June 22nd, 2010
Strange title, right? Well those of us in the web world know what I’m talking about – web traffic.
The word “hits” is often used, and mis-used, when describing website traffic. If you have a stats program integrated with your website like Google Analytics, take a look at your numbers, specifically those under the “Visitors” tab. Though Analytics doesn’t show how many “hits” a website gets, they do show “visits”, which is similar to hits in that it incorporates both human and non-human traffic. Before you get weirded out by what you think has transformed into a blog post on the sci-fi subject, let me explain. Human web traffic is described as traffic funneled to a website through a possible variety of sources (search engines, referring sites, direct URL typing, etc.) denoted by a particular IP address (think of the IP address as the human visitor’s name, in a way). Non-human traffic is defined as bots or spiders (like search engines going through your site looking for content on how to index your site properly). Believe me when I say this happens more often than you think – your site could be visited by dozens of different bots and spiders on a daily basis alone.
In addition, a “hit” or a “visit” is not a good measure of the amount of different people visiting your site. Each time you visit your site (which you most likely do every day), that is counted as a hit or a visit. If you have a few people working for you, each of which work through your website, every separate time they see your site they register as a visit. Now you can see why depending on hits or visits as a method of tracking web traffic is faulty.
Alternatively, I recommend measuring “unique visitors” or “absolute unique visitors”. Over a selected time period, say the past month, each human visitor will only register as one absolute unique visitor no matter how many times they visit the site. If I were to query your site 100 times today and 100 times tomorrow and you ran a stats compilation over traffic during the course of this month, I would only register as one visitor. This drastically helps out businesses whose employees are consistently viewing the company website. It helps give these people better insight into true visitor behavior as well as trends.
For an advanced look into statistics, you can also filter out internal traffic from certain sources so they don’t count as visitors at all – making this extra helpful for compiling a statistic like “average time on site” – something we’ll look at next time.
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June 9th, 2010
Next time you do a Google search for a business or an industry in your area, you’ll likely see a map appear in your search results along with a variety of different businesses in this industry that service your area, pin pointed on the map. As an example, I’ve pasted the map shown after doing a search for “bicycle repair vancouver” :
Now that you’re abundantly familiar with this, as you’ve no doubt witnessed it hundreds of times, you might be interested to know how important it is to have your business listed in these local business listings. First, think about where this map appears in the search results: at the top of the page occupying prime real estate, just below the top-level sponsored ads and above the regular organic search results. Obviously, Google is sending a message about the importance it’s placing on it’s local business listings – for specific industry searches, Google is saying that its local business listings are even more important that its conventional organic listings, upon which it made its name.
If that isn’t enough to persuade you to ensure your business is listed in the local business listings, consider this: after recently doing a mid-term site analysis for a client, I found that local business listing traffic coming to this client’s site vastly exceeded regular organic traffic. Seeing as it is absolutely free to add your local business listing, it would be nonsensical to say no to significant and targeted traffic.
Also keep in mind that many Google users are ‘visual’ searchers, meaning they’re much more likely to observe and take action with a visual search representation, like a map. Google recognized this when they conceived the idea for local business listings, and have had great success after implementing this strategy.
To take advantage of Google’s local business listings and to help gain more traffic to your website for your business, contact us and we’ll make sure your local business listings is optimized and set up properly.
Tags: local business listing, optimize local business listing, seo for local business listing
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May 27th, 2010
Can you remember typing in a URL into a web browser, clicking ‘Enter’ and seeing that bring you to a page’s URL completely different from the one you typed in? Every curious how that happened? The answer is through the use of a web/server based redirect action.
In the web world, there are 2 types of redirects: temporary and permanent. Typically, a temporary (302) redirect is not something most webmasters will need to use. It tells web crawlers that the redirect is only there for a limited time and data from the initial URL should not be passed on to the new URL, leaving the new URL high and dry for search engine rankings. It would be like starting all over again.
On the other hand we have the permanent (301) redirect. This tells web crawlers that the initial page will no longer be used, and all gathered data from that page will be applied to the new URL which is being redirected to. This way, the new URL won’t have to start from scratch to gather search rankings. Keep in mind, however, that if the content on the new URL is significantly different from the previous URL that the new URL will be re-indexed and your search rankings could change.
In any regard, redirects are a great tool to have especially when changing/applying SEO to your file names. For example, if the initial URL was something like www.yourdomain.com/page1.html and you decided to change that to something like www.yourdomain.com/seo-redirects.html, all you’d have to do is place a 301 redirect on /page1.html and every time that page is called, visitors/web spiders will end up on /seo-redirects.html.
There are a few different ways to implement a redirect on your site, and they can vary depending on the language used (HTML, PHP, ASP, etc.). The most effective way to implement a redirect, however, is to modify the .htaccess in your root folder to tell web crawlers about the redirect data.
For instructions on how to do this, check out this page.
Also keep in mind that any incorrect action in modifying your .htaccess file can severely inhibit the functionality of your site, so if you’re not trained in such modifications, definitely hire a professional.
Tags: 301 redirect, 302 redirect, how to use a redirect
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