OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

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It’s a Friday silly day. Of course, it is!

Well, I have something for you today that’s not silly at all. Want to measure how your site is doing? I mean, what people are looking at when they come to see your website or blog?

Like over the past week, I see 831 visitors and 160 clicks. Not a record load of traffic, but it’s building and it’s mostly coming direct or from search. Watch out Shoemoney. Ha!

Everyone clicked on different things, but mainly the AddMe button for bookmarking, which is very cool. Thanks to those who took the time to do that.

I got 27 optins. Welcome, friends!

And 9 people were interested in my “About Me” page.

This is totally cool stuff to know, right?

But… you also get a heat map. This shows you plainly what people are looking at when they come to your site. My brightest lites were subscribe to my list and my RSS feed. Not bad.

And then… you also get a “confetti” report. These are colored dots of light and when you click on them, you can see how the person got to your blog or site, how long they spent, what browser they used, and what operating system they have.

Whoa.

And all that for free. Go check this out. It’s an incredible tool, and I just gave you the highlights.

http://crazyegg.com

Popularity: 21% [?]

Google seems to want to take over the world, and sometimes their ubiquity scares me.They’re into everything, including browsers, as of  last week.

But I have to say that what they give us for zip, zilch, zero is truly impressive. I love most of the stuff that Google puts out, and I’ve been using their search engine since 1998. Ten years, and I rarely use anything else. Gotta love Google.

One of their tools is extremely powerful, and really important if you want to know how to improve your site for search. It’s called Google Webmaster Tools and you can get a free account at http://google.com/webmasters. I signed up early on and have been checking in weekly or so to find out what’s going on with my blog and my websites.

First, you get crawl stats. What pages are working? What pages aren’t? And you get the results for web search and mobile search. Plus, you get information on your pages. Where might you have dupe title tags or descriptions that are too long or too short?

Then, you get some down and dirty stats. What are the top search terms that people plug into Google to find you? How many subscribers do you have? How often does Google crawl, and more. In the Index tab, you can see who links to your homepage, how many pages of your site Google has indexed and other cool stuff.

I like the Links tab because you can see just who links to pages in your site. For a blog, that’s important. You’ll see what posts people like enough to link back to you. Great info to have, eh? I mean, when you know what people like and want, give them more of it!

Just be sure that your site has a sitemap. They’re not hard to make, and if you search, you can find tools that will build one for you. WordPress has a plugin called Google Sitemaps that works great for a blog. You can get it here. (It’s a big ugly link you don’t want to type in; trust me.)

And then, there are tools. You can set your crawl rate (if you want the spiders to use less of your precious bandwidth), they will help you to generate a robots.txt. This is especially important if you have pages in your site that you don’t want spidered. You can stop them from spidering whole directories or single pages.

But I encourage you to check out Google Webmaster Tools. There’s a wealth of information inside, and if you give Google what it wants, guess what? You’ll do better in the search results, too.

And Webmaster Tools is definitely the right price. Can’t do better than free.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Do you check your blog stats? I mean, I have Feed Blitz, Feed Burner, 103 Bees, and I check them all. I found out something very interesting today.

On January 16, my subscribers jumped by 155 people. One day! Hmm… What did I write about that day? “Subdomains vs. Subdirectories.” An SEO post.

I’m getting a lot of traffic for that video about embedding video in your blog. OK. That’s blogging, but also SEO, though in an off-hand sort of way.Then, I go over to Hit Tail and find tons of long tail keywords, the most popular being “stomper scribd.” How strange. But wow! I’m #2 on Google for that one. But again, SEO.

What the heck does all this mean. To me, it says that people are really interested in SEO. It seems like something they SHOULD know but haven’t really had the time to concentrate on learning. Understood.

But it’s not a big mystery. SEO is a mixture of common sense and a little secret knowledge. Well, heck yes, the gurus want you to think there’s a “magic” formula. There’s not, really. It’s just specialized knowledge. Like every general practitioner doesn’t know a whole lot about gynecology. It’s a specialty. Well, SEO is a specialty of Internet marketing, too.

If you’re interested in SEO, here’s a great idea for you:

When I first started studying SEO a few years ago, I found a program called Web CEO. It was free to download and use, but it didn’t have all the functionality of the paid program. Yet, it did allow me to take part of their SEO course. It was great as a starter, and enough to get some SEO going for my sites. And you can still go over to Web CEO and get a free version! How cool is that?

It’s not just an SEO course, either. You can do some pretty great keyword research using it, and a bit of optimization. Though I don’t trust it entirely to tell me how to optimize pages, I had to buy the pro version, once my business grew. And it has… big time. I have people calling to help them, and I have to put them on a waiting list. Because… SEO is where it’s at.

Stomper Net is the kicker, though. I got stuff from Stomper that made a lot of difference. I’ve been able to do things with optimization that I’m very happy about. The results are pretty awesome. But if you’re looking for a specialty, SEO is where it’s at.

Not everyone understands SEO, though. They think that you pick some keywords (any keywords), you do some on page stuff, and you’re done. It can’t possibly be that difficult. Well, I’ve written about this before in this blog. You’re far from “done” when you’ve done just the basics. SEO is a game, but it’s not a game you win quickly. You have to be in it for the long haul, and if you’re not, then just do the basics, but don’t expect to rank high in the search engines for what are called the “money” words. It ain’t gonna happen.

Plus, like Brad Fallon says, “SEO isn’t a race. It’s a marathon.” I can attest to that.

But it’s fun.

I just love seeing ‘dem stats roll in and get better and better every day.

Get WebCEO and learn some stuff. You might be hooked. But don’t tell the other SEOs I told you. They really don’t like competition.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Hey!

Do you wonder who’s coming to your site?

How about what they click on?

And then, there’s where did they come from?

What keywords did they use to get there?

And on and on. Statistics are the most valuable tool that you can employ in your business to see what’s working and what’s not. Want some very cool sites where you can get these things and more free?

Here some sites I use or will be using imminently:

Google Analytics: This site is the bomb. There’s a ton of free information in Analytics, and if you get the plugin Google Analyticator, it’s simple to get stats for your blog. Just go to Analytics, set up a campaign for your blog, and put the UA-### code into the space provided under Options/Analyticator. This rocks! However, don’t totally depend on it. Sometimes, the stats are questionable. That’s the reason you need stats from so many places to get a totally rounded picture.

103Bees: I’ve written about this site before, and it’s great! For example, I go there today and find out that this blog ranks #2 in Google for embedding video for “Traffic Geyser vs. Tube Mogul.” And how about #8 for” embed video into WordPress” or better yet, number 1 and 2 for “allinoneseo.” Freakin’ cool! Get a 103Bees account!

Hittail: I joined this site a while back, and forgot to put the code on my blog. Duh. So, though it offers some pretty cool stuff, including keyword suggestions, I’ll let you know how I like this one in a week or so.

Crazy Egg: This one is fun. You can see what people clicked on and where they looked when they came to your blog. Shows you exactly where their cursor landed and where they clicked and such. Very cool.

Robot Replay: Whoa. Did you ever want to be a fly on the wall? I mean, check out what your visitors are doing with this site. I just signed up to see what it will do. Interesting.

and a bonus…

MyBlogLog: you can get very cool stats from MBL free, if you want them from like, yesterday. If you want them up to the minute, it’s only $3 a month. Check out the widget on my sidebar. You can show your readers. (Hi, Jack Humphrey!) And you can see what’s clicked on most. Plus now, you can make a widget that’s all about you. Great site! One of my absolute faves! I’m going to sign up one of my clients tonight. I told him he absolutely HAS to have this one. You do, too.

So, that’s a few of the great stats sites. In another post, I’ll give you a few more.

Stats are not just a great way to help move your business forward, but they’re tons of fun!

I know. I’m an SEO. We’re a peculiar bunch.

Popularity: 39% [?]