Blogging and Feed Stats

So it's been awhile sense I spoke about the benefits of blogging, so it must be time to address the issue again.

Much of this blog deals with web master stuff, SEO techniques and web analytics. But almost any topic is fair game.

The first reason is to bring in traffic to your web site [Engineering Buses]. This particular blog brings in 2 or 3 visitors a day to the web site. Sixty five percent of that incoming traffic is from new visitors. Now that may not sound like a lot of people, but it's still new traffic from people that may not have otherwise found my web site. So in a sense a blog is like free advertising. The other blog which only relates to new page additions to the web site brings in twice the number of visitors.

The second reason, at least for me, is that I can blog about any topic. So I can cover topics I would not otherwise address. Remember each blog posting is just like a web page, so I can blog and generate a new web page about any topic which wouldn't fit or relate to the web site. There are currently 528 posting in this blog and another 212 posting in the other blog ~ 740 additional web pages.

Of course you don't even have to visit the blog, you can read it as a blog feed. The attached graphic is the blog feed stats from people reading the feed generated by feedburner. You can access the feed by clicking on the rotating Feeds banner to the left.

Free Blog Space & SEO Tactics

I went ahead and took a look at how these blogs are doing, following yesterdays posting about the health of the rest of the web sites. Looks like the visits are down a bit, but that's kind of understandable because I have not been posting that much over the last few months.  The graph combines visits from both blogs, click for a larger image. The large peak at the center of the date range is when I stated the other blog [New Page Additions to interfacebus]

Google Analytics indicate that the blogs send or refer around 250 people a month to interfacebus.com, I would assume most of those referrals are new visitors to the web site. The Bounce Rate or the rate that people only view one page after going to interfacebus.com is around 60%, and they stay for around 3 minutes.
The home page of the blog sends over the most visitors to the website, followed by people visiting the page relating to HDTV, SSTL Logic, and PCB Minimum Annular Ring Definition.

I'm not really sure what the news feeds I just started for the blogs will do to the blog visits. Either more people will see or find the feeds and visit the blogs, or people will just read the blog from the news feed and stop coming to the blog all together.

I still recommend running a blog, see 'why blog' below. In addition to the ten reasons listed in that posting it also gives me a chance to list web page address's here providing those pages with an external link.

Related posting's about blogging;

Start a blog to gain Site Visitors. 6/26/09
Blog Traffic. 5/15/08
Why Blog. 9/12/07
Blog Hits. 7/10/07

Knol is just not working for me

Well maybe Knol is working or maybe it's not. I have about 10 different Knols published of varying lengths, with different generation dates. Some Knols have been out there for months while others were just published, so some have more page views than others for that reason.

The ten Knols out there have been viewed 11,460 times over the last year. Now that number is not so bad for ten random pages on the internet, but there's a bigger issue. Those 11,000 page views have only sent 595 visitors to interfacebus.com, the site that really counts [link is not the main page].

Those incoming visitors have a 67% bounce rate, or 67% of the incoming people only check one page before leaving the site. So for every 19 Knol page views I get one page view at interfacebus.com ~ that doesn't sound that bad, put like that. But only 30% of those new people coming in were interested in the site. err only 178 people had any interest in the main site; now that sounds low.....

I consider the Knols just another web site:
1. Another external site that points to interfacebus
2. Another way to show up in the Search Engine Results [SERP]
----- two unrelated sites may show up on the same page result.
3. The Knols point to a number of my pages, other than the home page
4. The Knols push Page Rank to the pages being pointed to.
5. Another way for new people to find my site.

The dots [points] on the attached graphic are per week for the data range indicated. The data is from Google Analytics, for Referral sources, filtered to show only incoming hits from knol.google.com.

I don't track the amount of time spent working a page, so I can't say if it was worth the effort to work with Knol. However it takes months to get a page going after the Search Engine delays are accounted for.

FYI; the best Knol relates to a general description of Computer Buses, with 3,442 page views and a page rank of 3.

What ever; most of the Knols are to short, so I need to keep spending more time working them. Maybe someday I'll get some visitors from the Knol pages.......

[Text Removed 6-28-2010]

How to decrease Bounce Rate

So how do you reduce Bounce Rate, or the rate at which a person only visits one page of a web site and then jumps away to another site. Seems like I've been looking at this awhile now, with some page updates devoted to reducing Bounce Rate. I even see a blog posting from last May concerning Bounce Rate.

Yet I don't see any improvement. However there has been a slight improvement in a few sections of the web site;
Dictionary of Resistor Terms.
Component Derating.
But no changes in other sections.

Of course it's a bit hard to track individual pages, because there are so many. I could improve one page yet the bounce rate on another page decreases for some random reason.
Bounce Rate is important, but only because I see a steady decrease in page views, but no decrease in site visits. Which means the same amount of people visits the site, but over the last few years click to less pages per visit.

New Pages and the result [Title, Date added, Bounce Rate]
Diode Terms, 11/3/07, Bounce rate GOOD [80% last year to 60%]
Minimum Annular Ring Definition, 11/4/07, Poor, [75% steady]
Dictionary of Capacitor Terms, 11/17/07, Average, [60% steady]
Multi-Colored LEDs, 11/20/07, Average [60% falling]
CEC Interface, 11/29/07, Poor [80% rising]
MicroUSB, 11/28/07, Poor, [80% rising]

More Page Views equals a low Bounce Rate. Web Site; Personal Computer Signal Assignments.

Internet visits for the month of Jan

Web site visits for January came in at about what I expected. I still can't get the site's visits to increase, it may not look like it but these number are really flat.

The site receives around 8,000 visits a day, so on months with a holiday or with only 28 days the site hits could reduce by over 20,000 just because it's a short month.

Server Bandwidth:
The lowest curve is server bandwidth and does not relate to the other numbers on the chart. The bandwidth is hovering around 100,000 [on the chart] but really equates to 10GB as the numbers were changed to fit the graph.

Unique Visits:
Are visits from a computer within a month, but any one computer is only counted one time. If any one computer returns for a second visit it's counted by the Visits curve.

Visits:
A site visit is registered each time a person visits the site within a month and each time the person returns to the site. Site Visits should always be equal to or greater than Unique Visits.

Page Views:
Are the number of pages a person views per month, regardless of how many times the visitor returns to the web site. Page Views should always be equal to or greater than Site Visits. Page views are really the only data point that is falling. Page Views is related to Bounce Rate, which is the percentage a person visits one page and then leaves the site.

Bounce Rate:
The Bounce Rate for interfacebus is 71% for January. Or 71% of the people that visited the site viewed only one page during the month. Some individual pages have Bounce Rates of 20% while some may have rates as high as 98%. One page I just looked at [30-Pin SIMM] had a 77% Bounce Rate. When I looked at the data the Bounce Rate would cycle from 100% to 50% or 0%. So I went ahead and added links to simular memory modules; 72-Pin SIMM. Not really sure why I cared those 30 pin SIMMs have been obsolete for a decade now. But I know why the links were missing, key-word contamination, confussing the search engine as to what page the 72-pin SIMM was really on.

Referring Sites

Like the posting from March 14 about Backlinks, here is another view. Referring sites bring a lot of traffic to interfacebus. The graphic is Referring sites by month, averaging over 10,000 visits per month [13,174 visits last month]. So every month the site gets an automatic 10,000 visits generating 20,000 page views per month.

Guess the previous post was more geared to incoming back-links from my own sites, while this shows all websites.

The bounce rate, or chance a person only visits one page is 68.04%. The average bounce rate seems ok, as the links are coming in to a specific page. The percentage of new visitors is 79.69%, meaning all those links keep bringing in new people, or people that have never used the site before. When New vs. Returning visitors is charted I find 24,000 returning visitors @ 4/1/06, and up to 49,000 @ 4/30/08. But because the site is always growing New visitors are also increasing from 100,000 to about 160,000 over the same time period.