GeeG News

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