Blogger has some new features

Blogger is finally coming out with some new settings, and it's about time.
I've been on Blogger for about 5 years now and it seems that Google never adds any thing new, at least until this year. It does add new templates from time to time, but I've never been interested in changing. Now at the beginning of the year Google allowed Amazon to display ads on Blogger, so that's different.

Now Google has added Stats, so you can tell who visits the blog or what page the visitor views. Up until now I had used the stats from the ads that I run to tell how often that the blog was being visited. I also used Google Analytics to see who then visited www.interfacebus.com and what page they came from. They're both round-about ways to tell how the blog is doing, but I never got around to adding a free counter to the blogger template.

Blogger only just started counting pages last month, so I only have one month of data. The page with the most visits was written in 2008, followed by one from 2010, 2006, and 2005.

I just tried to up-load an image and I see they changed that function too. Instead of 'up-load a file' I get add from Blogger, Picasa, or from an html address ~ so I'm lost and will not be adding a picture from the stats counter??

Comparing Site Vists

I figured I would take another look at how the site is doing compared to last year. As of last week the site is still getting 10% more site visits than the same week last year.

Over all the web site is still getting more than 17% more web visits year-to-date, down 1% from 3 weeks ago. The first week of June had the lowest increase with only 6% more visits to the site. The largest increase in visits occurred on the last week in Jan with a 26% increase.

Over all the site is showing a 15% increase over 2008 visits, and about a 14% increase over 2007.

The graph compares web visits for 2010 and 2009 ~ by week.

Page-views [not shown] are down 4%, year to date over last year.

Why You Should Blog

At first I figured I was going to just insert a reminder post about some of the reasons a web master should also run a blog. But, as I was reviewing posts looking for the last relevant posting I found some disturbing data as it relates to the rest of this blog post. I'll address that data at the end of the post, with a comment plus a few related early blog posts.

The numbers below represent visits to the Engineering Site from this blog over the last thirty days.
The date represent when the blog posts were written with the number of visits from those posts.
The number of visits from blogger represent 84 visits from 15 different pages off blogger [although they are just shown by year of post].
The point of this post is to show that even after years of writing a blog posting, it still gets visits and provides referring hits to interfacebus.com. [Why Blog; Sep 12 2007]

Referral visits from Blogger [blogspot]
by page generation date:

42 referrals from 2010 posts
0 referrals from 2009 posts
3 referrals from 2008 posts
15 referrals from 2007 posts
10 referrals from 2006 posts
14 referrals from 2005 posts

The other blog site which only shows new pages included on the engineering site brings in even more traffic.
But in the last thirty days that blog sent over 82 referring visits from 26 different blog posts.
I did notice a spike in visits yesterday which has me wondering why.

I should note that this blog had 771 page views over the last thirty days, while the 'what's new blog' only received 354 page views.
That's page views in these blogs not sending traffic to the main site which is discussed about in this blog posting.
However you can read these blogs from a newsfeed, but these numbers don't reflect that.

The graphic shows incoming visits to the Engineering Site from these blogs over the last four years. Looks like there's been a steady decline in visits from mid last year. The middle of last year I stared a newsfeed, then near the end of last year I removed some permanent links from this blog that pointed to the web site. Now the newsfeed carries all these same posts, but if some one clicks over to the web site it doesn't appear to come from this blog.

Clickthrough Rate

Over the last month or so I've been updating pages to display the new Google Search bar, primarily because it uses 1kB less html code. So far just over a thousand pages have received the up-grade with the new code. But what about all the other page metrics I have to worry about, maybe it's time to work on a few of those; as in:

Page Bounce Rate

Pages with low Pageviews

Pages with a high Exit Rate
And on and on; there's just so many different ways to measure how a page is doing on the internet.

One metric I don't look at that often is search engine Click-Through Rate, or the amount of times a page shows up in a Google search but is not clicked on. Now the search term used or the query could be any term as long as it causes my engineering website to show up in the results returned in a Google search.

Of the 6,091 queries, Google provides no data at all for the lower 4,500 searches. I assume because the page impressions are to low [a percentage] to track; however I really don't know. There are another 1000 queries that display an impression but no Clickthrough data, maybe because the clickthrough rate is below 1%. Because the first term with a clickthrough shows up with a 1% clickthrough rate; which would be the worst search term with any data. The 'worst' Google search term in the report is "DVI" which I assume relates to the page I have on the DVI interface. That DVI page shows up on the first page as #8 out of 32,500,000 results. The DVI search term causes my page to be displayed in the Google search results 6,600 times with only 58 people clicking on the link [over the last month].

So there are thousands more search terms with different impressions and click-through rates. For example the term 'Derating' had only 58 search impressions but 12 click-throughs. So the question is, should I work on pages that have no or low search impression or web pages with a low clickthrough rate? What-ever; working any page based on this data would be Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

Related Blog posts 

[Custom Search Bar 4/2/10]
[Web Site Speed Performance 4/3/10]
[Web Site Speed Enhancements 4/15/10]
[Web Site Performance 4/22/10]

Graphic: Top Search Queries as Page Link Impressions vs. Clickthrough Rate.

SEO stuff really work

The numbers are in from last month, so I guess I should post them. The numbers seems to be on the increase, more than I figured. Although I can always predict the out-come based on the average numbers ~ maybe 10,000 visits per day, and 5,000 on the week-ends. However I did not expect to see the large jump in page views, which is finally up to the numbers back in 2006. I guess the trick now is to keep the numbers up there~

How to read the data:


Server Bandwidth:
The lowest curve is server bandwidth and does not relate to the other numbers on the chart. The bandwidth is hovering around 148,000 [in the graph] but really equates to 14G Bytes as the numbers were changed to fit the graph. I track bandwidth just to make sure the server does not see a heavy load.

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.

Another way to see the same data, as site visits, or number of visits ~ so a comparison can be made year over year. This chart makes it easy to see that site visits are higher than any other month and any previous year.
2005 was the year I started to follow Search Engine Optimization [SEO] techniques. I guess the SEO stuff really works.

Web Visits vs NATO Member Countries

I wanted to show the relative increase in site visitors this year. So I picked year to date numbers compared to the same time interval last year. I also wanted to show a few random countries, so I used NATO Member Countries.

Currently March numbers are the highest ever of any other month, and there are still two days left. The first day of next month I'll show the standard bar graph of visitor status, or what ever I put up. But I wanted to detail something different before hand, another view of some of the data.


The over-all site is up about 20% over last year; however some of the countries listed below may show a higher or lower increase. None of the countries listed had a decrease in visitors to the web site [Engineering Data].


Now none of the [22] new pages generated this year are getting any web visits [yet]. So the increase in site visitors must be due to new pages added last year, or additions made to existing pages already residing on the web site. Maybe a few posts back I detailed how poorly the new page additions were doing.

NATO member states:
Albania;  27% increase
Belgium; 16% increase
Bulgaria; 35% increase
Canada;  22% increase
Croatia;  57% increase
Czech Rep;  32% increase
Denmark;  11% increase
Estonia;  52% increase
France;  24% increase
Germany;  24% increase
Greece;  25% increase
Hungary;  15% increase
Iceland;  6% increase
Italy;  19% increase
Latvia;  47% increase
Lithuania;  45% increase
Luxembourg;  3% increase
Netherlands;  7% increase
Norway;  27% increase
Poland;  17% increase
Portugal;  31% increase
Romania;  27% increase
Slovakia;  55% increase
Slovenia;  42% increase
Spain;  13% increase
Turkey;  17% increase
United Kingdom;  17% increase
United States;  11% increase

Now to be fair there have been some countries that show a decrease in site visits; for example, the 1 hit from the Vatican City did not return again this year. ~ this may appear to be a long posting, but it's just the list. I guess I forgot NATO started letting the eastern-block countries in for membership.

Just for the record, I just posted a comment to a blog post regarding Alexa data. Alexa indicates 11.1% of my site traffic is from Iran, while Google Analytics [site counter] indicates 0.43%. The data above is from Google Analytics, not some third party site.
Graphic; Flight of a NATO AWACS and three F16 fighters. Open Source. [public domain].
Graphic; Map of NATO countries and EU members. Open Source. [public domain].

PageViews performance

Yep I went out and looked at the performance of the new pages that have been generated so far this year. In most cases the page views are very low, maybe one or two a day or no views at all.

I opened three or four of the different pages and added a bit more text when possible. But a number of these pages were generated based on a graphic. So either the text is already embedded in the picture or the graphic doesn't really require any additional text. So I'm kind of stuck, the pages are un-fixable  there's really nothing wrong with them. Except for the fact that the page bring in zero traffic.

Now I know I need text on a page to bring in traffic from the search engines. It's standard Search Engine Optimization [SEO] stuff, day one. But these pages were generated around a graphic file, little text required. Maybe I should stop generating a new page just because I have a picture file I want to use. Still I'm not even getting hits from people already on the site [engineering], nor am I getting any traffic from people doing an image search.

The question is what to do? Some of these pages were generated 3 months ago and have only seen a dozen hits.
1. Well I added some additional text to a few of the pages.
2. I also commented on a few of the Blog pages that added them. I always comment on my own postings, to indicate updates or changes in the original posting. Of course the comment enhances the blog page, because more text is added. Remember a blog post is also a web page.
3. Then there is this blog posting, with links to the pages that need help.

Now I talked about this same issue last December [New Page Generation and Page Views], only how new pages did over the entire year. Normally I never care about a page until it's at least 3 months old, which some of these are. But these page views are so low there's just no getting around the fact that they most have some kind of issue.

Panel Mount LED. Holds a graphic of a few LEDs. Added 1/7/10, zero page rank
Capacitor Networks. Graphics and a bit of text. Added 1/15/10, zero page rank
Via Stubs in PCBs. Definition of a Via Stub. Added 1/17/10, zero page rank
Jumper Headers. Holds a graphic of some jumpers. Added 12/31/09, zero page rank
These pages have only received between a dozen and 2 dozen page views so far, subtract a few because of me. Oh and page rank doesn't mean any thing, but it wouldn't hurt if they get one soon. Of course there are more pages in the same boat, but why fill the blog post with a bunch of page links.

Increasing Web Visits

Starting last month the number of visits to interfacebus started to exceed 9,000 per day. Ten of the 21 week days saw numbers over 9,000 visits. In fact, not counting this month, all of the highest numbers for any given day occurred last month. Most of the numbers centered around 9,300 or so.

The numbers for this month are already around 9,700 or four to five hundred visits higher than the highest day last month.

Here's a new way to look at the numbers, to compare month to month over the last few years. Over the last few months the number of visits have been increasing. Like any other posting I can't really tell what pages are seeing an increase, only because there's just to many different pages.

Web Statistics

The incoming numbers still look good for the web site this month. They seem to be about the same as they were for last month, so this month should almost be as high as last month, but the holiday will drop the total down several thousand visits.

The graph is for Page Views per year for the last 5 years. However there are two notes; first the first 3 months of 2005 had no data so the fourth month was used to back-fill the data. Second, 2009 does not include numbers for Nov or Dec of this year.

The peaks are hovering around 2,300,000 page views per year. The current data indicates this year will show around 2,500,000 page views. That's based on a current number of 2,061,643 page views, plus 223,689 from last month and 172,882 visits from last Dec.

Other than that, just normal web page house-keeping is getting done over the last few days. Oh I did notice that the AWG Table for Wire Gauge Size and Current Capacity showed two different 2,000 view dips lasting for three weeks each this year. Not really sure what happened to the AWG page, but it appears to be an issues with Google Analytics?

Chart; data from AWSTATS, produced by OpenOffice.

Highest Month for Visitors

So this month saw the highest amount of visitors to the web site. There were 160,384 unique visitors and a total of 219,826 visits. From those hits there were a total of 339,286 pages views [note these numbers don't include today]. Although it might be a bit hard to tell this month is higher than March at 159,517 but again, not counting today. Better yet, October is not normally a 'high' month. Click the pic for a larger image.


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.

I've changed the chart a bit for this month, now the legend and title are placed inside the graph. Placing the legend inside the graph allows the chart to grow in size while leaving the pic size about the same, although I did increase the overall size of the picture a bit.

The bottom trend line for bandwidth has no relationship to the other lines on the chart. The bandwidth line [light blue] does not show visitor data, but the amount of server bandwidth used during the month, while all the other data represent visits or page views. Basically the 100,000 'y' axis represents 10GB of server bandwidth and the 150,000 make would be 15G Bytes. So in this one case, I want these numbers to be low. The more they fall below the 'Unique visits' line [just above] the better it is for the site.

What is the Android Operating System

Android is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. Android was started by Google, but it's open source now. Seems like it's primarily only on mobile phones right now but I bet that will change next year. Looks like there are a number of phones about to come out using or based on Android. Once the people making phones see a reduction of ~ $40 a phone because the OS is free, other mobile devices should start jumping on board. Why not, reduce your products cost by $40 or make another $40 in profit, plus it appears Windows mobile has a low user rating [or so I find on the internet].

Although the graph shows 2009 data, hits from Android started coming in last November, with 11 visits for the month. Visits have ramped up over the last year to 38 visits for last month [87% of which were new visitors], according to Google Analytics.

The server side counter [AWSTATS] does not report any hits from Android. However it might just be lumping Android visits under its "GNU Linux category [there are 7 other Linux based operating systems listed in the report].
Here are the different versions of Android coming in [2009]
Version 1.0 = 7%
Version 1.1 = 26%
Version 1.5 = 58%
Version 1.6 = 8%

Now it wasn't but a few years ago that search engines were telling web masters that they had to reformat their sites to allow them to work on mobile devices. Now, the un-formated sites seem to work just fine on those new devices, so I'm kind of glad I didn't spend three man years building another site just to find out later it wasn't needed.

Side topic; So far this month there are 138,782 unique visitors; higher than Jun, Jul and Aug.
By the end of the day there should be around 146,000 visitors, pushing it above Jan, Feb, Apr, and May.
Wednesday will pull in another 8,000 plus visitors. This month may bring in the highest amount of visitors this year.

Graph is produced from Google Analytics data.

Tell me who visits the site

Engineering companies that visited interfacebus.com this year.
Determined by their Network Location as reported by Google Analytics

The ranking is provided by Google, as are the network names.
The missing ranking's are normal commercial internet providers.
Of course no one company will out perform a large internet provider.
Ranking by # of visitors
23. raytheon company 7,089 visits
34. lockheed martin corporation 5,859 visits
38. northrop grumman corp. 4,778 visits
43. navy network information center (nnic)  4,583 visits
45. 754th electronic systems group 4,470 visits
47. computer sciences corporation 4,183 visits
49. vitro corporation 4,109 visits
50. honeywell international inc. 4,027 visits
51. general electric company 4,010 visits
53. the boeing company 3,930 visits
56. intel corporation 3,850
59. national aeronautics and space administration 3,631 visits
61. l-3 communications corporation 3,568 visits
68. headquarters usaisc 3,366 visits
87. texas instruments 2,412 visits
88. rockwell international corporation 2,395 visits
90. dod network information center 2,296 visits
92. cisco systems inc. 2,260 visits
98. hewlett-packard company 2,200 visits
106. harris corporation 2,064 visits
108. level 3 communications inc. 1,994 visits
122. itt aerospace/communications division 1,800 visits

This data is from 1/1/09 to 10/17/09
Just as an example Raytheon [#23] sent in a consistent average of 180 visits per week.
The ones that got my notice were the military sites which were out performing a number of other companies;
DOD sites: #43, 45, 68, and #90, I had to look up #68 I never heard of them [United States Army Information Systems Command].

Can I do any thing with this data, no but it's interesting to pull up every few years...

Photo credit; US Navy: USS Nimitz.

Yearly High in Unique Visitors

I blogged on Friday about the number of hits or visits coming in because I noticed an increase during a month that normally shows an average amount of visits. The previous day I noted that the incoming visits had amounted to the second largest number of visitors during the year. [Seasonal Fluctuations of Web Visits]

Well yesterday just became the day that received the largest amount of visitors for the entire year. Yesterday ended up with just a tad over 9,000 visitors for the day, or maybe about a hundred over the previous high. Now it's common to see days producing 8,800 visitors, and even more common to see visits in the 8,500 range, but the important point to note here is that the count went over 9,000.

I can't tell why the visitors are increasing; how ever there are a few reasons that come to mind. Perhaps some new page additions just got spidered [found by the search engine], maybe some of the pages added over the last month or so just made it into the Search Engine Pages [SEPs], or maybe some of the page enhancements made over the last month are bringing in new visitors. But really there is just no way to tell why I'm seeing an increase.

Remember it takes time for a search engine to find any changes to your web site. Normally I assume about 15 days before Google finds or reads one of my pages. Another 30 days before a page really starts to show up in the search results [if at all], and another 3 months before that new page receives a Page Rank [if it ever gets a page rank]. However because I post new pages additions out to Blogger [New Engineering Additions], Google really sees the new page address the same day, but I'll bet it does not go out and read it then. Of course Google re-orders their listing every month so maybe I just show up higher in the results now, and has zero to do with any updates....

Graphic; Monthly History AWSTATS: 1/1/09 to 10/13/09

Web Visits and Seasonal Fluctuations

Figured I would produce a different chart then I normally would. Just to show a different view point.

The number of visits coming in this week are some of the highest of the year, but not the highest because a day in March produced the most visitors [so far].

Any way it just doesn't seem like the incoming hits were matching prior trends, so I generated this graph to actually show the high and low trends by month. Yes I know the trend line is flat for the last three years, I'm working on it.

So the best month of the year is in March or sometimes January is a good month. The worst months are at the end of the year in December or mid year around June/July. It just seems odd that if this months hits continue at their present rate that October could be the month with the most visitors this year. Of course I only have a week of data this month, but I looked back over this year and did not find visits per day this high. In fact last month was the highest number of hits in September in the last three years..... There are already a number of older posts that indicate why the visits are flat, so just scroll down the page with the next page link being on the right side.

Data Source; AWSTATS off my server [apposed to Google Analytic data which I also post]. FYI; Google's count would be 3% low because that percentage of visitors do not run Java Script which their counter requires.

SEO Advice; I noticed a few months ago that Google was posting the last revision date of pages as they were displayed in their SEPs. So now regardless of the update I make to a page I rev the text that indicates when the last time the page was updated. In previous up-dates I would only change the date for a major reversion, certainly not for some html change that no one could even see.

ESD Orphan Pages

I was checking a subsection of the site for hits, and I find a page with just one hit or visit this month. I look a little deeper and I couldn't find a page linking to it. I'm sure there is a page linking in, but I couldn't find it. The tracking code is on every page so Analytics will track visitors regardless of any cross links. However; normally zero page visits indicate no possible way of finding the page [really it was one page visit].

The page covered Methods of Static Generation. Which means it just held a table showing the top five ways of generating static electricity and their resulting electrostatic voltage. Looks like that page was just a supplemental page just added to hold the graphic, because it had almost no text at all.

The pages covering ESD terms is a small subsection of the main Engineering Dictionary section, linked off the page covering Engineering Terms, Es. Here are the ESD pages listed by the first term on the page:

Antistatic Property Definition. A to D.
Electric Field Definition. El.
Electrostatic Voltages. El.
Electrostatic Discharge Definition. Es.
Human Body Model Definition. H.
MIL-HDBK-263. Mil Specs.
Static Awareness.
IC ESD Pin Protection.
ESD Wrist Strap. Looks like this has no incoming links.

Photo credit; United States Navy

The issues with ESD on board a metal ship must be reduced a bit......

Web Site Health

I just spent some time looking over just how each of the web sites are doing, and they appear to be doing ok.

Yesterday I posted a graphic showing the increasing hits to the google sites location I run. There's  no doubt that the incoming hits are low, but they are on the increase and we're only talking about a dozen pages.

The analytic data for serialphy also shows a slight increase over the last year. However that site has triple the amount of pages but is only receiving a third amount of the visitors. I just updated a few of its pages with a bit more data.

Google analytics is also reporting an increase in visitors to the knols I've written, again there are only ten and only fifty people visited them yesterday. Five people were referred to interfacebus from knols yesterday.

The important site is interfacebus.com but the amount of visitors this year is flat at around 43,000 visitors a week +/- 5,000. The attached graphic indicates the analytic data for interfacebus, as complied from AWSTATS.

I didn't really check the data for the blog, but it appears to be flat as well. Interest in the blog feed is slowly increasing

Comparing Visits from Different Years

One of the reports from Google Analytics is an overview of visitors from any two dates that are of interest. You can also compare any two sets of date ranges. In this case the graphic to the left compares 1-1-08 to 7-22-08 vs. 1-1-09 to 7-22-09. The graph points [dots] are per week, but you can show data per day or per month. Click the image for a larger view of the data.

Notice that the graph lines appear almost identical. However the data indicates there has been a -0.56% increase visitors from this year to last, or around a decrease of 7000 visitors. That's less than one day worth of visitors, so maybe the site went down a few hours more this year than last.

Not much to worry about until I scroll down the report and review the data on a per page basis. That's when the data starts to look troubling. Here is a sampling of a few of the pages that are in decline, ignoring the few pages that showed an increase in visits.

CANbus -4.24% in visitors.
USB Interface -5.21% in visitors.
interfacebus.com [home page] -15.68% in visitors.
PCIexpress Interface -37.28% in visitors.
RS422 Interface -5.16% in visitors.
SerialATA Interface -7.19% in visitors.

Now these are not buses that are in decline, so there is no reason for these pages to see any decrease. Unlike the RS232 bus that is being left off newer computers; that page also showed a -12.25% decline, but I can deal with that.

So what is the deal with a graph that shows no real decrease, but many pages that seem to be in decline. Well when you check the blog listing new engineering pages, you'll see that over a hundred new pages have been added over the same time frame. So the new pages are leveling out this year even as a number of pages are seeing a reduced number of hits.

Hmm, I happen to be looking for the VME64x pin out today, my page came up first in a Google search but I decided to select the next guys page. Sure enough there's my text, plus a link back to me ~ stay off my site. Guess it's time to start looking at some of these other pages to see what's finding its way onto other websites.

Most of these guys running hardware or engineering sites aren't engineers at all, you can kind of tell by what they copy.

The point here is always spend some time searching the Internet looking for your work. I found a guy a few years back who had copied my PCIe page [and a dozen others], but I had just written the page. It had taken several hours to generate the different pin out tables in HTML, and he grabbed them in a matter of minutes.... Better stop now or I'll start naming names. Oh had two typo's I found weeks later, to bad he missed garbing the up-dates.

Why do Web Stat Counters Differ

So I was looking at the Manufacturers listing section again, just to see how that section was doing. Looks like there are 95 individual pages that make up the manufacturers section. There are 10 pages that make up the listing of companies that start with the letter 'A', as an example.

The graphic shows two examples of counters that might track incoming visitors, both counters represent page views.

The top counter is from Google Adsense and the bottom counts represents page views from Google Analytics. Both counters require JAVA Script to be enabled in the browser.

But why are the counters so different, there both from Google? The Adsense counter seems to be counting at a higher rate than the Analytics counter. Note the scales differ between each counter.
Click the graphic for a larger image.

Pages with the least amount of visitors;
Component Vendors, 'Us'.
IC Vendors, 'Ap'.
Equipment Manufacturers, 'Go'.
IC Manufacturers, 'Gen'.
These are the bottom 4, but it could be these page were only generated last year and may not be as old as some of the other pages.....

SEO Tactics and Visits from Image Searches

One sure way of getting new site visitor is from image searches. Just like receiving incoming visitors from a text based search, images can bring in new visitors. Plus images go along way to adding support to the text it's related to on the page.

The attached graphic shows weekly page visits from people using an image search, via a search engine. The data is from Google Analytics; Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, Filter 'image'.

So over the last three years there have been 43,437 visits to interfacebus.com via an image search. Now 43,000 site visits is not a very big number, and it's less than what the site gets in a single week.
More importantly the data indicates that 86.37% of the incoming hits were from new visitors. So 37,000 new people found my site who may not have otherwise ever found it, that's called free advertising.
Now the Bounce rate was only 67.77%, so 33% of the visitors jumped to more than one page on the site. I can't tell how many people book-marked the address or came back again, but it must be some percentage.

New pictures are being added to the site all the time. All images also always come with an html alt tag and title tag to help the search engine determine what the picture relates to. The picture file name is always descriptive, and most site graphics have a visible caption.

In fact the section on Definition of Resistor Terms was up-dated over the weekend with a few more graphics. At the same time any missing pic captions were added.

How to Increase Site Visits:
Just keep adding graphics to gain more visitors, but not so many that they slow down loading in the page. Keep in mind that there is a time lag between when a pic file is added and when the search engine finds it.

This blog brings in 100 visits a month, 61% new visits at a 61% Bounce Rate.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

Related post from last year; SEO and Hits from Image Referrals
Graphic; Weekly hits from image searches.

Web Site StatCounter

Here is the latest webStats for interfacebus.com. You'll note that there has been a bit of an improvement over the last few months.

Visits are up over the last year, that includes Unique visits and Total Visits. Normally the first of the year shows an increase in site visits, or the increase could be due to work done to the web site during the end of last year.

The increase in Page Visits tells me that the site Bounce Rate is decreasing. Which means that people are checking out more pages per visits ~ which is always a good thing.

However; over the last 3 and a half years these lines are flat ~ after 3 years of work.........