rank 2,655,296, which puts it in the top 3.79% of blogs tracked by Technorati.
( again a nice improvement )

This month I'll start tracking inbound links –( Oct Inbound Links: 284 )

Referrers – Well, lets just say that Google's blog took the top spot by a long shot – there was that bit of controversy over the I Google redesign and that generated a lot of traffic here.
The next 4 referrers in order

Googles Search
Technically overboard
Geeknews
Random Good Stuff

As far as what browsers people use when visiting – here's the rundown
Firefox 57.2 %
MS Internet Explorer 31.4 %
Safari 5.6 %
Opera 1 %
Mozilla 0.8 %

What were the most searched for posts that delivered the most traffic?

It was the story about mystery meat in new jersey – but at the last minute these 4 terms jumped into the lead

halloween internet radio
halloween jars
George foreman deep fryer
Swedish Sisters

So this months big lessons

1 – Title tag should contain your highest relevant keywords –
2 – Google's own blog is still a fantastic way to get traffic inbound.
3 - Meta description has almost no effect on page rank or searches but it's as good as a free ad.

Thanks to everyone visiting GeeG , it's you readers that make the site. Next months goal is 15,000 visits – think GeeG can do it? Stay tuned!

Rob

Well, its been our first month and the page has literally jumped out of the gates running. I'll go over both internal (our stats engines) and external metrics (Google, Alexa, Grading Engines, etc.)

This will give you a picture on how GeeG as a site is doing, and also some knowledge on how to get your page to shine - so read on and enjoy, and as Fat Albert says... "be careful or you might learn something before your done." Hey Hey Hey

This month I've submitted the site to Technorati, Globe of blogs and a bunch of other blog directories- also to just about every major search engine and aggregator I could find. Started the link swapping with a few old friends and a few new ones. This is all to get a decent page rank and increase traffic - has it worked?

Well, I think so - first for Webalizer stats for the month.

Total Visits = 6694 (a very respectable first month eh?)
Total sites visiting = 1757
Average 223 visits / day

Most popular hour for people to visit was 5 'O Clock -

Countries that visited - well, too many to list. You know you're doing well when you see countries in the list that you don't even recognize. ( Hrvatska anyone? )

Now you can say - yeah but those are private stats - they really don't represent how well a page is doing.. And to some extent you'd be right, so lets move on to Website Grader - a fantastic resource to get your page noticed and optimized.

On September 10th I went to the grader and we scored an already impressive 42% - Today due to all the work I've been doing to get GeeG noticed we have moved up to 64% ! The metrics that get measured are public and you can see the actual report for the site RIGHT HERE

So here's the big rundown

These are my meta keywords - I've kept them short -(technology,gadgets,food,toys,fun,games)

Granted some people pack their meta with hundreds of words but I have found you get better SEO with a few key words that really define the heart of the content. There are tools out there that will analyze your page and find the top 5 or so words or terms - I highly recommend the use of these tools. Some people also argue that meta is useless these days but not so. Google also displays the meta description tag content under your snippet... fine way to get searchers interested - almost like free advertising.

Readability Level: Primary / Elementary School
I almost want to be insulted on that measurement but its actually a compliment. You want your articles to be readable even to a 4th grade dunce. Heck, that's pretty much my level of writing anyway so I'm good to go eh?

Google PageRank: 1
It is a real bitch to get a good page rank on Google - I'm pleased as pie we got a rank of 1 (out of 10). Google page rank is calculated on a logarithmic scale based on how many sites link to you / modified by how much weight (IE authority) those sites carry.

Google Indexed Pages: 223
Like I say in the posts - Google loves GeeG - I post something and less than 20 minutes later its indexed. This I can attribute to the B2Evo blog software .. I couldn't recommend anything better.

Traffic Rank: Top 23.98 %
This is the Alexa rating - its publicly viewable for any site. It's kinda the mac daddy metric of how popular your site is - and to have one this high -heck I thought it was a mistake, but nope... I've checked on Alexa themselves and it is no goof.

GeeG has an Alexa rank of 7,367,300 which is in the top 23.98 % of all websites.

Blog Ranking: Top 3.79 %
Technorati is still an important metric - and I only submitted us a week ago, so another surprise is that we rank so highly there...

This blog currently has a Technorati rank of 2,655,296, which puts it in the top 3.79% of blogs tracked by Technorati.

So all in all the Website Grader gives us one fine score - ( to put things in perspective, the best I ever got on my Technically Overboard page was 79% and I got 50,000 hits a month there.

Referrers
Referrers are important - they are the folks that link to you. They also are the core of your pagerank so it's good to know where your offsite links come from. Interestingly enough, I've found many a cool page to surf by looking at my referrer logs - and for this I rely on the logs generated by my blog engine.

As you can see - ONE, yes ONE post linking to the Google Blog Overwhelmed the top referrers spot - ( these are just the top referrers ) It is good to link the mighty Google.

A heartening second is good old technicallyoverboard.com - man you kids just never cease to amaze me. I closed the TOB in February and people are still visiting hoping it's gonna come back.

The rest of the referrers are all people I've linked or like with Random Good Stuff, sites I've done a one post link partner with.

What were the most searched for posts that delivered me the most traffic?

Topping the list was the Messiest apartment post - by a landslide.
Right under that in order were
Japanese Ghost Videos
Weebls Destroy
Robert Plant getting replaced
and the post on the NFL streaming Sunday night Games

Wisdom here is that you are never going to know which posts will bring you traffic - but once you see which ones do, try and learn from them and see if you can't figure out why. Maybe it was a really good or relevant title, maybe just a hot topic.

Placement

Placement is important - if you are 13 pages down in the results you won't be seen too often. A couple interesting places for this month

Geeg places second on the Blog Directory

And if you Google Geeg we now command the third spot! W00T!

So all in all?

Overall the site has gone from Pinto to Mustang in just over one month. I have to thank you readers who visit, here's to next month which hopefully will be even better than this one.

Long live the GeeG!

This Area will be for updates and news on the site that's not really relevant to the front page content. Expect an end of month roundup on reach and SEO coming on the first or second.

In other news we moved out of beta (0.4) and into 1.0 status - most kinks are ironed out by now and things are moving along relatively smoothly.

Rob