MMMeeja

Marketing experts talk about conversions, Google Analytics lets you measure conversion goals but what conversion goals should you set for your blog?

Once you have defined your goals, you can track your performance in acheiving them. After that, work to improve with a little experimentation and a well-researched strategy.

Sales

Duh! No-brainer - if you sell online, this is the goal that matters.

If you don’t sell online but sell in a bricks-and-mortar shop you can still drive sales with your blog and measure them. Try giving out a printable coupon or discount code on your website and use that to track your goals.

Advert Click Throughs

So you don’t sell stuff but you show adverts. Cool, each click is a conversion and every ad network will let you measure your click through rate. A bit of internet research should reveal other people in your niche bragging (or complaining) about their click through rate, examine their sites and figure out what they do differently.

Feed Subscriptions

Those of us who do not sell online or show adverts still need goals to help us improve and getting more subscribers is an excellent one. Readers who use feed readers are technically savvy, often early adopters and opinion formers. Use Feedburner to measure the number of subscribers to your blog feed.

Comments

Bloggers love comments and interacting with your readership is one of the most important aspects of blogging.

Comment quality is an important factor too. It’s all too easy to get hundreds of spam comments but getting an inciteful conversation going with your audience can improve the quality of your writing. Another great goal.

Clicks To Other Articles

When a visitor comes across one of your pages do they stick around and read another of your posts or just jump straight back out again?

This metric is called “bounce rate” in Google Analytics and reducing it is one of the goals that I have for this blog.

Social Media Links

Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us allow users to share pages they have found all over the internet and can bring a significant boost to your traffic.

Consider each digg, stumble and bookmark and kind of conversion for your blog.

Personal Contact

If your blog has a contact form or you publish your twitter username then measure how often your readers actually use them to get in touch.

Get Measuring

You should have some ideas of what is an appropriate measurement for your blog so set up some spreadsheets and make some records of just how you are doing. When you find a weakness (and we all have them), there is a wealth of information out here on the net to help you improve.

Have I missed a conversion goal that you use? Leave a comment below.

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CC licensed Rugby photo by Éamonn

Oh my, what a brouhaha in the SEO community over the announcement that Googlebot can fill in forms!

Nobody should be surprised at this. Thanks to the experiments of SEOs and Matt Cutts we know quite a bit about Googlebot’s behaviour.

What Do We Know About Googlebot?

We know that Googlebot is pretty damn clever - it’s been working hard to separate the spam from the bacon for years and is part of Google’s core product.

We know that Google checks whether you are serving different content to Googlebot and human surfers - presumably by using a different user agent string.

We know that Googlebot will index NOINDEX pages, if it thinks that human searchers would benefit. We know that Googlebot can sometimes ignore a robots.txt directive in its eternal hunt to expose blackhats and spammers.

Googlebot is clever. Its programmers are clever and they are waging a battle against people who want to sell you unregulated medicine when you’re searching for Britney Spears latest single.

I wholeheartedly support Googlebot being clever and bending the rules sometimes, so long as the end goal is to provide human searchers with the information they seek.

What Don’t We Know About Googlebot?

There are a couple of technologies that might be used by Googlebot to some extent but not be publicised:

• Cookies - Googlebot might be able to store and provide cookies. Hardly a difficult coding problem.
• Javascript - Some basic javascript interpretation might be used in Googlebot. Nothing super-fancy, but it could determine whether a page’s text is hidden after loading and replaced with adverts for unsavoury products.

Both these techniques are useful to catch blackhats but should have little effect on organic search results for legitimate sites.

The Bottom Line

Don’t sweat the form filling. Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) know about blogs and search pages and do not want to lower the quality of their search results by including the results of filling a search form with random words. As Matt said in his post, the form-filling technique is used sparingly and carefully and I believe him.

The technique is not meant to penalise anyone, it’s about improving Google’s search results. If your site goes down in the rankings as a result, I will be very surprised.

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Photos by jenn_jenn and peyri