Giencke.net Analytics Woes or Experimenting with SEO
Having spent some time going through the web stats (courtesy of Google Analytics) for the WordPress-powered giencke.net blog this weekend, I’m pretty bummed. The facts at hand:
- Giencke.net has a bounce rate of ~75%, meaning 3/4 people look at one page, and then go elsewhere.
- 86% of traffic is direct, meaning only 14% of traffic is new users.
- Giencke.net received 14 unique visitors today, 58 unique visitors being the high water mark for the past week (ouch).
- Users do spend an average of about 5 minutes on the site, so if they find the archived content, they look at it.
Armed with that sobering knowledge, I’m bound and determined to do better. The site has 6 years of posts, and although it’s mostly fluff, the content still might be interesting/funny. So, here’s my game plan for doubling visitors, halving bounce rate, and adding new eyeballs in 2010 (disclaimer: I work for a search company, but know nothing about SEO outside of what I’ve read on the web, which follows):
- All links will hereafter become canonical, and descriptive, e.g. http://www.giencke.net/2009/12/giencke-net-analytics-woes/
- Generate a sitemap, http://giencke.net/sitemap.xml, with added weight to homepage and recent posts
- Add visible links back to giencke.net content (e.g. RSS), specifically, using the sidebar to add links to recent posts, and a calendar for archived content
- Use giencke.net as my own personal twitpic (but in reverse). This entails uploading a pic to the blog, and having some code automatically send out a tweet once the post is published (using wpToGo, for example). This strategy can be applied to advertising more general interest posts as well.
- Increase post frequency (from once per month, to at least once per week).
- Decreasing the page load time (which may mean moving towards actual self-hosting).
- Providing links to high quality, highly-ranked content
- Removing the giencke.net wiki, which was serving out porn (WTH) and undoubtedly hurting my page rank.
- Adding additional rich content to posts (maps, photos, videos, etc)
- Posting more broadly interesting content to blog (howtos, etc).
Anything I’m missing?
2 Comments December 21, 2009
