WordPress Consultant: Judith Kallos, At Your Service... » seo

WordPress Site Stat Tips You Can’t Live Without

Judith — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:33:02 +0000

You know you are getting traffic to your Web site — but that isn’t good enough! You you really need to know the nitty-gritty of your Web sites statistics so that you can plan accordingly when it comes to landing pages, new content or even revising/resurrecting older content. Did you know that you have this data at your finger tips 24/7?

If your hosting server has a cPanel, you’ll find your Web site’s stats located in Logs | AWSTATS. Every host is different so if you cannot locate your stats, just ask your hosts where they are located.

When most folks login to their stats they are overwhelmed with all the data displayed — graphs and menus abound explaining pretty much every bit and byte of activity on your site. Many express surprise at how much is being tracked on the server side with the next comment being “what do I do with all this?”

Below are the main criteria, that if you work towards becoming familiar and comfortable with — you’ll have a very good idea as to what is going on with your site.

Unique Visitors: You hear site owners throw around how many “hits” their site gets. While that large number may sound impressive, when you know what hits really are you can then understand why that is not as important of a metric as Unique Visitors. The simplest way to explain hits is that hits are every call to the server to respond to a request. Look at your home page and count how many different images are displayed — each one is a hit. Then you add to that number your home page file itself and every script that is called in the background to display your home page. See where I’m going? One visitor can be responsible for a bunch of hits! That is why looking for Unique Visitors — individual different visitors to your site — gives you a more accurate view of the number of actual visitors to your site.
Top Entry Pages: This metric will show the page visitors entered your site on. Not everyone is going to land on your homepage the first time to your site. That is why it is so important to SEO each and every page with a unique Title and Description that accurately reflects the topic at hand so that it can stand on its own and get found when searched for. Top Entry Pages can show you the information the is most sought out and that visitors are interested in so you build on that moving forward.
Top Exit Pages: This will tell you where folks are leaving giving you an insight on where you may want to work on your calls to action. Look for patterns to determine if you need to work on your navigation or content flow. The fact is visitors will exit at some point so use this information to fine tune your top exit pages.
Terms: Here you will find the keywords and phrases used to find your site. You may be surprised at what you find! While we work so hard at targeting our primary terms in our SEO efforts, many times we are also optimizing for other terms that naturally are used in those efforts. In addition, this metric gives you a solid view of what potential customers are looking for so you can provide more of the same.
Referrers: In this area of your stats you will find referring search engines and sites. These are the sites that links were clicked on to get to your site. Not only does this metric show you which search engines are sending your the most traffic, you will also see where other sites have linked into your site. I make a habit of checking out these sites and if I like what I see, I take a moment to e-mail the site owner and thank them for their support. I’ve also found scrapper links — sites that have mechanically scrapped my content and put it on their site. In some cases I don’t mind, but if they butcher my content, or change every other word into a keyword link that they commercially gain from, that site owner will hear from me too with a request to remove my copyright protected collateral.
Platforms, OS and Devices: Now more than ever it is important to know what devices are accessing your site. Tablets and mobile devices are probably hitting your site more than you realize. Get informed and upgrade your WordPress site to a responsive theme so you can be ahead of the curve!

The above criteria will help you determine what is working, what isn’t and what to add more of and what to do next. There is a ton of other information contained within your server logs that is pretty self-explanatory. The more you understand your stats the better you are able to notice trends and differences in site activity.

Make a point of visiting your stats at least once every month. This allows you to be more proactive when considering the growth and nurturing of your site.

“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”
Frank Herbert (1920 – 1986)

At your service,

Your WordPress Consultant

WordPress Site Stat Tips You Can’t Live Without is a post from: WordPress Consultant: Judith Kallos, At Your Service...

WordPress Landing Pages Made Easy!

Judith — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:44:32 +0000

If you have a specific product, service or promotion that you want to convert — then you need targeted landing pages. “But how do I make an effective landing page?” That’s a question I get asked quite frequently and why I am going to recommend the following very cool application to help you get the answers you seek.

Premise is a high-powered plug-in for WordPress that is basically a bundle of software and education that lets you quickly and effectively create landing pages with WordPress as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1: Pages: Quickly and easily create 7 critical landing page styles in WordPress, add visual flair with included custom graphics, and control fonts, colors, and styles without code.
2: Copy: Make your words work with copywriting advice delivered directly from your WordPress interface for each type of landing page, plus the Premise Guide to Effective Copy.
3: Optimize: Detailed conversion optimization seminars, easy split-testing from WordPress, and SEO tools ensure that you’re getting the absolute most out of your landing pages.

Premise empowers you to quickly and easily build custom, graphically-enhanced landing pages without cost, code, or hassle.

Quickly create sales, email, video, SEO, tabbed, and pricing pages
Works with any WordPress theme
1,100+ custom graphics
Point-and-click design controls

Premise makes conversion and search engine optimization a snap, so you can get back to focusing on your business.

Easy split-testing from WordPress
Google and Visual Website Optimizer
Built-in SEO controls
Conversion optimization seminars from industry experts

How to Build WordPress Landing Pages that Work

With the Premise Suite of software and support you can easily create sales pages, e-mail opt-in pages, video landing pages, thank you landing pages, content (SEO) landing pages, pricing pages and even tabbed scroller pages.

Between the tutorials and the seminars that are available to you, you can’t help but create landing pages that sell. I’ve been playing around with Premise and am pretty much blown-away with the easy of use, tips and support offered.

If you want to work on targeted content that ensures a call to action which then leads to conversions, you’ll get a return on your $165 one-time investment with your first landing page — and this package includes unlimited pages. (It would cost you more to hire a developer to create just one quality landing page!)

Premise offers a 30 day risk-free trial — so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Why not check it out and tell me what you think!

At your service,

Your WordPress Consultant

WordPress Landing Pages Made Easy! is a post from: WordPress Consultant: Judith Kallos, At Your Service...

WordPress Site Tip: Not All Links are Created Equal

Judith — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:22:13 +0000

The best scenario is to have tons of inbound one-way links to your site. Those type of links show that you have something that another site found of value to link to you without having to agree to exchange links.

Exchanging links is a good thing, but only if it makes sense for both sites and more importantly — site visitors. Certainly competitors won’t want to exchange links. Nor would those who have a gift basket site want to link to an industrial components site. And one could say that those who land at either site are not interested either. Two different markets there.

Many think link exchanges are the end-all-be all to getting high search engine rankings. Not the case. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that site owners are chasing links to the exclusion of all else. Links are just one part of the find-ability puzzle — not the end-all-be-all. Link exchanges for the sake of doing so pretty much cancel each other out and have no effect.

You need to make sure that you are linking to a credible site that is of a quality that earns your recommendation. See, when linking to a site you are basically giving a recommendation to your site visitors about the site you are linking to. And that site should in some way apply to your niche and your market’s interests. Forget about linking to your best friend’s poorly developed site. This is business and you are judged by the company — and the links — that you keep.

Be very leery of linking circles, link farms and pretty much anything that makes it sound like getting a bunch-o-links very quickly is a good thing. It isn’t. When sites participate in such programs including buying links, those links are ignored or in some cases penalized. The search engines are wise to most practices of artificially gaining links specifically to affect search engine rankings and they are getting better at not giving high rankings to sites that use them.

So we’re back to square one, right? Create a valuable content rich site worth linking to and the links will happen. No way around the hard work here! I have an article about the Reality of Linking, why not check it out?

At your service,
Judith
Your WordPress Consultant

WordPress Site Tip: Not All Links are Created Equal is a post from: WordPress Consultant: Judith Kallos, At Your Service...