Janric Website Design » Marketing Tips

How To Get More Hits For Your Website

Keith — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:47:51 +0000

The amount of profit your website makes is directly proportional to your traffic and hits. So, to make more profit, how do you increase your hits?
By Keith Lunt, ©janric.co.uk

First, what is the difference between hits and visitors? Well hits is the number of pages viewed by all of the visitors coming to your site. So a visitor looking at one page generates one hit, whereas the same visitor looking at 10 pages is still only 1 unique visitor, but 10 hits.

So, why is it important to increase hits, not just visitors? Well if the count of visitors and hits are equal, then people are not looking around your website. Whilst these immediate bounces might be more likely to click on adsense adverts, they are less likely to become long term visitors or even buyers and less likely to keep coming back.

That means to increase website hits we need to look at three areas. First, increase the page hits per visitor. Second, increase the visitor return rate. Third, find new visitors to come to the website.

Increasing page hits per visitor is all about making it easy for visitors to find what they want. Show them related posts or other items that previous customers have bought after looking at the current item. Show them your most popular recent posts, or those products on special offer or products that are often purchased.

Make sure that your navigation is simple and guides them through the process. Also check that you do not have huge pictures or animations that cause the page to take too long to load. All images must be optimised to the size they are displayed at. Confusing navigation and slow loading pages cost you traffic.

To keep them coming back offer newsletters and RSS feeds. Offer both, just in case a visitor isn’t sure how to use one or the other. Tell them why they should join your newsletter, such as free ebooks, special discounts and latest new products. Give them a site they want to return to and the ability to return to the site easily.

Lastly, start to look at how you promote your site and this should be after addressing the above issues. There is not point in improving your SEO, for example, if your slow load page and confusing navigation puts off every visitor.

Have a go at article writing, blog commenting and other methods intended to bring in more visitors whilst at the same time increasing your SEO. Maybe trial a PPC campaign on one of the major search engines and look into getting a banner advert displayed on another relevant website.

Increasing your hits is not all about optimising your website. It is about preparing your website first so that the best results can be achieved when you later optimise your website or decide to have a go at paid advertising schemes. Taking the time to prepare your website will see you well rewarded.

The Ins And Outs Of Adwords

Keith — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:02:51 +0000

If you want traffic quickly, then Google’s Adwords is what you need. Or so we are often told. What makes it good, and what makes others hate it so much?
By Keith Lunt, ©janric.co.uk

Google’s Adwords, if you believe the hype, can bring untold traffic volumes directly to your website almost immediately. And when this traffic comes, you should be able to sell to them and make yourself very rich indeed.

Well, how much of that is true and how much is a bit too far?

The answer is basically it depends on you. And that is very true as I have spoken to people who depend on the traffic that Google sends for all of their business, whilst other people say they barely make enough profit from the traffic to cover the costs of the adverts. Some, sadly, do not even cover the advertising costs.

It all boils down to a few factors. Your approach to using Adwords, your website and your target market.

For example many people will fall for the trick of believing that loads of traffic is best and will buy very general keyword terms. But this is a complete disaster as there will be a lot of people bidding on the general terms and it is highly likely that the people visiting your site might be after a specific product or service that you do not offer.

To get the best from the system you must be very specific, even if this seems to be limiting your traffic. For example, if you are selling shoes, then the keyword “buy shoes” no doubt has a lot of traffic. If you limit the potential traffic to those products that you actually sell, such as “buy children’s shoes” then you are just targeting those people that are likely to be interested in what you have. Ths means less wasted clicks to your site.

On top of this be very specific in what your advert displays. Saying that you sell cheap shoes does not grab potential buyer’s attention. However, telling your audience that you sell what they are searching for and spelling out an advantage you have, for example free shipping, is likely to grab their attention.

Also, by spelling out exactly what it is you are offering you are hopefully putting off those people who not find your products and services useful. This means that they are not visiting your site, costing you for clicking on the advert, then leaving disatisfied at not finding what it was they were looking for.

Google’s Adwords can be a very powerful tool, but you must not be too greedy with the amount of traffic that you are trying to buy by choosing your keywords very carefully and using advertising text that encourages the right people to visit your website.

Finding some new business

Keith — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:41:26 +0000

I am in the process of considering ditching my sales guy and looking for leads from elsewhere, so it was rather fortunate that on the same day I decide he has probably got to go, I discovered this new lead generation website.

It says it sells business leads, but at the moment all of the recent leads are website design leads, which is perfect for me! And the prices are not too over the top either, unlike some competitors.

The examples show a few recent leads, most of which I would happily have handled, so it will be a matter of wait for some to arrive, buy some and see if I can get more new business.

And if it works, well they offer a cheaper scheme as well if you guarantee to buy so many leads. We’ll have to wait and see on that one, but do watch this space!

Getting more profit from your website, almost ready.

Keith — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 09:59:30 +0000

The long promised series that I have been thinking of for months should be ready shortly.

I am just not getting the time to write any of my articles / posts, but I really need to find time for these over the next couple of weeks and get everything back on track!

The new series that will be gracing these pages later this month (honest!) will be all about how to get more profit from your existing website.

It is looking at tricks and tips to get the people you already have visiting your website to spend more money, in some cases even just to spend money rather than leaving the site.

The idea is that we all spend enough cash on marketing our websites, but do we invest the same time, effort and investment in making sure that our sites are worthy of these visitors that we are trying to summon to our websites?

So I look at different tricks we can use, both to get new visitors to buy from us and to get old customers to either spend more each visit or to come back and spend more again.

Whichever you try, they should all be beneficial to you and make sure that your site earns a lot more, without a lot of investment.

A New Mini Series

Keith — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:47:56 +0000

Walking along this evening, just minding my own business, I was wondering what I could talk about (at length) in my writing that would be interesting, fresh and original and call upon my personal experiences.

I wanted a subject that is not often discussed and would be relevant and exciting to some people. Writing articles, starting blogs, working from home etc are all very relevant, but not really all that new.

And then it came to me. Something that I have plenty of experience of both from large multi national business, staffed by thousands of employees down to one man band retailers.

And that is quite simply taking your current ecommerce business, or shop, and making more money out of what you are currently doing. That means taking those existing customers and new buyers and getting them to buy more from you.

Many people have written about how to find new customers, but not so many have studied the art of increasing sales through existing customers. So, that is what I will be dealing with in September,

It is quite a complicated issue and one in which I have a lot of experience and plenty of crazy ideas, so I’ll put together a mini series that will, no doubt, start off slowly and then pick up pace as I get time to write down all of the ideas and expand on them (I’m very behind on this week’s writing in all of my blogs!).

So watch out for the appearance of these articles, along with (at the end of the series) a whole new ebook. And if it goes well that ebook should be available for sale via affiliate channels, but free to readers of this blog!

I’m determined to push a few ebooks over the last quarter of this year, so here is the start of one of them.

Do leave any comments you want of anything you would like to see included. Input is always welcomed!

Using Promotional Items For More Sales

Keith — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:07:59 +0000

A good way to generate more business is always by getting some decent quality promotional printed products sourced and getting them out to your customers.

But, promotional printed products do not need to cost you a penny and in these harder times that can be great news. You just need to apply a little logic in your promotional activities.

Random Giveaways Are Not Best
The obvious way to use promotional printed products is to stand there and just give them out to anyone and everyone. But, whilst this can be effective, there is the cost of sourcing the items to consider.

Instead, look at ways of covering the cost of getting your keyrings, toys, stress balls or whatever printed and over to your distribution point.

Create More Sales
And the way to do this is to instead of just handing them out to ever passing potential customer that goes past, using them to tempt in new customers and to temp existing customers to come back or buy more.

Drag People In With Promotional Giveaways
If you own a shop, then along with the items have some big posters created that shout out exactly what you are offering for free, but with a catch. For example, “Free stress ball with all purchases over £10 tomorrow.”. This way, you are drawing the people into your shop and encouraging them to spend money with you and this becomes instant profit.

This giving them out in return for a purchase is much more cost effective than just giving them out and hoping for a sale in return, and can be used on websites. The poster in the shop can even tie in to an online promotion, so that the shop promotion encourages people to visit and buy from your website.

Increase Average Sales
But this is not the only way of encouraging direct sales. There is another way, if a little complicated at first to understand.

Take a look at how much your average customer spends with you in a single basket, and this works in a shop or online (but work out the averages separately). Now add a little amount onto that average and see how many customers are spending that much. Aim to find a figure that only the top 30 – 40% of customers are spending in a basket.

Now offer the promotional gift for free, when a customer spends more than this target basket figure. What you are doing here is rewarding the best customers whilst trying to persuade those average customers to spend a little more, which means more profit.

This is excellent add on marketing and it is so easy to tell if it is working – just work out again the average basket value and the top 30 / 40% figure and see what has happened. If your average basket has gone up, then you know that people are tempted and are going for your offer and it is working.

Spreading Your Name

Keith — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:01:09 +0000

I always like to carry a load of business cards with me in my wallet and make sure that everyone knows my business.

It sounds a daft thing, but according to a new customer he frequently asks businessmen passing through his store for their business card, only to find out that the are not carrying them

But, why not? Make sure that you carry plenty of your business cards with you wherever you are and whenever you go anywhere. Likes of last night I was asked by my wife’s long last friend for contact details. Quickly a business card comes out, not just telling the old friend our new contact details but also what our new business is.

The thing is, business cards are cheap to get printed, but do absolutely no good on your desk. Get them printed and then give them out to everyone and anyone. Even when to meet a customer that has previously contacted you, give them a few cards as you never know who they might give them to.

In your wallet they do no good. Given out and spread around and you never know who could see them and what business they might produce!

Having A Fresh Weblog Included In The Technorati List

Keith — Sat, 29 May 2010 10:43:41 +0000

You might have decided that you need to get a Technorati Authority for your blog, but how do you go around it?

First, I used to believe that pinging Technorati works. Don’t bother, they ignore pings now! You might as well take away the ping from your blog and save the processing time. So what do you do? Here are the stages we have used to hastily get a ranking.

1. Go technorati.com and sign up for an account. Easy. You will need to validate it as usual by clicking an email link, but on the whole, nothing clever!

2. Find the claim a weblog button. Follow the form for directions here – enter your blog URL and press next, then type in the particulars you find. Don’t submit it merely yet!

If you don’t know your RSS feed address, it could be displayed on your site somewhere. Only right click and then copy link location to copy it and paste it where it is asked for. If it isn’t shown somewhere, you are omitted a trick!

3. One of the optional fields is for sites linking back to you. If you have been using FTS or article directories, then you should have some of these. Go to Yahoo and search link:www.yourblog.com and find a few web-sites linking back to you (forget Google, unless you have loads of links). Copy and paste three of these into the form. I have no idea if it really helps, but the question is there, so in case it does…

4. assume up a few suitable tags and enter them, plus select the three categories that match your website the best. Now, check the details and press submit.

Now, they will email you a claim code that you have to put into your weblog. This seems to be the biggest sticking point for getting listed – positioning this claim token. The problem is here that Technorati seems to do a double check.

First, they spider the website to check the claim token exists and second they look for it in your RSS feed. The second makes sense, as I will explain in a moment. But why then do the first? If both checks used the RSS feed then an error message could be generated. I assume that this is the reason that plenty of claims are failing and why a lot of websites are not getting listed. Let me explain more!

The reason to use the RSS feed rather than just spidering the website is because anyone might place a comment in a site, which could include the claim token. You have to be able to update the posts to be able to get it onto the RSS feed.

So what causes the claim problem? Well, plenty of bloggers set the RSS feed to merely display a summary, rather than the full post. If the claim token is too far down the post, then it won’t be read by Technorati. Therefore, your weblog doesn’t get listed properly.

So, when you receive your claim token, create a new post and put the token in the first sentence. I would recommend within the first 30 words at the most. Also, (in WordPress), go to settings, reading and ensure the RSS feed is giving the entire post. A belt and braces job, but better to make sure that. Once you start to see a Authority appearing, you might reset your feed to summary just if you prefer.

After that, you should be ready to get listed. You only need to get other bloggers to mention you in their posts!

Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 10, The Tools Of Article Writing

Keith — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:33:25 +0000

There are two different purposes to article writing (search engine placement and visitors from the readers) and so, on the whole, there are at least two different ways of publishing articles.

If you are writing for visitors, then you want to be publishing your articles on directories that have high quantities of visitors that are interested in your writing. For this, I always use EzineArticles.

Along the same lines, you can write an article and pass it to a blog owner and ask them to publish it as a guest post on their blog. By working with high traffic blogs, you can tempt their readership over to your website.

But there is also the element of search engine optimisation. Both of the above will, on the whole, help with SEO. But it is a small number of inbound links and not really going to make a huge difference.

Therefore, you need bulk submission systems if you want to get the best search engine effects and with this comes duplicate content.

To avoid duplicate content, rewrite your articles for these systems using a tool such as MAR. It is an easy way to provide the submission tools with alternatives to key words scattered through the text, but be careful that the text does not become unreadable.

Then, I submit the article to up to 30 blogs who are asking for this content, via a system known as FTS. It is quite simple, copy and paste the prepared article then find some blogs that have a category that fits your writing.

There are also bulk article submission tools such as MAS that allow you to submit the articles, again with the variations, to hundreds of article directories. As long as you are careful with the spinning, you should have loads of reprints pointing back at you.

Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 8, Best Use Of Articles

Keith — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:05:51 +0000

If you are going to write articles, then you might as well get the best of each one that you write. So what else can you do to benefit your website and your business?

Well, for a start, submit the article and variations of it to as many different directories and submissions systems as possible. Just submitting to 1 would be a great boost to your site, but if you can submit to 100s, there is an even bigger benefit.

Next, start blogging. If you do not already have a blog on your website, get one. Then post copies of articles, chunks of articles or whatever, to your own blog. Sometimes I split articles down to post to my own blogs and sometimes I join a couple together.

Why blog though? There are two reasons. First, you are constantly adding new, fresh content to your website. Even if you have a static site, by blogging you have a constant flow of new content and search engines will see this and you get a huge boost. It is much better to have a fresh website than a stale one when you are fighting for search engine visitors.

Second, if people are searching for what you talk about in your articles, then if you have them published on your website they might just find your website and take an interest. Some make become subscribers to the blog and eventually buyers.

Ultimately, you can also compile a selection of your posts into an ebook and either sell it to your visitors, offer it in return for signing up to a newsletter or give it away for some other reason.

Forget changing the code of your website, concentrate on what matters – get some articles written!

Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 7, Making Articles Unique

Keith — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:02:49 +0000

Submitting your articles to 400+ article directories has great search engine benefits, but it does not always work as well as it should if you submit 400 identical articles. So how do we get around that?

Well, for a start, be very careful with this technique, do not over do it and do not use it on articles submitted to the very best article directories!

The first step is to rewrite your articles between article directory submissions. This is great, but when you submit your new article to 30 blogs in one go and 400+ directories in a second batch, then there is not the option to rewrite as you go.

For this reason I use MAS, which provides a thesaurus and makes suggestions as to what selected words can be changed to. Unfortunately, I have seen this techinque used to the extreme and even the titles of articles become totally unreadable, never mind the content of the piece. So be very careful when using this technique, read the output and check that it still makes sense. Go for correct English language articles rather than something that is totally changed, but absolute nonsense.

What tools such as MAS do is quite simple. Within your article you pick the words to change, or ‘spin’. This is then coded up and you paste the ‘spun’ version of the article into the system that you are submitting via. This system then randomly picks one option from each spin and should, therefore, even with hundreds of reprints, always end up with unique articles.

You can do this manually, but it it far quicker and more time efficient to use a tool. Just check what it writes and post the original, not the spun version, to the best article directories!

Continue to part 8.

Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 6, Where To Submit Articles

Keith — Sun, 23 May 2010 22:03:14 +0000

So you have written a few articles and now you want to make the most of them. What do you do with them?

Well, my rule of thumb is to always submit the best and original article to what I and many others consider to be the best article directory on the net – ezinearticles.com. Looking at various website stats, this site always wins hands down and should be where you submit your articles to. But they only accept the very best of your writing and it make take a while to get into the habbit of writing correctly for them. But, they do generate a lot of visitors from their readership and their links are visible to Google and other search engines.

After that, I have found that just concentrating on the one directory does not give the best possible search engine results. Relying on just the one directory for a couple of months I saw my site slip slightly through the rankings. Once I started submitting again to other sites, the ranking improved. There is a great benefit to spreading the benefits between multiple sites.

Therefore, I also submit amended copies of articles via two other systems, both of which submit to multiple destinations. The first is known as FTS, which allows free users to select up to 30 blogs to submit the article to whist the second, MAS, attempts to submit the article to hundreds of lesser article directories. I can quite often distribute my articles to over 400 directories each time!

Continue to part 7.

Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 5, What Are Articles?

Keith — Sun, 23 May 2010 22:03:03 +0000

I have already said that the best way to increase website traffic is through article writing, but what exactly is an article?

Many people are frightened when they hear that article writing is all that is needed to optimise a website. It sounds daunting, scary, too difficult. It sounds like something that only the very clever can do.

Do not believe that! This piece that you are reading now is an article, written about my own experience. If you are selling a product or a service, you can write about that, or what you offer or latest reviews and developments. You can write frequently asked question lists or discussion topics. If you know something about the subject, then you can probably write an article about that subject!

Depending on where you are submitting the article to, it should be anything from 250+ words to 500+ words. Each system has its own limits, so check with terms and conditions of the site that you will be submitting to for their guidelines.

It is also important to know what an article is not. You must not write a press release or an article that just sings the praises of you or the services that you provide. But other than that, you can just about write about whatever you like.

The best articles are well written pieces that are interesting and tell the readers what they want to know. For the best readerships, you should write an article that is related to your product or service. You might know a lot about bird watching, but that will not drive a lot of satisfied readers to a shoe website!

Continue to part 6.

Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 4, Why Articles?

Keith — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:31:15 +0000

So filling meta data and tags with keywords is old hat and link directories are out of the window because they have no value. But we need links and to do that we write articles. But, what is so good about article writing?

Well, that is why this series is “Getting More Free Web Traffic” and not “Search Engine Optimisation“. Article writing certainly does get websites to the top of search engine rankings, but that is just one part of the story.

For many websites, there is a market of customers that spread far and wide and some of these are researching more information by reading article directories. Others might be looking for products and services and will stumble onto articles on directories.

Either group, if interested in the article, can then see the author’s biography at the bottom of the article and then visit the author’s site. With one recent brand new site, before it had even been cached by the search engines, I managed to get it up to 40 new unique visitors per day, just through people reading a handful of articles on 1 top article directory.

Also, given that a main reason for writing articles is the search engine benefit, the plusses go on. Not only does the article get printed on the directory that you submit it to, but other directories and websites will pick up the article, print it and link back to you.

So, we write articles for 2 reasons. First they are great with the search engines and boost our ranking position and second people will read them on the sites we submit them to and visit our sites. But how do we write them?

Continue to part 5.

Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 3, Link Building

Keith — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:29:48 +0000

Previously in this series I have looked at the content of the website with regards to search engine optimisation. Personally, if this counts for as much as 5% of the weight that search engines give for your optimisation work, then I would be surprised.

Most of the influence as to what terms are significant to your website come not from what you say on your website pages, but what other sites say about you. And this is by how they link to you.

Each link has what is known as an anchor text – this is the piece of text that the visitor will click on to use the link. But the search engines take a look at this anchor and use it as a vote for the website. So, if the anchor text is search engine tips, then you have 1 vote for that term pointing to your website. Get enough votes and you will be top of the list.

Historically, website owners have done this by running link exchange directories on their websites. Mass exchanges, where you link to another site in return for them linking to you. This was fine, but as with the content issue, everything to optimse a website needs to shout out ‘natural’. Search engines can easily spot huge directories and most have no page rank and are useless.

So, we need a way of link building that gives natural links, ideally from websites that we are not enforced to link to in order to keep the link back in place. And the answer to this is article writing. I’ll look at how and the other advantages later in the series.

Continue to part 4.

No More No Follow!

Keith — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:49:27 +0000

This blog has now been running happily for a couple of weeks without the nofollow in the comments field!

If you want to leave a comment, please do so. All comments are still checked manually, but as long as what you say is reasonably going with the flow, then it will be accepted.

A few pointers though:

Comments should fit in with the topic. Sorry, but ‘”Nice site, you’re 34th on my daily must read list” is still spam as is “Great views on the topic.” If you have read the post, at least refer to what you like about it or how you found it so I can write more on those themes!

No in comment links. Isn’t the fact that the comment links back enough? If the link you add adds value to the comment then that is fine, but self serving links for the sake of it are a sign of spam.

Give your name. Your name isn’t really ‘Best Online Casino’, give your name so we know who is talking to us. I’m not saying I will never approve a comment without a name, it just adds to the crosses in the checklist to get the comment deleted.

Use an Avatar! Not essential, it is just that I am interested in who is commenting!

I’m not saying that you have to do all of the above, just that these are the sort of warning flags I am looking for with comments. If your comment is interesting and fails the rest, I’ll accept it.

And if your blog is not nofollow, let me know!

Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 2, Page Design

Keith — Sun, 16 May 2010 20:32:46 +0000

In part 1, about SEO myths, I discussed how I believe that there is no longer any point in filling attributes and tags with keywords. So what should a page include?

Well, for my own website design site, I appear on the first page for various local listings, without mentioning the local areas on the website. For example, Merseyside does not appear in the code, yet I appear on the first page of Google for searches on website design Merseyside.

My home page does naturally discuss website design and gives more details on the services offered. And this is the key to how a well optimised website page should look. The page should naturally mention and deal with the keywords. A few mentions of them, maybe in different contexts and mentioning them in different ways. For example, website design and designing a website.

Do not ever over-do the number of times that a keyword is mentioned in a site. Some people suggest a rule of each keyword representing no more than 2% of the words on a page. So, if the web page contains 300 words, which is a detailed page, then you can have no more than 6 mentions of any of your individual keyword.

Take this to the extreme of a 200 word page, and if you used your keyword in the title, description, and keyword meta tags and once in an alt attribute, then you would have hit your 2% without mentioning it once in the text.

So, for the best results, make sure that you mention keywords naturally instead of stuffing them everywhere that you can. But it is the next stage, link building, that is important.

Continue to part 3.

Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 1, The Myths

Keith — Sun, 16 May 2010 19:56:12 +0000

I am calling this set of articles ‘Getting More Free Web Traffic’, rather than ‘Getting More Search Engine Traffic’, because I believe there is more to optimising a website than just the increase in the search engine position. I will come back to that more later in the series, but for now, this will be a series of improving your website traffic through search engine optimisation.

But first, let us dispel a few myths on what is involved in search engine optimisation. Many so called self confessed experts will tell you that you need to use certain entries in your Title, Description, alts, keywords and other places. Make sure that you have enough H1 and H2 tags and use bold a few times.

Forget that! These worked fine years ago, but for Google in particular, these are more or less ignored. I have successfully got sites to the top of Google without een mentioning one or more of the search terms anywhere in the code.

I am not sure why people still insist on using these tags and attributes. Sometimes, I think it is just to baffle less technical people. There may still be a small benefit in filing these attributes and tags with your desired keywords, but I doubt it is much. The problem is that they are too easy stuffed with random, irrelevant, keywords.

Search engines instead are putting a lot of value in what happens off the site and that is what I will look at in the rest of the series. So do not worry if changing your website code sounds too difficult or you do not maintain the code. You can do everything that is needed without changing a line of code!

Continue to part 2.

Website Traffic – Monitor Your Visitors on a Daily Basis to Ensure Success

Keith — Mon, 03 May 2010 20:51:27 +0000

Do you look at your web site visitors usually? Do you monitor what is going on on the web site, or only trundle on as you are? Monitoring your traffic daily might improve your traffic levels! find out why.

It is crucial that you monitor your web site traffic so that you know what is going on and could make the most of it. OK, I accept that for some web sites and for people with loads of web sites that monitoring every day is impossible. But if you aim to monitor the stats once a month, you will beyond doubt forget and end up monitoring them once a year at best. Aim to check them every day that you can and you will remember to check them as a rule.

But what, exactly, are you checking for? Monitoring the total number of traffic a day goes part of the way, but here are the checks to look out for:

Visitors spikes – if the visitors goes up for a day, why? Look carefully at the other factors listed below and see if any of them are to credit for it!
Visitors drops – have a think if there is a reason that traffic has dropped. Check that your server hasn’t bee down, or have other events caused a lull in the traffic, such as a huge news item?
Referring web sites – who has sent you traffic that day? If you suddenly see traffic coming from a new source, or more than usual, then what could you do to encourage this? Maybe someone has blogged around you – in this case go to their weblog and thank them. Do what you might to encourage a repeat. Or maybe you have been submitting articles and are receiving extra hits from the sites – if so, then you know where to submit your next articles to…
Search engine terms – again, watch for visitors increases that indicate a term has done well, but also look for those that are falling a little short. Go to the search engines and try the search terms and see what position you are in. Not quite on the top of the page? Then write an article for that keyword and move yourself further up that page. It is better than working blindly on random keywords.
Landing pages – what pages do your traffic land on? Is one suddenly becoming hot or is there a theme to which pages are often found? Maybe you have discovered a term that there is stacks of visitors on, but not much competition. A little more writing on what people are interested in could absolutely improve your visitors levels.

These are all vital factors that if you monitor them often enough, you can react to them and do something round them whilst they are still hot. There is no point in trying to repeat a search that sent you traffic last week, because the search results could have changed since then. Work out where you are getting visitors and nurture these sources. Quickly you could be building ample of visitors.

Is there something else that you like to monitor on a daily basis that I have forgotten? Only leave a comment and I might add it to the list.

No More NoFollowed Comments!

Keith — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:25:47 +0000

I have decided that, for a trial period at list, this blog will no longer nofollow writer’s links in comments!

A big step, but instead of preventing the abuse of the comments system by nofollowing links, I will be monitoring carefully every comment to every post on the website and either removing or nofollowing those that are obviously an attempt at abusing the comments.

So, all genuine looking comments will now be followed by the search engines! I’m expecting this to take a bit of work, but if successful it should be useful. But, the nofollow is remaining on links within the comment text! Only 1 link per comment, please!

Hopefully I will be able to leave this change in place indefinitely and roll it out to my other blogs, if I see benefits to this system rather than just thousands of spam comments!

Do you already remove the nofollow from comment avatars? If so, what hints and tips do you have to share? If your blog does not nofollow comments leave a mention below and I might just pop over and have a good browse of it myself. If a few people respond, I might even be tempted to make a list!

p.s. want to find more sites that don’t nofollow comments? Take a look at this page.