I looked at www.alexa.com this morning, just as I normally do. I like to see what the Indians who comprise half my traffic have been up to overnight.
Those guys do well by me but their Adsense clicks don't raise much money. I do much better when the US wakes up.
Anyway, today Alexa has a shiny new interface.
They have added a couple of very cool features – they are now measuring Bounce Rate and time on site.
After looking at my competition and seeing that I have a lower Bounce Rate than the market leader and my time on site is surprisingly good compared to my peers I thought I'd pop a post up here to tell the world, or at least this small part of it.
Bounce Rate is the percentage of one's site visitors who, after entering a site, hit the back button rather than exploring further into the site. Ad networks prefer sites with a relatively low Bounce Rate as they prefer to have eyeballs exposed to as many ads as possible and because a low bounce rate can be seen as an indication that the site is offering readers that which they seek.
Time on site is a related concept and is exactly what it suggests but refers to the total time on the site, not jsut on a single page. In general the longer a user stays on site the better.
As an overall quality measure I am sure that ad networks and others use a combined measure that accounts for bounce rate and time on site; after all, somebody who hits a page and stays for five minutes before hitting the back button probably got benefit from the visit and probably more than the person who hits five pages in a minute before leaving to go somewhere else, yes?
It is speculated that search engines as well as ad networks are interested in these metrics and this new introduction from Alexa pretty much confirms it, after all, why would they bother sharing these metrics if they had no meaning or value?
Time to start making those pages more 'sticky' and encouraging readers to move from one page to the next.
Filed under Blog Promotion, Ideas and Tips, Reviews by on Apr 1st, 2009. Comment. 
Today I came upon a very useful blog post describing several tools (almost all free) designed to help social marketers and optimizers to gain an insight into what real people are doing, are interested in and are writing about.
These tools will help internet marketers, search engine marketers and social marketers to do research, find niches and to some testing of their ideas almsot all for free. The cool thing is that Marty, the author takes care to explain the utility of the tools and provides links, for those less clear about the concepts, to learn from.
The site is very useful and well worth a read with a cup of coffee or two.
Filed under Blog Promotion, Blogging Tools, Ideas and Tips, Internet Marketing Training, Social Bookmarking by on Apr 2nd, 2009. Comment.
When we were building lots of blogs for other people we discovered that the search engines seemed to particularly relish content on the static pages.
We would add content to static pages that defined the style and theme of the site and once the pages were indexed they'd often be among the best ranked pages on the sites we made.
There is a problem though – our basic promotion strategy was to syndicate the rss feeds from these sites to a network of rss directories and aggregators and, as you probably already know, WordPress does not include pages within the feeds it produces. This meant that the first pages to be indexed were rarely the best quality content for which we wanted the sites to be known.
The normal way round this is to make a short post that links to the page but this can be quite time consuming.
Today I came across a plugin that helps a lot. This plugin, when activated, adds pages to one's rss feeds. Rss Includes Pages is by Marios Alexandrou and works on Wordpress versions from 2.5 onward.
Here is a link to Marios' blog where there are user comments on the plugin.
One important point, if you want to use the plugin to publicise pages on a new site but do not want to continue having pages in your feeds then you simply deactivate the plugin and pages will no longer be shown. No muss, no fuss!
Filed under Blog Promotion, Blog Setups, Blogging Tools, Ideas and Tips, Install WordPress, Reviews by on Apr 17th, 2009. Comment.
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