That is an excellent question that I asked myself and then scribbled down on a piece of paper, which I finally have gone and looked at.

The best tool that I have access to this type of data is Google Analytics (which is now hooked in with my Adsense account). Google Analytics gives lots of interesting info about your site and my only problem is that I don’t reference it enough to figure out whether changes I am making or things I am trying are actually adding readership or not.

The actual data is as follows:

So what do we learn from this and all the work I have been doing with Social Media?

• Google seems to be giving me the most traffic right now, but I am not sure what Organic means? I assume it might mean searches, but you never know.
• The Canadian Capitalist is my second biggest referral site, which is also not surprising, given the readership numbers that site has.
• Stumbleupon is driving a lot of traffic to my site, but I had noticed that before, so no big surprise there, but nice to see as well.
• The big surprise was that Reddit was a big referral site. Everything I post there gets lost very quick, and inundated with negative comments and rarely has a score above 5, yet it supplies a lot of readers as well, so that is something to think about.
• All the other social media sites create not much interest really.

I now need to ask, am I doing this whole social media thing right? Maybe not, but I have had 1 or 2 posts go “viral” (for me) and get a lot of hits, due to them being well exposed, so maybe that is how it all works?

I am open to any ideas, or theories on this from any of my readers.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So I have started looking at the Yakezie challenge a lot closer and there does seem to be some merits in participating in that group, as well as the other group I have of fellow bloggers.

The numbers seem to be doing OK, although my number of RSS readers has stalled and actually seems to be dropping. My Alexa ranking is now well below 200K which was the initial goal, however, my Compete numbers continue to stink and don’t look to be getting any better any time in the near future.

A few interesting tid bits I have learned or seen this week:

• You shouldn’t post your own content to StumbleUpon, or you might end up being banned. I hadn’t known that and was merrily posting everything there, so I have stopped doing that.
• Sub.Diggerplus.com is an interesting idea, but there seems to be a lot of bugs in retrieving articles from Digg, and you end up with empty articles you are allegedly reviewing.
• I have created a Facebook ID Theo B. CajunMan, since they wouldn’t let me go with TheBig Cajunman, oh well, I am running a lot of content through there, and luckily HootSuite has an ability to post in a timed fashion on FaceBook as well.
• The biggest post of the week was That is One Big Mortgage about the fact that Canadian now owe more than a Trillion Dollars in Mortgage debt. Written as an afterthought, but lots of folks picked it up, so it has been stuffed into many different Carnivals as well.
• Found an AutoTwitterLetter creation engine, so it pukes one out for me every day around 8:00 PM, not even sure what criteria it uses, and it doesn’t make me any money, so is it worth it?
• Found an interesting way to promote the site on Twitter, every Sunday I put out a list of links to my articles for the week, and it increases my ReTweet numbers too (yes that’s a little stinky, but all is fair).

Slowing down a little in the Social Media Blitz, but attempting to make more specific work directly with other bloggers attempting to create Buzz in different ways. Might look into my HubPages page too and see if it is worth keeping up or not.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

SEO Bible from Amazon

SEO Bible by Jerri L. Ledford

(ISBN: 978-0-470-17500-2) As usual I have not purchased this book, I have, however, borrowed it from the Ottawa Public Library.

This is an excellent book for those who are beginners in the “Mug’s Game” of Search Engine Optimization.(SEO) It explains what the basic concepts of SEO are, and why they are important if you are trying to make money on the web.

The book starts sensibly talking about how you need a plan for how you are going to use SEO on your site (know what you want to achieve so you know whether you have succeeded or not). A good point made is that if you are going to do this, you should use Google Analytics to collect data (again, you need data to know whether you are succeeding or not).

The book then dives into different SEO techniques like the use of META tags on your site to get Search Engine Robots to find your site and be able to classify it, correctly. If you do a “View Page Source” on this page you’ll see which meta tags I have set up for this site too. The key to SEO is the use of Keywords, and the rest of the book outlines well how to get Search Engines to associate Keywords with your web site, and how to get your rank for that Keyword up the list (appearing on Page 10 on Google isn’t your goal).

Very good learning points about Keyword densities (don’t use them too little OR too much), and what techniques you should be using in a Pay Per Click (PPC) environment as well. Their explanation of PPC is useful for “newbies” as well, I learned 1 or 2 things I didn’t know as well. I skipped the section on Advertising keywords, since I was not very interested in that section (yet), but it seems quite detailed on tactics in that area as well.

Content is king, is my credo and the book outlines the importance of not simply putting out a bunch of retread information or some hack-kneed old information, you need to be interesting and fresh to attract and KEEP readers (don’t just do book reviews, as an example, unless your site is a book review site).

The books sections on Links and Robots is again very illustrative and important to understand if you want to play the SEO game. This site for example has very incoming links and whereas my financial site have hundreds of links in which helps it keep it’s popularity. How to deal with Robots is also quite important and the explanations in the book are very helpful. The author’s warnings about SEO SPAM should be heeded, unless you want to be a Black Hat SEO person (i.e. a bad guy).

Analysis of the data after you have implemented your plan is your final goal and deciding whether you have succeeded (and how you might change your plan to create more success), concludes the books content.

Rating:

I always feel that if I get three new ideas from any content it is of value, and I view this book as a useful resource and a good read. I will not be buying it, as I have already noted from it what I want to use, but I would recommend this book if you are starting out in the SEO game.

Good read!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

That is interesting, because the Adsense reports show lots of nice activity on my web site, yet Google Analytics report ZERO visitors, which seems really strange. I must have knocked something off the apple cart, and analytics has lost me or something. It does say it is receiving data, which is good, but there is no data, so that is bad, I seem to have deleted the Urchin code, so I think I have fixed this, but we shall see.

I’ll see if I can find a blogger version of the WordPress: By Me A Beer plug in, I like that one, it’s kind of funny too.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Yes, the boys and girls and Google are working hard to keep us bloggers looking at more data to try to figure out why we work for Slave Wages, but Google Analytics has a new Beta version out that consolidates data nicely, thank you. I will poke around and see whether this helps me understand why my postings still don’t seem to be be making it onto the Google search engine (look up Lu Lu Lemon, and you find a posting I made, that has been scraped off by another site, but not the original posting?).

I have taken to cross posting a lot of stuff in my own articles, to catch the scrapers and RSS thieves, so that at least I get links back to the original work, I am not too happy about this, and may start a campaign against these kind of intellectual property thieves!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Yes, after submitting to a few carnivals my article and Zen and the Art of Financial Planning I seem to have picked up my traffic again, which is good and my RSS subscription rate is back at about 50. I really need to push forward to get that closer to 100 and get the traffic closer to 1000, than to 500 reads a day. Need more ideas to see if I can increase readership, that is for sure.

I seem to have a thriving, “walk up” business, in that people simply have me bookmark’ed or something because I get over 100 direct hits, with no referal in my Google Analytics stats, so that is kind of cool, that folks go, “Hey let’s go see what he’s babbling about today”.

More money making bits added to all of the blogs, but still not a large amount of cash rolling in, but I am hopeful, after all it is Holy Week.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

My latest google analytics seems to suggest that Google is putting me back on their lists, with google associated visits up to 48 now, up from ZERO last week.

This is a good thing, and I have put a few articles into a few “different” carnivals just to get some new traffic through my site, and have added a Federal Budget Analysis posting to see if I can draw some keyword searches on that as well.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Well, it seems like I am back in the good graces of search engines or something like that, because I got a fairly healthy trade for a Saturday on Canadian Financial Rants. My Google Analytics showed:

	Top 5 Keywords	Visits	%±	G1/Visit	%±
1.	canadian financial stuff	5	-29%	0.00%	0%
2.	count floyd	4	100%	0.00%	0%
3.	smith manoeuvre	3	-25%	0.00%	0%
4.	canadian finace blog	2	100%	0.00%	0%
5.	debtors procrastination	2	100%	0.00%	0%

Well, it’s not a lot of reference, but, it is a start at least! It’s even more interesting that I match more misspelled keywords?

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So at least the folks at Google Analytics were nice enough to answer my e-mail about why my site seems to be on the Google “no look” list. Initially they had problems finding my site, but then once they found it, they said there was no problems with the Analytics side of things (did I mention that if you are serious about your web site, you should have this information from this tool), but that it seems to be a Google Search issue. Well, it’s good to know that the problem is where I think it is, and the Analytics, analyst forwarded the issue on to the Search folks, so now I await their verdict as to why I seem to not exist on the Google Search engine.

I figured this all out, when I saw that another site had been quoted on the “Smith Manoeuvre” and I remembered Canadian Financial Opinions usually came up on that kind of search on Google, but to my surprise, it no longer shows up there, in fact I have created keyword combinations that are impossible to miss, yet Google continues to ignore my site? This is intriguing and I am really curious now to find out what I have done wrong. Stay tuned.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So I have noticed that my hit counts have been rather flat for the past few weeks, and wasn’t really sure what was going on for the Canadian Financial Opinions site. I finally tweaked to when I looked at the analysis from my Google Analytics output (a very useful tool that you should add to whatever site you create), that I was getting NO hits from either Yahoo or Google.

My top 5 reference points are:

Top 5 Sources	Visits	%±	G1/Visit	%±
1.	(direct)	116	-20%	0.00%	0%
2.	canadiancapitalist.com	75	15%	0.00%	0%
3.	canadian-dream-free-at-45.blogspot.com	46	0%	0.00%	0%
4.	blogs.canadianbusiness.com	42	950%	0.00%	0%
5.	getrichslowly.org	28	4%	0.00%	0%

This is wild, normally Yahoo and Google are in there, but not for the past few months. What is going on here? More tomorrow, but let me tell you I am not very happy right now!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.