A couple of Observation about Tracking Traffic
How many different traffic tracking systems does one blog need? It seems like everyone wants to track my traffic and report on it.
- Feedburner
- MyBlogLog
- Google Analytics
- Hittail
- Woopra
These are a few that come to mind without even thinking about it.
I take a look in my footer.php and find I’ve got java scripts for tracking systems up the wazzo (sp) and with every system that is added it seems the load time for my blogs gets slower and slower and slower.
I have a simple HTML static website that loads like a rifle shot. (only hittail on that site) Every page, click BANG, click BANG, the page is loaded. But the blogs. I look down in the lower left hand corner of the browser and it can take 30 seconds or longer as I read a laundry list of URL’s passing before my eyes and most of those are tracking.
Starting today, I’m going to eliminate some of these and see if I can improve the load time on the lab and the business blogs.
Goodbye Woopra
Last in First Out. Woopra is cool, I’ll give it that. Both times I’ve bothered to open it there was a wealth of information there to look at and digest. It is a data junkies dream come true. But DO I REALLY NEED ALL THIS DATA? I don’t think so. Maybe in the beginning it was good to know how things were progressing and to look at from different points of view.
Woopra is slow enough I see it all the time in the bottom of the blogs doing it’s thing before the site can load. It is now gone. A couple of times a year I might miss it.
I wish there was a way to turn off tracking with Feedburner and MyBlogLog as well. I never look at those stats. As far as that goes I never look at Google Analytics either. I’ve never been able to figure it out or how to set it up. I’m not much on charts or graphs. I do have it running on three of the blogs, but have only logged in twice this year and still couldn’t make sense of any of it. It could easily be the next to go as well.
Hittail is the one I use daily, almost minute by minute some days. Do I need it? Yes, it is quick and fast and gives me the snapshot of moment by moment traffic to the various sites.
I like mybloglog visitor widget to see who has been dropping by for a quick read, but honestly I don’t NEED it on site. I never look at the stats and finally while researching for this article found I had 61 contacts waiting for approval. I didn’t even know I had to approve them. Since Yahoo bought them out I think I’ve been to my account a total of Once counting today.
Diabetic Example:
Diabetics are supposed to test their blood several times a day to see how they are doing and serve as a reason not to eat chocoalte or anything which contains sugar. A good rule of thumb, my rule of thumb, as been “If it tastes like it was pre processed by a horse it is safe to eat.” Is it important to meter, yes it is. But what if I had five different meters so I could see how I was doing on each and maybe find one that produced lower reading, or I just decided to take the lowest reading as “The Good One”. I would be sticking and drawing blood 20 times a day to get essentially the same results. It would cost me for test strips, batteries, time and Oh yeah, blood.
One metric is enough to get the job done. There isn’t any reason for us to make our blogs load slower just so we can have one more metric of our traffic.
Time to Check the Footer
Take a look in your footer.php or where ever you put your tracking codes and ask yourself if you need all these tracking metric or are you just bleeding bandwidth from your site and making your readers wait.
BTW, they also slow down posting and editing and anything else you do on your blog as an author. When you hit the save or save and continue button, just look in the lower left corner of your browser and see if you don’t see some of those flashing by.
Real Estate Blog Lab loses PR5 to PR4
Many Well Known Blogs Loose PR in this Update
It was April 28, 2008 when I last reported a PR update. That was when we gained our first PR5 ranking. It felt wonderful having that first PR5 and is hard to give up today. But Google giveth and Google Taketh away. I won’t say the rest of the quote. We appear to be in good company I see Bloodhound blog went from PR6 back to PR5 and they are as prolific as any blog at adding new content.
Another blog I follow closely and read everyday is Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider His site went from PR6 to PR5. I’ve not seen any site gain PR this update but many that gained a point in April have lost it in July.
I noticed in June there were a lot of changes going on with Google (more than usual) in search results and rankings in the organics.
For a few months the lab had been ranking for the term “real estate blog”
- it was in the middle of page 2
- then the top of page 2
- then the bottom of page 1
- then GONE.
No where to found for that term or real estate blogs. Now at the end of July it is back to the bottom of page 1.
But it meant a lot of lost traffic for the lab and several of our business blogs that experienced the same thing during June and most of July.
The result: One blog lost PR4 to PR3 on the home page. Two others stayed the same as it was PR4 and PR3.
A Point In Every Direction . . .
What this means is there appears to be a major change in the way PR is assigned and it hit sites across the board. So if everyone goes down, you stay the same, just not with the same PR you had before but in relation to others you held your own.
The Good News Internal Pages and Posts
As in previous updates I see more posts gaining PR on internal pages than were in the past. Most are PR2 but some are holding their PR3 rank. This means the main loss of PR was to home pages and not to internal pages/posts. It seems Google is doing a redistribution of PR to internal pages over the home page ranking high and internal pages having little or now PR at all.
The Long Tails of PR
This should mean Google is giving even more weight to the Long Tails effect of a site and content on that site than it has in the past. More juice, for content inside the blog/website and not all directed at the home page is a good thing for those that are continuing to add quality content.
It’s not about PR or the Large Toad in the Room
I don’t blog for Google (most of the time). Google is a part of our marketing strategy. It isn’t the reason we blog. Does a loss of PR hurt? Emotionally, sure it does. As a Geek, I loved it when I hit PR5. I loved opening the the lab to a half green bar and mouse over just to see the PR5.
Did it change anything? not really. Same with the business blogs. Consumers and potential clients keep finding our content and expressing a desire to work with us for both listing their home or buying one.
For some it is the photos. Honest, we get a lot of listings based on our listing photos and flyers in the box. We have had some clients say, “We drove around and gathered flyers from all the homes for sale, you had the best flyers and pictures so we called you.”
I’m saying this so you don’t get discouraged about blogging. Yeah, it hurts to lose PR on the home page, but I’d gladly give a point on the home page to gain 50 PR2 pages in the index. We blog on, keep adding content, every post is like another line in the water in the ocean of the Internet.
Have a great weekend. And if you didn’t loose PR in this update, GOOD FOR YOU : )
Bread and Salad Can Kill a Google Bot
Or you could say:
Where’s The MEAT
I look at page source code all the time. I want to know how many lines of code a search engine bot has to navigate before it gets to the meat.
How often do you check your page source for you site? Never? That’s not a good thing.
You should check your page source every time you make a change to your blog structure.
- Add a new plugin check your page source
- Change Themes check your page source
- Add a new widget check your page source
All of these things can add a lot of lines of code to your site keeping the search engine bots at bay and preventing them from reaching the meal you have prepared for them to find, digest and index.
The Story of an added Salad to the Dinner
Sometime ago I added the wp-table plugin to test and see if I could quickly design and post a table inside WordPress. I have always used Dreamweaver for table design and then use the HTML editor in WP (Since the Visual Editor Screws up Tables) to put them inside of posts.
I tried it once, it was limited, But I didn’t deactivate the plugin I just didn’t use it anymore.
At the moment I’m checking sites to see how many lines of code a bot has to navigate before it gets to the meat (content to index). I found that wp-table plugin added 26 lines of CSS code to each blog post. My content didn’t start until line 100 on the page. Once I deactivated the wp-table plugin the content started on line 74. That is 25% closer to the top. Twenty five percent of a meal removed from the table the bots don’t have to gobble through to get to the meat.
If I had liked using this plugin I would have found a way to add the CSS styles to my styles sheet and remove it from the plugin code. Your style sheet is where your CSS belongs and not on the page itself. That way it is a one line call to that file for formatting.
I just checked a site (Outside Blogs) which put all the styling on the page itself and not in a file (poor coding). There are 850 lines of code before the bots get to the content. Holy Cow that’s a lot of bread and salad to have to eat before you get to the meat. It is like having a store and everything you have for sale is in the sub basement 850 stories below ground. Do you think your customers want to go down 850 stories just to see what you have for sale?
Feed the Bots quick, Keep them Happy : )
I’ve slowed down the release of the posts in the series on Wordpress Theme Checklist. I wanted to take some time and read a new book out on Wordpress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver
There are a couple of major changes in CSS styles that will need to be incorporated into your blog if you are going to use the new caption class and the image class for your blog posts. This is due to the change from align=”right” etc. to img class =”alignright”.
Yes, I upgraded to 2.6. I HATE WHAT THEY HAVE DONE TO THE VISUAL EDITOR
First, Flock browser won’t even let me log back into the admin panel after the 2.6 upgrade.
Worse AND I MEAN HORRIBLE WORSE is the removing of the “Insert Image” icon from the Visual Editor.
WHAT IDIOT CAME UP WITH REMOVING THIS FROM THE EDITOR?
I FTP my images up to the site. When I want to enter them I click the icon and insert the location of my images. But not any more, some moron thinks I want to use the add media and wait to upload everything in the stupid directory structure they use ONE IMAGE AT A TIME. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
I upload batches of images for use, not one at at time. Will someone please put this back in the visual editor.
If you handle images the same way I do, you DEFINAETLY DO NOT WANT TO UPGRADE TO 2.6 at this time.
Yes I can switch to the HTML view and insert the image, but why not in the visual editor?
Please, would someone start engaging a brain when they make these update. There is a thousand different ways to navigate around a blog, couldn’t it be both ways?
I would have put an image in this post but . . .
Where the Magic Happens
Learning how to work with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is like learning to drive a stick shift. If you can edit and modify CSS style sheets you can drive anything. If I find a theme that has “good bones” I can usually modify it to appear in the browser the way I want it to.
- No header image, I can do that
- Header size change, I can do that
- One sidebar instead of two
- Right sidebar instead of left
- You name it.
This is where the magic happens in theme design. If you don’t know anything about CSS you will be destined to point and shoot themes.
I’ve never had a computer class. I’ve learned by looking at code and reading books. I can tell CSS style.php files that are well laid out and the ones that aren’t. No matter how much I like a theme, if the CSS file is a mess to interpret, I move on. Recently, I did just that, I tweaked for two days, learned a few things, and in the end moved on.
It is in analyzing the CSS you learn about how the Theme handles everything. The browser’s “View Source” (IE) or “View Page Source” (FF) is the Rosetta Stone to the CSS. Study this on one tab with the CSS open on another and you will break the code. Write down the class divs and what the container structure hierarchy looks like.
Most CSS style.php files are broken down into the basic elements for the theme.
- General Formating of Tags
- Code to handle Images (this is often left out)
- Styling of the various parts of the blog (Header, Footer, Containers, Content, comments, sidebars, etc.)
Here is where the fun begins and a little frustration as well. I’ll tell you right up front I’m not a CSS guru by any step of the imagination. Much of what I do is:
- try it,
- save it,
- switch tabs,
- F5,
- switch tabs,
- undo it.
- try something else.
To keep it simple I only work on one part at a time. I’ll make changes to the fonts. Then move on to the Header. Once it looks good I back up the file. Now changes and additions to the Footer, etc. Using this simple procedure and the try it, save it, list above I can move through the process of modifying the CSS to make the blog look the way I want.
I’ve suggested before but will say it again here, when you get a change you really like, back up the style.php and FTP that copy down to your computer. It will save you a lot of frustration if later on you make changes to the CSS that corrupt this file. If you do, you have a backup ready.
All along the way, I back up this file to my computer. I might make as many as 10 backups as I proceed using the method described.
Tags in CSS
I’ve debated about including this here since it is handled in the CSS, but it is important and can greatly help or hinder your blog or web site in the search engines. This is another one of those things where viewing the source in the browers is very important. Note how H1, H2, H3, etc tags are handled. More on this in a separate post to follow.
Learning CSS is Worth the Effort
CSS is one of the most fun and most frustrating parts of theme modification. Pick up a good book or hit some basic websites for an introduction to CSS. It might seem daunting at first, the same way driving a stick shift takes time and a few jerky starts. When it clicks, it clicks and you won’t look back. Great blogs and websites are built with CSS. You don’t just want it to look good in the browser you want it to look good to the search engine bots.
Well structured CSS will be an express lane for search engines. Poorly coded sites using tables or poorly structured CSS is like creating Construction Zones with detours for detours.
A while back I wrote A Fable Do Follow and Comments when I installed the Do Follow Plug-in. I’ve noticed more and more comments which have nothing to do with the post. They found the blog lab on a do follow blog list and all they want is a link.
I’m declaring this to be “Clean-up Un-used Plug-ins Month”
I know I didn’t need the hyphens. I’m trying to be a little creative as a Dial-up Geek.
I’m always installing new plug-ins here at the lab to test and see if they will add functionality or enhance the presentation of the blog.
However, sometimes I don’t have a real use for them, or I replace that functionality with a different plug-in. But I don’t deactivate the old or unused plug-in.
Why this is important to you
Plug-ins can add code to your posts
Three things can happen:
- You slow down the load time of your blog because it is going out and getting something that plug-in needs and it isn’t even active.
- You are moving the content of your blog down further on the page for the search engine bots.
- You (in some cases) are providing one way links out to those plug-in author sites and all you did was activate the plug-in.
These are Great Plug-ins Podpress and Next Gen Gallery
I activated each of these plug-ins to do some experimenting which I never got around to doing. While looking at my page source today (because I changed do follow plug-ing) I noticed a lot of lines of code going out to these two plug-ins. I knew I hadn’t used either one. I deactivated them and as expected the code went away and my page was smaller with 6 less lines of code and javascript calls.
Cleaning it up in July
Open any post and view source. If you see a lot of calls to plugin files you aren’t using on your blog then I would suggest you deactive them. Some plugins don’t put code or calls on your blog. But you might want to deactivate any plugins you aren’t using even if they don’t add additional code and load time.
With everything else we have to do it is hard to set aside some time to do a little house cleaning. Now is the time to Unplug those Plug-ins you aren’t using.
ReBlogWorld 2010
My Hosting Choice:
Custom WP Site Design
Follow On Twitter
Recent News
-
Featured News
-
Email & RSS Feed
Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.Yeah Right !
