My blog is one month old - Tips to improve site traffic

I would like to express my thanks to everyone who visits my blog. You are the reason why I am keep doing this ... ...

Google Report - Blog Traffic Overview
Learning Point:

1. I will write more posts during the weekend as the blog traffic goes down during each weekend;
2. Long posts are better than short ones (Blog traffic goes up a lot after I write a long post);
3. Use images, and upload them to flickr;

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Google Report - Usage Summary
Learning Points:

1. Share my knowledge & experience (Posts of those type getting more page views than others);
2. Use proper labels which indicating what the blog is about;
3. List your best posts as they will attract your new visitors;
4. Encourage and help people to subscribe the feed;
   

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Google Report - Traffic Source
Learning Points:

1. Use proper referral sites, including: digg.com, linkedin.com, wired.com, blogcatalog.com;
2. List which sites/blogs you like;
3. Try to reduce the bounce rate by putting proper labels against each post

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Google Report - Search Results
I am not using Google AdWords or any paid category services. What I 've been doing is:

1. Leave comments on others' blogs, forums;
2. Only submit your blog to relative blog/site categories;
3. Allow comments on my blog and reply emails asap;
4. Write some posts about google (Google like that, and they promote those posts, which means they generate more links from their engines);
5. Make the blog looks pretty and armed with useful technologies (google analytics, digg, snapshot, google adsense, etc); [Drop me an email (alexzang@gmail.com) if you need help to implement them]
   

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Technorati Report - Blog Response

1. Check technorati account regularly;
2. Understand why other blogs response to mine and express your thanks;

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Thanks once again for all your help!

Technology review for this 29 days old blog (section one)

Feed - The feed does look good by using Feedburner, and it reaches the widest possible audience. I am using the rotating highlights (screenshot 1) and the counter (screenshot 2) at the moment.

(screenshot 1)

(screenshot 2)

SnapShot - Without clicking a link, SnapShot can help you to get a general impression of what the page behind looks like. (screenshot 3)

(screenshot 3)

Footer - I made a transparent footer, just trying to improve the usability. If you like it, please read my previous post CSS-Driven Footer.

Google Analytics - It is just too good a web monitoring tool to miss. It tells you absolutely everything about site traffic (a sample report as shown in screenshot 4). If you not using it, better give it a try. (Click here to start)

(screenshot 4)

Motigo - Another useful web statistics tool, and it provides some interesting reports, like a page-view-per-hour report shown in screenshot 5:

(screenshot 5)

I will write the second part later :-)

Google Webmaster Tools Updated

The google webmaster tools updated this morning, and it looks like this now:

Not only the looking feel changed, but also some new functions they are providing, including Top Search queries, etc. Take a look see if anything interesting there ....... :-)

Snap Shots is Cool

I signed up for SnapShots today, and really like it. Here is a screenshot:


What it does?

Without clicking a link, you can get a general impression of what the page behind looks like. Very cool, innit? Check this out ...

Latest Features:

1. Logo changes
2. Picking a new color theme
3. Change the Snap Shots icon and/or trigger
4. And more...as Snap will continually build new features

List of Firefox Add-ons I am Using

Generic:
[A] del.icio.us
[B] Google web accelerator
[C] Firefox Operator 0.7
[D] Firefox Page Load Timer
[G] Skype

For Programming's Sake /* I am a PHP programmer :-) */
[E] HTML Tidy
[F] Firebug 1.05

Learn from yahoo.com

Every developer dreams to have a website whose pagerank is 10 or daily reach percentage is 20+, but are you sure your sites wouldn't breakdown when facing with millions of clicks on a daily basis? Let's open the box of yahoo.com and have a look whats inside, shall we? :-)


Total Requests: 37
Page Size: 208K
Loading time: 1.68s

If we are not so sure how brilliant yahoo.com is, I am not being cruel, but lets have a look at sugarcrm.com:

Total Requests: 85
Page Size: 419K
Loading time: 8.68s

A Brief Conclusion:
[1] If an image/javascript is not really necessary, REMOVE it.
[2] If an image/javascript is considerably big, REPLACE it.
[3] Every little help :-)

Tips to make your site faster

• Compress the JavaScript files: http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/shrinksafe/

• Compress the CSS files: http://iceyboard.no-ip.org/projects/css_compressor

• Use Firebug (Firefox Add-on): http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843