blog :: seo
Posted on 07 Apr 2010 by Andy
How would you like a big spike in Flickr traffic to one of your pictures, like this:
It’s easy - just tag your photos with star trek like Alex did with this photo.
Sigh... sometimes the internet just conforms to stereotypes.
If you have photos of more than chicks in Star Trek costumes, then DoshDosh’s 2007 article on traffic building via Flickr is still one of the best out there.
Posted on 29 Nov 2009 by Andy
A while ago, Glenn Murray (aka DivineWrite) put out a call on Twitter looking for people to review his latest ebook, SEO Secrets.
Despite being hugely sceptical about the whole ebook genre (too many scammers charging for misleading or out of date information in that space, IMHO) I volunteered because I know that Glenn’s previous work is of a high quality and, as I follow him on delicious, I know he’s been doing a lot of very diligent research.
On downloading the PDF and opening my review copy for the first time I was struck by how nicely designed and well laid-out the book is. The title page matches the design of his website and the typography is unusally readable for a PDF. On to the coontents page to what topics it covers and... JEEZ! IT’S HUGE!. One hundred and ninety-nine pages long!
Sure, the layout uses plenty of whitespace and Glenn’s attention to detail means that he included a three-page introduction, glossary, bibliography and index but 199 pages makes for a long ebook.
SEO is a very broad subject and Glenn has attempted to cover a lot of it. Experienced SEOs won’t gain any insight into cutting edge techniques or shady greyhat practices - this is a book for bloggers and web designers wanting to get to grips with the basics of search engine optimisation.
The first chapter explains what SEO means (I said it was for beginners) and why you would want to be aware of good practices in the art. After that, the next chapter covers keyword research and contains a number of good examples, often culled from divinewrite.com itself.
Chapter three is a meaty one at thirty-four pages and covers the technical aspects of SEO, such as canonical URLs, duplicate content, semantic HTML and so on.
Everything presented here is solid, sensible advice - my experience is that if you follow these pointers, you’ll rank for keywords that aren’t too competitive. Glenn backs up his instructions with lots of links and examples making the book is all the more readable for it, if you want to dig deeper into a particular issue he provides some good pages to keep reading on the web.
The fourth chapter covers Glenn’s recipe for optimising a self-hosted Wordpress install and, again, it is good advice. I think, however, that this is the section of the book that will age fastest.
Wordpress is continually releasing new versions and its ecosystem of third-party plugins and themes is enormous. I think it is worth looking at the advice in the book and hunting around (or thinking laterally) for other ways to acheive similar ends. If every Wordpress blog installed the list of plugins in SEO Secrets, there would be no competitive advantage.
Nop surprises here: Glenn recommends submitting a sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing’s webmaster tools and to their Local Business Centres, where appropriate.
He also mentions the two remaining directories that have any search engine love - Yahoo and DMOZ. I personally don’t think that Yahoo directory is worth $200 per year, but your mileage may vary.
This is DivineWrite’s core expertise - copywriting for SEO - and it shows in the next couple of chapters.
He starts with the oft repeated premise of create great content and people will link to it
and then discusses in detail the types of posts that can act as linkbait (taking the 20 post types from Problogger’s book).
The next chapter builds on the keyword research from chapter one and discusses techniques to ensure that your articles are packed with good keywords whilst still keeping your text readable and feeling natural. This is good stuff, and something that I need to practice. I particularly like the use of wordclouds to illustrate keyword density.
After writing and optimising your content, the book then gives some pointers on creating a buzz around it with social media and some (very whitehat) linkbuilding strategies. I am not going to go into the details of the rest of the book - suffice to say it covers the full range of SEO basics.
I would recommend this ebook to those starting out in SEO. It is well-researched and informatively written and provides excellent value for money at $39.97 (USD). I know that Glenn put a lot of work into its production and it shows - this is not the typical twenty page, cut-and-paste ebook rip off.
If you are starting your first blog then a resource like this book will save you a lot of time trying to sift through misinformation and rubbish. The techniques presented here will work and provide a great foundation to your SEO campaign.
Want to get the download? Well, here it is.
If you want to check out the quality of Glenn’s work before you buy, here is his presentation on Content Creation For Search Engines:
Posted on 28 Nov 2009 by Andy
Squidoo is great for building links to your websites and primary content, but your Squidoo lenses need links too. Many web 2.0 sites will allow you to build links on autopilot just by submitting an RSS feed - okay those links aren’t of a very high quality but every little helps, right?
So I was busy doing some Squidoo based linkbuilding for a wine education website and wanted to get some links to my lenses. I followed the usual protocols and left some relevant blog comments, submitted to a bunch of Squidoo directories and then looked to import the set of lenses into a lifestream for a few cheap, easy backlinks.
It turned out to be harder to find than it should be, so I figured I’d write it up here on the blog.
Squidoo do offer RSS feeds for syndication but it doesn’t seem to publicise the fact - and there is certainly no auto-discovery on your lensmaster dashboard (so no orange RSS icon in the browser’s address bar).
Anyway, the secret is to construct a URL like this:
http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lensmaster/username/
Make sure to change username to your squidoo username.
The excellent SquidUtils can also give you seven different RSS feeds for your lenses if you enter your Squidoo username. Thanks to TheFluffaNutta for the tip.
Posted on 21 Oct 2009 by Andy
Any SEO worthy of the title will have heard about David Harry’s SEO Dojo by now. The dojo is a knowledgebase, forum and community hub for SEOs, information retrieval geeks, social media maniacs, link buiders and more that places a heavy emphasis on education and information exchange.
I was lucky enough to get a membership when the site was still in its beta phase and I’ve been astounded by the quality of information available and as the community grew, I was blown away by the helpfulness of the other members.
Remember, I’m not an SEO (I just do some SEO from time to time) but the dojo’s members are just as happy to answer confused noobie questions from people like me as they are discussing page segmentation patents.
David and the community hand pick the best tools, patent publications, webmaster videos and research papers relating to information retrieval and (by extension) SEO. The result is a single source of high quality search-related news and ideas in one place - kind of like Sphinn’s hot topics but without the sock puppets and manufactured controversy.
You can spend hours in the SEO dojo’s library, diving deeper and deeper into different aspects of search technology - and I often do.
Even if you don’t join the dojo, sign up for the newsletter to get the latest sent to your inbox - you’ll miss out on the great discussion that goes with it though.
There is some great unique content available to dojo members - David’s SEO handbook e-books (including the linkbuilders edition, well worth a read) and Excel worksheets for linkbuilders and directory submitters.
The big draw, however, is the amazing SEO site audit framework. You know that document template that you always meant to write covering the basics to look for when first analysing a site (or a competitor)? This is it.
Eight pages of solid SEO wisdom that will ensure that you don’t forget any detail. It is constantly being updated, too, so it won’t become obelete as technologies change.
You can get involved in the discussion in real-time by chatting via Skype. These great sessions are used to answer questions, build resources and just chew the fat.
If you weren’t as lucky as me and missed out on the beta period, you will want to join the dojo but it’s now a paid resource.
There are monthly, three month, six month and twelve month plans available, starting at 30 bucks for one month. The longer you sign up for, the more you save and the 6 and twelve month plans get loads of valuable freebies thrown in.
On top of all that, use the coupon code dojofriends to get a massive 30% off your sign-up!
There are no affiliate links in this post and I don’t make any money from it. I wholeheartedly endorse the SEO and think that it is a top notch resource. My only connection with the Huomah SEO Dojo is that I’m a satisfied member.
You can find me on the Dojo with the username andymurd - say hello!
Posted on 21 Jul 2009 by Andy
In August 2007 Twitter introduced the use of nofollow for external links from its websites, closing down a neat way of gaining a lot of links quickly if your content went hot. This should hardly have come as a surprise, the service was getting too popular so either twitter had to do something or Google would have devalued the links anyway.
Most SEOs now use Twitter for building a buzz and getting traffic, but don’t discount its value for building links - even with the nofollow on twitter.com!
Twitter’s API is its strongest feature, allowing people to syndicate, mashup and/or republish their tweets on other websites. Lots of bloggers have Adobe Flash or Javascript widgets in their sidebars showing their latest tweets - but these also pass no useful link juice. Tracker sites like tweetmeme provide a dofollow link for a short period, but your link will be lumped in with a lot of irrelevant, sometimes spammy, links.
Enter the lifestreamers.
You’ve probably seen sites like FriendFeed and LifeStream.fm which aggregate a user’s data from a wide variety of web 2.0 sites (including Twitter) and then display it all in one place. Both of these services nofollow their links too but there are some open source lifestreaming packages that people install on their own websites - and many of these are dofollow!
Sweetcron is a very popular stand-alone lifestreaming platform - and it follows all links by default. You can easily google for Powered by Sweetcron to find sites using the software.
There is also the Lifestream Wordpress plugin which adds a lifestream page to any self-hosted Wordpress blog. Search for Powered by Lifestream from iBegin. to find sites where it is installed. Some Wordpress themes also offer lifestream or Twitter support, like the ones listed here - check out the demos to find out which pass link juice.
You’re probably asking whether these links from lifestreams are of any use to improve your search rankings and that’s a good question. I think that is like asking whether a link from a blog is of any use - it all depends on the blog in question! So look for lifestreams that are high quality and relevant to your niche. The number of on-page links can be an issue too, so prefer shorter, slow-moving streams and those with archives.
Should lifestreamers nofollow their links? That is entirely up to them - a person’s lifestream is like their blog, they can link to anyone, however they want. A tweet or delicious bookmark is very much like an endorsement so nofollow should not be necessary for personal sites but using a link condom is sensible for sites like FriendFeed.
So, you’ve identified a number of non-spammy, relevant lifestream websites that pass link juice, now you need to get your links onto those sites.
There is no great secret to this - follow the owners on Twitter and interact with them. Tweet their links, retweet their tweets, build relationships and your new friends will reciprocate, and when they do you get a link from their site. Sweet.
Short URLs are the key here - you don’t want Twitter to (re)shorten your URLs (see @pageoneresults’ excellent analysis of how, when and why Twitter converts URLs).
The best URLs shortener to use is one on your own domain, which is easy for Wordpress bloggers but be sure to follow all the changes to use 301 redirects.
If installing your own URL shortener is not an option, use a shortening service that provides a 301 redirect and allows you to customise the shortcode, such as kl.am. Remember that Twitter uses the URL itself as anchor text so get some keywords in there!
Ensure that you track referring URLs and evaluate which lifestreamers send you the most traffic too - links are good for more than just pagerank.
Hopefully you now see how Twitter can be used for linkbuilding and the process is not too different from traditional link building:
I came up with this concept whilst evaluating the impact of a popular post on delicious.com (which uses a robots.txt to block search engine spiders) and noticed lots of bloggers cross-posting their bookmarks in a weekly wrap-up. Applying the same reasoning to Twitter allows us to leverage the social aspect - unlike delicious which is less gregarious. If you like the post, please give it a Sphinn, if you think I’m an idiot then leave a comment.
Creative Commons licensed photos by Eric M Martin & Nearsoft, respectively.
Posted on 15 Apr 2009 by Andy
I was reading SearchEngineLand’s round up of a SEO & SEM Q & A twitter session by Danny Sullivan and one of the questions caught my attention. EdWords asked:
How would you do SEO for a web page which is an application (= javascript, images & practically no content)?
Danny’s answer was good but kind of constrained by Twitter’s 140 character limit:
if page is more an application using javascript than HTML content, find way to add some text and also look to build links
I think it’s worth looking into this issue a little deeper, starting with a look at how the top Internet Applications manage their SEO.
IAs are most often characterised by highly interactive, javascript or Flash based user interfaces that are very different to the average blog’s pages of text. Security concerns often mean that they are closed to search engines so even if GoogleBot can understand more than HTML, these applications should be considered black boxes.
Let’s take a look at a few top IAs (chosen through an informal survey around the office and on Twitter) and see how they do their SEO. I’ve chosen these two types to look into:
Free RIAs like webmail and RSS readers. I’ll be looking at the following:
Business users are happy to pay for premium applications suited to them, like:
Let’s see how well these RIAs perform in a google.com search for appropriate terms (personalized search turned off, universal search results ignored):
| Site | Term | Position |
|---|---|---|
| GMail | 1 | |
| Google Reader | rss reader | 3 |
| ColourLovers | colour palette | 2 |
| Salesforce.com | crm | 5 |
| Basecamp | project management | 16 |
| Zoho | word processor | 4 |
These are all very competitive, generic terms and the applications did well, with all except Basecamp hitting the first page of Google. Should we measure the success of a Google-owned application according to how well it ranks in the Google search engine? I don’t know if there is bias there, but...
We’ll look at each application in more detail and see which SEO techniques they’ve applied.
Domain: mail.google.com - A subdomain of Google’s PR10 main domain with a link from the homepage. Few IA developers will be in this privileged position.
Homepage: Javascript heavy and table-based layout with four sentences of text - not great on-page SEO. Has links to About and What’s New pages which are better optimised.
Public pages: In addition to the About and What’s New pages mentioned above, GMail has a large set of help pages. These are written in a quite technical style (very different to the friendly prose on their blog) and will help with targetting long tail queries. The help pages are also translated into several langauges, causing Yahoo Site Explorer to show over 70,000 indexed pages.
Inlinks: Approx 480,000(!) Many of which are from Google’s other properties, think how many ccTLDs Google owns.
Blog: gmailblog.blogspot.com - On yet another Google-owned domain, this is a good source of links to their help pages.
URL: google.com/reader - A subdirectory of the main search page which also benefits from a link, this is Google leveraging the power of their most powerful page again.
Homepage: Again, javascript heavy and table-based layout with little text. Has a link to a set of Tour pages which also have poor on-page SEO.
Public pages: As with GMail, Google Reader makes good use of its help pages. Mobile and iPhone versions of the homepage show up in the SERPs but since the homepage is so sparse there are not likely to be duplicate content issues.
Inlinks: Approx 31,000 from a wide variety of sources. Technical authority (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb et al.) sites love Google Reader and it shows in their link profile.
Blog: googlereader.blogspot.com - As with GMail, a blogspot blog is used for promotion and deep links to help pages.
Domain: colourlovers.com - Five year old domain containing a keyword - a good solid domain name for SEO.
Homepage: Straight into the meat of the application, with lots of palettes and patterns shown on the homepage. A ton of links too (170+) but there is a good chunk of introductory at the top right.
Public pages: Most of the site is public and it makes great use of user-generated content. Each palette and pattern has its own page which allows comments. There is a forum too, with links to the most recent discussions shown on the site footer. All this UGC means that Yahoo Site Explorer lists 5.7 million indexed pages.
Inlinks: Approx 9,000 from a variety of designers and bloggers. ColourLovers also made Time Magazine’s top 50 websites of 2008 (as well as winning other awards) which is definitely going to help that Google juice flow.
Blog: colourlovers.com/blog - In a subdirectory of the main site, the blog is often used to link to the profiles of prolific site members, great motivation for them but the site might be missing out on some long tail queries by not leveraging their blog for how-to posts and social media linkbait.
Domain: salesforce.com - An eleven year-old domain containing a related keyword. You can start to see why domainers expect such high prices.
Homepage: There is a high code to content ratio here but the homepage makes good use of excerpts from other pages, kind of like a blog’s front page.
Public pages: There are a lot of sales pages aimed at different types of user (sysadmins, sales staff, managers etc) and they are all translated into a number of different languages. There are also subdomains for company blogs and customer outreach - great for long tail and internal linkage.
Inlinks: Approx 167,000 from a good variety of top sites (apple.com, techcrunch etc.) but if you include the salesforce.com subdomains, the number of inlinks jumps to 285,000. Internal linking FTW!
Blog: blogs.salesforce.com - Lots of different blogs on this subdomain, in keeping with the company’s practice of tailoring content to different types of customer.
Domain: basecamphq.com - No keywords in this five year old domain.
Homepage: Pretty good on-page optimisation here: correct use of heading elements and a decent amount of text. Links to sales and help pages, blog posts and even Twitter. There are URL canonicalisation issues though, no redirect from www.basecamphq.com to basecamphq.com. URL parameters indicating referring sites also appear in Yahoo Site Explorer (not Google SERPs though, so they’ve probably fixed that through Webmaster tools).
Public pages: The URLs with referrer parameters make it difficult to see exactly how many unique pages are indexed (there is no XML sitemap either). There are far fewer public pages on this domain than for any of the other RIAs examined.
Inlinks: About 200,000 inlinks from two main sources: the 37 Signals (the owners of Basecamp) network and advertising. Basecamp seem to have a very popular affiliate program, which results in a lot of dofollow sitewide links on blogs.
Blog: productblog.37signals.com - 37 Signals have a single blog that covers all of their products (as well as the popular Signal vs Noise). This is a pretty good strategy for gaining and controlling offsite links.
Domain: zoho.com - Like Basecamp, there are no key words in their domain, which is five years old. Each of their tools has its own separate domain, with a sales page.
Homepage: No canonicalisation issues here, but the homepage is rather devoid of text. It shows a list of links to their nineteen office applications (each app is on a different subdomain). There are just three short exceprts from press coverage right at the bottom of the page. The oage uses tables for layout too.
Public pages: The subdomains for each of the tools are much better optimised, with excerpts of sales pages linking back to the main domain. I am undecided about the significance of this last sentence, maybe it just means that the homepage is poorly constructed, add a comment if you’ve got any insights. There are about 500 pages listed in Yahoo Site Explorer, although some are duplicates caused by advert referrer tracking parameters.
Inlinks: About 950,000(!) inlinks. Zoho got a huge amount of love during the Web 2.0 boom, won many awards and featured in a lot of people’s Top X Web 2.0 sites lists.
Blog: blogs.zoho.com is used to build community and promote wiki pages.
Phew, that’s a lot of information to get through, still reading?
When we look at the successful and not so good SEO aspects of the listed applications, some patterns emerge...
Put some good, keyword laden text on it. Testimonials, press cuttings, blog excerpts - the front page is your sales page. So don’t dive straight into your application, have an introduction and a big call to action button.
Consider making the front page
Great for long-tail technical queries and link back to your front page with targetted anchor text.
Send link juice to your help pages whenever a new feature is announced. This can help you own more results on the first page of the SERPs too.
Forums, community help, user blogs - did I mention long-tail queries before?
Give your customers a voice on your website, what they are talking about is your product!
Put out press releases and be very nice to journalists and A-list bloggers. A new startup cannot compete with sites that have half a million backlinks, but focus on quality not quantity.
All but ignored by the big players, but if you are building from scratch then at least ditch the tables!.
A good affiliate programme attracts a lot of sitewide links from a wide variety of sites, which is great for your link profile. Of course programme participants should nofollow their links but if you provide the link text for them to paste into the siderbar, you don’t have to include the tag.
This should be SEO 101. Pay attention to your affiliate tracking.
Most of these recommendations apply just as well to any website not just RIAs but to answer @EdWords’ original question of “How do you SEO a web page with no content?”, don’t. Make a web site with lots of content and SEO that!
Posted on 03 Mar 2009 by Andy
Search Engine Optimisation has seen exponential growth over the last year and the good times look set to continue as firms make the most of their web assets during the credit crunch. Google’s webmaster group published their guidelines covering the basics of promoting HTML content - the rest is down to effort, discipline, time and creativity - but search technology is seeing some big changes on the horizon.
The emergence of the semantic web is going shake things up big time and require some old SEOs to learn new tricks. Whilst text indexing will remain the bedrock of internet search technology, e-commerce sites that leverage semantic search technologies will find it much easier to get closer to thier customers. SEOs working for such forward-thinking sites are going to have to brush up on their technical skills and go back to the roots of Information Retrieval.
The semantic web is about presenting data to search engines. Let’s call these snippets of data facts (their technical name is triples, but facts is a great term to help your understanding).
I can write a web page using current HTML technology and the only facts that I give to the search engine crawlers are:
I could add microformats to the page and include these facts:
Great, I could ask a search engine for all documents written by Andy between July and August 2008, but few people ever will. They ask for short jumbles of words (“cheap holiday Heathrow spain”) because that works well with text indexing technologies available now. That query really means “I want to see details of cheap holidays to Spain that fly from Heathrow”.
Now consider optimising a page to include these facts:
Are you SEOs reading this getting excited/worried yet?
As an SSO, it’s your job to get your document considered as an answer to as many questions as possible. To achieve this, there are parallels with current, textual search engines:
The big deal here is trust.
Semantic web tools start out with a corpus that they trust, often Wikipedia, scientific or government data. They don’t want to pollute that with dodgy data that’s been hacked around to get better rankings so you’re going to need your whitest hat. SEOs are familiar with Google’s TrustRank algorithm, and you can bet that this will be applied to RDF data too.
As always, links will be hugely important.
A shoe e-tailer could link from his product offering to the manufacturer’s product description data. Affiliates and price comparison sites can link to the e-tailer’s product data. This already happens with HTML pages but it will happen with data objects too.
Guidelines for semantic link building will follow similar themes to those for HTML link building:
Although discredited for HTML link building, I think that directories will regain favour as people look for good data - at least in the short to medium term. Directories of semantic data sources will be able to capitalise on the machine-readability of RDF and implement a form of automated quality scoring.
You can start now - even the humblest WordPress blog can add hAtom semantic tags by following these instructions.
More complex sites, such as e-tailers should begin planning to deliver semantic data sooner rather than later - perhaps by integrating it with your affiliate programme. Being the first in your niche will count for a lot when other sites have invest effort in linking to your data.
I’d like to bring your attention to an excellent slide show by Jonathan Mendez that discusses the use of semantic data in landing pages. Lots to think about there.
Are you an SEO? Have your thought how “Web 3.0” will change your working practices? Have any customers asked about semantic technologies? Please leave a comment.
Creative Commons licensed photo by lecasio.
Posted on 23 Feb 2009 by Andy
If you’ve ever spent some time checking out search engine optimisation on the web, you’re bound to have read something by David Harry (aka theGypsy). If you’ve ever submitted a story to Sphinn about Google using bounce rates to determine site quality, you’ll have been down-voted by him and had your argument destroyed in the comment section.
He’s a force to be reckoned with in the SEO world and now he has launched his own social media space dedicated to advanced SEO techniques - the Huomah Dojo!
I was privileged to be asked to help beta test the dojo and I must say that I’m impressed. There’s some clever people on there already, sharing knowledge and exploring the technical aspects of SEO, link building, keyword research and lots more. The list of tools available in the "Weapons Room" is definitely worth a visit too.
There’s a great deal of content there, with an emphasis on quality information and a strong technical theme to it. David’s background in Information Retrieval shows through - testable hypotheses and published patents are on the menu, not the regurgitated pap that fills out most SEO ebooks.
The site is still in beta (though it looks like it will be launched very soon) so you’ll need to sign up for the Huomah newsletter to be notified when it gets opened to the public.
If you’re an SEO, it will be worth it.
Posted on 23 Sep 2008 by Andy
I last posted about twiggit, an automated system to inform the world of your diggs via twitter. In the comments, ecreeds asked whether a similar service for Sphinn existed. I don’t think one does, but here are instructions on using TwitterFeed to do something similar.
You’ll need to change the twitter username and paste in the URL
of your Sphinn feed.That’s all there is to it. When your feed is processed, you should see a tweet from your account like this:
Most social networking sites provide feeds of your interactions so you could use TwitterFeed to do something similar for del.icio.us, stumbleupon, youtube, flickr and more but beware that if you automate too much, people will unsubscribe from you because your signal to noise ratio is too low. FriendFeed is much better place to stream all your web 2.0 feeds.
Hopefully that answers ecreed’s question, if you have any similar queries or want help with anything to do with the web or social media, leave a comment.
Posted on 03 May 2008 by Andy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
CC licensed Rugby photo by Éamonn
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