If you don’t already know, I love analyzing statistics and that’s why Google Analytics is my best friend. Whether or not you like stats, it should also be your best friend  because it helps you make smart decisions. If you don’t know where your traffic is coming from and you don’t know what that traffic is doing on your website, you’re never going to be able to grow. Why? Because you don’t have a single clue if the 500$/month ad you placed on some website is paying off! What if the FREE traffic you’re getting from Facebook or twitter for example converts more? That’s where Google Analytics comes into play, whether you like stats or not.

Direct Traffic

I love direct traffic because it makes me feel good! Direct traffic is someone who actually remembered your domain name and took the time to type it manually in the address bar to visit your site. If you reach my website on a consistent basis by typing the name manually in your browser, I love you.  Direct traffic is about 30% of my blog traffic which I think is huge! Let’s have a look if you guys are good traffic

If it’s green, it’s good. For people not familiar with Google Analytics, everything that’s green or red is the particular statistic compared to the site’s average. There’s no surprise here as direct traffic actually represents people willing to spend time on the site. The only bad statistics is the number of new visitors but I don’t see this as bad: you guys are coming back, that’s good!

Referring Traffic

Referring traffic doesn’t seem to be that good. Referring traffic is basically traffic coming from social networks or other blogs and a lot of that is because of comments I write on so many blogs. So, let’s have a look at how you guys can’t provide me with good traffic! Just kidding.

OK, so that sucks. I mean, the only good news is that it’s bringing me new visitors but I already knew that! When I look at the stats, these are pretty good stats to me but it’s below the website’s average! It doesn’t mean you guys should stop sending me love…!

Google Traffic

Now let’s have a look if the Google traffic loves me!

I am so impressed! The Google traffic ain’t that good on some other website I run so it really is a surprise to see how good in this niche the search traffic seems to be. Every visitor spent almost ten minutes of their precious time on my blog, visiting an average of 4 pages!

Build your personal brand

You see that referring traffic is good but not as good as direct traffic and Google traffic. What does that mean? Well, it means that we all have to continue building our brand. I don’t care if people subscribe to my feed, I much prefer to see them type my name directly in the address bar or in Google: it means people actually care! That direct traffic converts in word of mouth, because these visitors know who you are and can remember your website’s name.

As for the Google traffic I don’t know. It looks to be the killer, but it might go down in the future when the site gets a lot more traffic. I prefer to think people like what they read and decide to stick around.

Now it’s not because referring traffic isn’t the best traffic source that we have to stop commenting on blogs! You know why? Yes, that personal brand thing and the loop starts all over again. In the end, traffic is simple: it all comes down to establishing your brand out there.

I took the weird habit of analyzing every single website I go to. I do it because it’s so easy with the SEO-Quake Firefox toolbar (also available for IE…?). This toolbar contains a lot of useful information that get automatically updated when you visit a website and you can do a quick analysis of a website’s popularity within only a couple of seconds.

What’s in SEOQuake?

What’s better than an example? I took a screen shot of the toolbar while visiting ShoeMoney and broke it down in different parts (Shoe is my website of choice when it comes to examples I know…).

For statistics lover like me, we get this part of the toolbar:

From left to right we have

• PR: PageRank
• I: Number of indexed pages in Google
• L: Number of links pointing to that that SINGLE page
• LD: Link Domain, which is the total number of backlinks for the domain
• I: Number of pages indexed in MSN
• Rank: Alexa Rank

In a fraction of seconds, you can see if the website you visit is a serious website. I particularly like the Alexa Rank and the number of backlinks. These are usually good indicators of a website popularity. I know I wrote about the Alexa ranking and how it is inaccurate sometimes, but it’s still a good metric.

Then, we have some other interesting options:

From left to right we have:

• Age: domain age (which ShoeMoney blocks so that’s why we don’t see it.)
• I: The Delicious Index or the number of times the page was bookmarked on delicious.
• whois: The domain’s whois information.

The domain age is provided by The web archive and the button will bring you to the domain’s history.

Finally, some very useful options for your own website:

Source will of course bring you the source code of the page and it is very useful to access the page’s source code faster. Then we have Internal links and External links: Internal links is the number of links on the current page linking to the same domain and External links is the number of links on the current page linking to an external domain. This can be quite useful when you want to control your precious link juice! Finally, a feature I really enjoy to do keyword optimization is the density feature. This feature will give you a lot of information about the keywords on the page:

This way, you can optimize your keywords by checking how many time each of them appears on the page. The keyword density tool can go to 4 keywords phrases, which is really cool because we don’t necessarily always target individual keywords.

Get SEO-Quake

So that’s it, I use this toolbar all the time and check it for every site I visit. It’s a little addictive to be honest and I feel like I’m missing something when I’m on a computer that doen’t have the toolbar. It’s free so there really is no reasons not to try it Get it here.

I want to follow up on my last week (Maybe more) post “Google loves fast hosts“. In that post I talked about how switching to a HostGator reseller account helped me increase the number of pages crawled everyday by Google, but also cut by more than half the average load time of a page. Some people asked for a follow up on that to make sure Google wasn’t just very nice with me. Even if Google is rarely nice just for the fun of being nice, I’ll provide a little more to you guys.

I’m covering something I don’t think has been covered a lot before. Most people don’t care about database performance because most people don’t use 1% of their host capabilities. The website I’m talking about in this article was extremely resources hungry and was reaching the limits of the host. I think that’s why I didn’t find a single database performance review of HostGator when I wanted to switch host, but here it is. (more…)

It’s going to be a quick one guys as it’s getting late here and I didn’t have time to post today. At least I’m honest with you guys, I won’t try to fill space!

I will point you back to a little something I posted a while ago about how to increase your technorati authority. It’s a neat trick that really works well at the beginning of the month because it relies on the top commentator plugin. Anyway, it’s all in the post, so have a look and take this opportunity to increase your authority!

I personnaly really need to work on this because my authority got all screwed up when I switched the domain name from seohorror.com to frogstr.com!

Happy commenting! (oh, I’m sorry I don’t have the top commentator plugin on here…Will try to work this out!)

I tested a new concept recently and it turns out to be working very well. My goal was to get a lot of content indexed in Google, with not that many backlinks and check what would happen. Usually, with blogs, we focus on quality content and not quantity and that’s always what I’ve been doing, so I had to change my mindset a little bit. We’ll go trough generating a lot of content for a website and how this can drive traffic.

There’s of course a balance

You can’t just generate a million pages and wait for the traffic, it’s like anything else, you have to find a balance between quality and quantity. I’m sure you’ve figured by now that when I say I generated a lot of content, I didn’t generate that content manually. Not generating the content manually means getting the content automatically from rss feeds or similar sources. That being said, it’s easy to just get yourself a million of articles through RSS feeds and get them indexed in Google, but the truth is that like anything else, you have to be smart. Remember that you still need backlinks to get a good ranking in Google, and those backlinks are extremely hard to get with a crappy website. It’s where playing smart comes into play, because you have to find a way to generate thousands of pages, without your website looking too much automated.

How to generate content from feeds

The most popular method to generate content is to get your content from RSS feeds. I won’t go exactly into details as everybody use a different platform for their website. You can generate content automatically for a wordpress blog, a drupal CMS or a pligg site for example. You can do a little search for your platform and I’m sure you will find some interesting plugin. If you are into WordPress, you might want to have a look at an interesting WP plugin called wp-o-matic. It let’s you generate content automatically from RSS feeds for your WordPress blog and it’s pretty good for a free plugin.

Isn’t it bad?

I know, I know, you like quality. I do also like quality. I just think part of making money online is trying a lot of things and getting some money from everywhere you can. I’m not building my future on automated websites, it’s just a nice addition to my collection of websites and it’s bringing in some money. You can make your site totally useless by generating content automatically, so that’s why I’m saying you have to be smart when doing it. If you are going to automate a website, make it look good and still useful to people. That’s what I did and after 2 months, it’s driving around 500 uniques daily and it’s going up every week. I think it’s great for a 2 months old website and it is 100% passive income.

Don’t be evil

Remember, don’t be evil! I know you guys will look around for an automated website possibility. I don’t usually talk about these things because I don’t like it, but I found out that if done correctly, it can be useful for you and your users. Don’t think about starting a finance blog and just generating posts without doing nothing, you have to think a little further than that to have a platform that can drive good traffic. The lesson is that automated websites work if you’re not too evil!

I want to make a brief post about how Alexa ranking is inaccurate and might not be that good at getting a decent traffic estimate. I’m pretty sure everyone here is familiar with Alexa, but if you are new to SEO/Internet Marketing, you might wonder what I’m talking about so here’s a short description from Alexa’s website:

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

So you see, Alexa analyze the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and that’s their main source for traffic analysis.

Why isn’t accurate?

I run a couple of websites and I obviously like to compare how they are doing against each other. They aren’t in the same niche, but i still like to have a look at the ranking in Alexa vs the traffic I get. The past few weeks confirmed what I thought: Alexa is not accurate. For example, let’s take one of my older website which actually receive 50x more visitors than SEO Horror. Yes, you read correctly, 50 times more visitors daily than SEO Horror, so it’s interesting to have look at the rankings!

here’s how seohorror.com looks in Alexa:

Wow that’s not bad for a website about a month old. We have to look at the 1 week average because the 3 months average isn’t really any good for me now as seohorror.com has only been live for a month or so. I’ve had a couple of days in the top 100 and now it looks like I’m mostly between 100,000 and 150,000 on a constant basis. I’m OK with that.

Now, let’s see how my other website with 50 times more traffic than SEO Horror compare:

What’s that? I’m ranked 556,812 this week! I mean, 50 times more traffic and I’m poorly ranked. You see how inaccurate it is!

Why does it look so inaccurate?

The reason it looks so inaccurate between my two websites is because they aren’t in the same niche. The visitors at SEO Horror are SEO/Web marketers and there are good chances you guys use the Alexa toolbar. If 50% of my readers use the Alexa Toolbar, it will certainly boost my rankings because a normal percentage could be something like 0.5% of the readers. Now, on my other blog, which is definitely not aimed at techies, nobody uses the Alexa toolbar and nobody has a single clue what this toolbar is all about. So even if I receive 50 times more traffic, because nobody use the toolbar, I get a poor ranking.

Is it any good then?

It’s good to compare with websites within your niche. For example, if I compare my blog with another SEO blog, then it makes a little more sense when I look at the numbers. If I take a look at a cooking recipe website, then it doesn’t make any sense to compare. Alexa is mainly used as a traffic estimate and to put a price on how much you’ll sell advertisement on your website. If your Alexa ranking is good, you can usually sell advertisement a little more, especially if you’re in the top 100. So, the bottom line is that it’s so much easier to get a good ranking in Alexa with a tech/SEO/internet marketing blog!

So, you can continue to use Alexa to check your website progression, but it’s definitely not everything as you just saw. 50 times more traffic does not mean 50 times better ranking….In fact it can be the complete opposite as you just saw!

I feel good right now. For seo horror, which I launched this month, I had a simple goal for the first few months: “Not give a damn about Google”. I know you’ll say it’s pretty dumb for a blog called SEO Horror, not to care about SEO, but In fact I think it’s a pretty good SEO strategy.

Let’s be honest here, I still care a little bit about Google, but only for long term benefits. When launching this blog, I did the traditional SEO tricks: link directories submissions, join social networks, on-page optimization, etc, etc. This means that not caring about Google does not mean not doing SEO. When I say I don’t care about Google, it simply means I don’t give a damn about my rankings so far.

The social strategy

My strategy with this blog is being a lot more active socially than I used to be with other websites and so far it pays off. This initial strategy was to get traffic from alternative sources and with that, the Google traffic will come. You know, it’s extremely hard to make your way into the Internet Marketing business because there are just so many websites out there and so many SEO being done. It’s hard to get good ranking for popular keywords and for that reason, I didn’t want to spend all my free time just to get decent rankings. The way I see it is: if my blog is good enough and that I’m an active blogger, traffic will come from alternative sources like other blogs and social networks. I must admit I’m getting decent traffic from these sources and I’m extremely satisfied.

The John Chow example

I used not to like John Chow and now I must admit his marketing strategy is one of the best out there. John Chow got penalized some time ago by Google for a too aggressive SEO campaign and for that reason, he’s not even ranked for his own search terms “John Chow”. If you type “John Chow” on Google you won’t get johnchow.com in the results for that reason. Then, how do you explain this guy is one of the best known blogger and has some really good traffic? The answer is quite simple: he has Internet Marketing strategies outside of Google. Yes he does use controversy a lot and viral stuff as well but he’s damn good at that.

We can’t all be John Chow

I can’t use a marketing strategy similar to John Chow’s strategy for the simple reason I’m not John Chow. I’m not good at generating controversy like he his and it’s not part of my personality anyway. I know what I’m good at and I use it in my own social strategy. What are your social skills? I know for my part I make friends easily, get a long with mostly everyone, I’m a good marketer and I’m also good at selling stuff in an honest manner. That being said, I know I can’t fake personality traits so I use what I’m good at. Write your social skills on paper and think about how you can use those skills in a social strategy to generate traffic.

Feels good

Not caring about Google feels good because you concentrate on what’s really important: building a network around you. Nobody can act alone in the web Business, you need a network around you. Google won’t give you that network, so you have to build it on your own. Then, the Google rankings will surely come anyway. I used to care too much about Google rankings and forget about what’s really important. Yes, this was giving me good ranking and traffic, but it was not as fun and didn’t have much friends in my niche.

You’re the master of your strategy

In the end, you do what you want. It would be stupid to ignore Google so YOU HAVE to do some SEO, but I don’t think it’s worth investing 100% of your time in that. You don’t want to be 100% dependent on search engines: alternative sources of traffic are equally important and you’ll get that traffic with a good social strategy. It’s your call as to what percentage of your time you invest in link building, seo, etc VS the time you invest in making friends and establishing your brand. The bottom line is that you have to do both correctly, but don’t ignore the power of a good social strategy.

As bloggers, our main concern is to write good content so we can drive some traffic to our blog, but also build backlinks. One thing you’ve probably noticed is how hard it is to get backlinks from articles. Unless you have a good users base or write an extremely unique and valuable article, people won’t talk about your posts. We all know it’s impossible to write everyday the best post ever and nobody starts a blog with an instant 20,000 readers. So, what can you do?

Think outside articles

If you can’t initially drive thousands of visitors with your posts, you have to think about an alternative way of doing it. Even if you have thousands of visitors, it’s always interesting to increase your traffic and alternatives to articles are still of interest for you.

I know you’re asking “what alternatives can we use?”. Well, there’s nothing specific I can say here but there are a couple of concepts you can learn from. Being a developper, I always think of tools/plugins I could develop to help the community. This can be a WP plugin, a Google gadget or whatever web-based tool. How can you drive traffic with that? Well, if you host the tool on the same domain as your website, people will visit your website and subscribe to it if they like what you do. Many bloggers are doing it and it’s usually working great.

How is that different from an article? Well, it’s really unique and it’s something people can’t copy so they have to link to you. Let’s say you develop a great WordPress plugin, other bloggers will surely talk about it, use it and link to your website to actually download the plugin because it’s not available elsewhere.

One example I can give is a Google gadget I developed for one of my website. The website isn’t a blog, but the concept remains the same: not rely on Google ranking to get traffic. I’m a big fan of the well known Rubik’s Cube, so a couple of months ago I built an online Rubik’s cube timer with statistics so that people could record their best times. I had to find a way to be really different and not only rely on Google search to get some traffic, so I built a Google gadget people could put on their Google home page. I had to do this because at first, I wasn’t ranked very well for the keyword “Rubik’s Cube Timer” (Now I’m #2). While very useful, the gadget is a simple version of the timer and it’s lacking a lot of features so people still have to visit the website. The gadget is on Google directory, has a user base of 380+ users, help me drive additional traffic and is a free advertisement for my website on Google!

The gadget looks like that:

And see how it’s giving me free exposure on Google:

People searching for a timer or something similar for their Google home page ended up using my little timer. Whenever they needed additional features, they ended up on the main website. This was a great way at first to drive some important visitors and get people to talk about the website.

I’m not a developer

Ok, this was just an example to show you how can something you usually wouldn’t think about could drive traffic to your website. I’m a developer so that kind of tools is quite easy to do for me, but not everybody is a developer. There are a lot of other ways to drive traffic and backlinks to your website. Contests are particularly popular among bloggers. Having a contest on your blog will help you drive additional traffic and there are good chances other bloggers will talk about your contest if it’s any good. I’ve seen some contests like 25$ by Paypal for the top commentator of the month and stuff like that. Why not have t-shirts with your website logo and give that away once a week/month? Things like that work and you really just have to be creative.

I’m working on a couple of things outside articles only for SEO Horror and these should be live in the next couple of months. It’s OK if it takes time to develop or to get online because you’re not in short term blogging…Are you?

Be creative

I’ve said it a couple of times in this article: be creative. There aren’t any exact techniques but it’s just important to think about what else outside your articles you can use to drive traffic. One of the most successful blogger John Chow isn’t even ranked in Google for “John Chow” because of aggressive SEO techniques. How does he drives traffic then? Well, he has found numerous ways over the years to do so and he still has one of the most successful blog on the Internet with 27,000+ subscribers, whithout Google. You want to drive traffic from Google, but it’s just to show that Google isn’t everything, you can use alternative ways.

A lot of webmasters look at their bounce rate, realize how crappy it is but aren’t really sure what to do with it and how to analyse it. First of all, let’s define the bounce rate with Wikipedia’s help:

It essentially represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

So let’s define bounce rate as the percentage of users who leave your site from the first page they visited. Not giving a damn about your bounce rate is a really good way to loose money and potential readers. Let’s say all your readers only visit one page (100% bounce rate) and you manage to get all these visitors to visit 2 pages instead, you double your page views but also double your advertisers exposure. What does this mean? More money. First, what’s a bad bounce rate? It all depends of the niche. For certain niche, a bad bounce rate might be 70% and on another niche it might be 40%. I’d say when you start going over 60%, there are some improvements you can make.

So how to fight that evil bounce rate?

To fight your bounce rate, you have to know your traffic. There are certain types of traffic that will kill your bounce rate (StumbleUpon) and you can’t do anything about it, it’s the type of traffic. For this article, let’s presume your traffic is mostly organic. What I usually do to improve my bounce rate is to put my girlfriend or a friend in front of the most popular page of my website and ask them why would you stay on my website and why would you leave? This is a terribly good technique because you can’t yourself evaluate objectively your website.

Get their comments and work on it!

Usually, the main comment is that there’s nothing catching their attention. Remember that someone leaving from the first page is someone who actually didn’t even read half of the first page. So, before concentrating on the second page, concentrate on the first page! Getting your readers’ attention is the first step and this will ensure they actually read the first page.

Right, but how do I get their attention?

Visitors are usually very attracted by colors and images. How painful is it to get on a colorless webpage filled with text? That leads me to one of the first solution: Your website design. Remember that for every single visitor coming to your website for the first time, your website is like any other. If on top of that your website’s template is a common template found on over a thousands blog, your website is really unattractive. No matter how good your content is, it still is a regular blog for any visitor. So why not work on your template a little bit? Change some colors, make yourself a little logo, etc. It doesn’t have to be terribly good, just a little bit different. If you are no web programmer/designer and you can afford a 50$-75$ template, do it! This will make your site a lot more distinctive and professional. My last experiment with getting a professional template improved my bounce rate of about 10%. Just because it looks more professional and unique!

Another solution I’ve used is to redirect your readers to some other related articles. Make yourself a section “Related Articles” or “You might also like” and place some related articles in there. If you use a CMS like WordPress there are some good plugins to help you achieve that.

People also like to read what’s popular. Why not have a section in your sidebar or where ever on your site called “Top articles”, “Top pages”, “Most commented”, “Most popular” or anything like that?

Make sure these sections are visible to your visitors and it should really improve your bounce rate.

One other thing I like to use are ads referring to my own site. On certain important pages, I like to put my own little banner which is referencing another page on my website. If the banner is attractive, it works like magic.

So there you go, with these little tips you should be able to improve your bounce rate.