Web Analytics as defined at Wikipedia is the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.

Data collected almost always includes web traffic reports. It may also include e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information, user performance data such as click heat mapping, or other custom metrics as needed. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign’s audience response.

The simplest way to analyze the traffic patterns is by looking at your web server logs. This can be a fairly tedious task though. There are various tools available that can simplify this task. Most of them require you to embed a small piece of JavaScript code on your pages. Given below are some of the popular analytics tools available currently. This is not a comprehensive list by any means.

Google Analytics
Google purchased a company called Urchin in 2005 and this went on to become Google Analytics. GA is available for free and provides an extensive toolkit to analyze your web traffic. I personally use GA on this blog and many other sites that I run. The power comes from its ease of use and the power to drill down to the details that you are interested in.

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So you’ve started a blog. You’re writing good content…But it does not seem like anyone is reading it besides you!!

How do you get traffic to your site? How do you improve its popularity? There are several ways to do so…

1. Good Layout: You might be writing good content, but you also need to ensure that you’ve got a good site layout which is uncluttered and easy to navigate. This will ensure that your readers find the relevant content quickly. Also, if you do intend on using a free theme, do customize it a bit so that it stands out from the crowd.

2. SEO Friendly: Ensure you have your site optimized for search engines. Getting your posts indexed periodically by search engines like Google and Yahoo! is absolutely essential. Ensure you add a sitemap to your site. If you’re using a self-hosted blog running on WordPress there is a plugin available which automates the entire task. All you need to do is to submit it once to Google and your posts will be indexed faster than usual after that.

3. Feeds: Make your posts available via an RSS/Atom Feed. Most blogs support this already, but ensure you’ve got the RSS subscription badges visible on the site for people to locate it. Many surveys seem to suggest that full text feeds are better in the long run. Use sites like FeedBurner to manage your feeds. They provide a host of additional features over what WordPress provides. One of the things that you can use is FeedBurner MyBrand which serves feeds for your site directly from your site without redirecting to FeedBurner.

4. Social Bookmarking: Have plugins like addThis or Sociable (there are many others!) installed on your site so that its convenient for readers to bookmark your articles. Do not clutter it with too many bookmarking sites though! Also, don’t forget to join sites like Technorati, BumpZee, BlogCatalog, and MyBlogLog. These sites can help you get a lot of traffic and they are good sites for socializing.

5. Socialize: Its essential that you visit other sites in your niche area and comment on articles they post. Ensure its constructive and relevant comments. This is a way for readers from other sites to get to know you. You also get noticed within that niche area and might get opportunities to guest blog.

6. Trade Links: I am not sure if this is so useful now, with Google clamping down heavily. A good example is what happened with John Chow where he got bumped down badly in the rankings at Google. In my personal opinion writing good content is better off in the long run in building traffic than participating in link train posts!

7. Trade Advertisements: If you don’t want to pay for advertising your blog, you could try out adgridwork. You will need to add a small advertisement widget to your site to show advertisements. For every ad impression shown on your site, your own advertisement (for your blog) will be shown on sites participating in their network. All this for free!

8. Trade Reviews: We have sites like ReviewBack where you can write a review for another site in exchange for that site writing a review for you. All this for free. If you can selectively choose good blogs to trade reviews with, it could help in building back links and traffic to your site. Be choosy though and don’t review sites which are not related to your blog’s focus area.

If you can think of any additional areas to focus on, please do drop in a comment.

I have finally given the comments in this blog a spruce up. I’ve integrated MyBlogLog Avatars into the comments.

It definitely looks much better now with images showing up next to the comments! Have a look at a image snippet below for an example.

 

The inspiration on how to get this done came from a post on FuzzyFuture. Infact, I tried out the MyAvatars Wordpress plugin but couldn’t get that to work properly for some reason. I might give it another try later on again. But for now, I’m quite happy with the results that I am getting.

Does anyone know if BlogCatalog and BUMPzee! provide similar mechanisms for retrieving Avatars?

UPDATE 11-Jan-08: MyAvatars is now being used on this website!

Thanks for the overwhelming responses that I have received to the earlier three posts. I’ve received some inputs via the comments for each of the posts and some have been sent directly to me via email. Thank you all for that.

In this post, what I have attempted to do is to put together a simple comparison between the three websites in a tabular-fashion. I have not try to vote for which is the best or worst site. In my opinion, all three sites are awesome and deserve the utmost respect for promoting the blogging community.

So here goes

This is the 3rd part of the 4-part series. To read the earlier posts, click Part 1 or Part 2.

This post focuses on BUMPzee. BUMPzee is an excellent way to promote your blog. Its got a fast set of features which go beyond MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog in some respect; not to take anything away from the other two though!

BUMPzee! Main Page

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This is Part 2 of this series. Click here to read Part 1 (MyBlogLog Review) .

BlogCatalog is one of the more popular blog directories on the Internet. It provides features quite similar to MyBlogLog but adds a few additional punches to it!

The BlogCatalog Main Page

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This is the first part of a 4-part series on MyBlogLog Vs BlogCatalog Vs BUMPzee.

MyBlogLog was launched in 2005 as a blog analytics service. It rose to popularity when it allowed the creation of communities around your blogs. The company was acquired by Yahoo! in January 2007 for close to US$12 million.
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