Make Your Website Better

You’re blogging regularly. You’ve keyword-optimized your blog for Google. You’ve commented on other people’s blogs to begin building reciprocal links.  Are your efforts paying off? A recent post by Dawn Foster in WebWorkerDaily (12/17/2010) explains how to find out whether anyone reads your blog. Here’s what she has to say:

Google Analytics Provides Capabilities You May Not Be Aware Of

Most web site owners and bloggers probably already use Google Analytics, and Dawn recommends looking at the reports for traffic sources, keywords, content, and using “In-Page Analytics,” which shows you your site page and points out where people click on the page. In another blog post, 5 Simple Ways to Get More Out of Google Analytics, Dawn also recommends using Google Alerts to email you updates on any search terms you want to monitor.

You can also set up Analytics custom reports via the “My Customizations” menu and use the report templates for all your Analytics accounts and blogs.

Feed Analytics tools show traffic from feed readers

Feed readers don’t pick up the coding for Google Analytics (GA). That means GA won’t show you traffic from subscribers to your blog feed. Analytics from Feedburner can provide that information.

If you haven’t set up a news feed for your blog, follow the Feedburner link above to find out how.

Learn Which Posts Got the Most Attention on Social Networks

Postrank shows you how many times your content has been posted or commented on in Twitter and other sites, and ranks posts to show the most popular ones. You have to join first, and import feeds into your account.

You can see which posts have gotten the most attention on Twitter, using bit.ly to shorten URLs and checking how many people clicked on the link and retweeted it. BackTweets performs similar analysis for any URL, not just those generated by bit.ly

Find Links to Your Blog, Blog Post or Web Site

Finding links to a URL shows you how many blogs or sites have linked to your blog, blog posts or your web site. You can do that by entering the following in Google’s search box– link: yoururl.com (be sure to leave a space after you type link:).

What do you do to learn whether people are reading your blog? If you have any favorite tips or tools, please share them.

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