Tracking Your Online Successes & Failures

Tracking the visits to your web site is essential to long-term success on the web.

Step 1: Make sure your web host has a web statistics package included. Preferably you'll want to know the number of pages visited by hour, day, month, year; how many pages viewed per visit; who is the referring web site or search engine; pages people entered the site at and what pages they exited the site from; keywords or search terms used in the search engines to find you.

Knowing the number of pages visited gives you a goal to shoot for...if 500 people visited in December you'll want to boost your marketing efforts to raise that number for January.

Knowing how many pages were viewed per visit lets you know if your content is interesting and if your navigation menu is allowing people to easily access all the pages on your web site. i.e. if you do not give people access to all the pages on your site via a navigation menu on each and every page they will not "surf" around, they will exit the site after reading one page. I find this on many sites, they offer a great deal of options on the homepage but once you are inside the site there is either no menu or a limited menu.

Knowing the referring web site or search engine is very helpful. It allows you to know which web-alliances are working best for you and re-focus your marketing efforts for next month.

Knowing the pages people enter and exit from is important. If you see a large number of exits from one page, you're going to want to take a look at it and make sure they are not exiting it for a code error. View this page from someone elses computer or a public library computer to see how others see the page. A good example of this happened a my web site, I added a Georgetown section several years ago and neglected to give people a way to get back to the Redding section of the site. Thus, people entered the Georgetown section via a link on the homepage, saw only Georgetown information and likely exited the site saying to themselves "History of Redding?? this site is all about Georgetown!" I was able to pick up on this via web statistics and correct the error.

And lastly, knowing the keywords used to find your web site can help you in several ways- you get an idea of what the search engines are finding appealing about your site and if keywords you thought you should be ranked highly for are not it gives you the que to improve your pages and add better content.

Step 2: In addition to web statistics signing up for a service like Google's Webmasters Toolkit is extremely helpful when it comes to traffic patterns. The Webmaster Tools show you search terms people are using to find you and what your ranking is for those search terms. These two are big when it comes to tracking successes and failures - in that - they help you see where you have succeeded and failed in the real world. I access the Google toolkit often to see where my traffic is coming from and what is generating the traffic. I also check the web sites that are linking to my site to determine my marketing strategies for the coming month...Google provides this information too (for free).

What I may be typing about here may seem foreign to you (now) but that is the whole point of my posting this information...it's not rocket science all you really need is someone to point it out to you. By reviewing your web statistics and web traffic reports you can get an idea of how you are doing on the web. Most importantly you see where you need to improve.

In addition to these reports you should also be monitoring the news that relates to your topic(s). I've stated this before and will state it here again...now-a-days when people read something in print they often go online to see what else is out there on the topic. It's a good opportunity to become a source of information when they do and key reason to learn HTML in order to post content quickly and capture an audience on Saturday that may not have existed on Tuesday.

Content is King

Yes, I know...the several months of silence has been due to the arrival of Liam, our second child. At first it wasn't so bad but then all the wheels fell off at once.

This post is on what site content you should consider (once you start a web site) based on who you are and what you want to accomplish with your history site. This is fairly straight forward...

1. If you have a building filled with history that you want people to visit: the focus of the site should be an index of what you have available to the public. The index will be most effective if you break it out into categories. Be sure to give the web visitors a taste of what you have using photos and short but descriptive paragraphs. Your goal is to drive people to your door so be sure to make your contact information and address visible on each and every page of your site.

Once you have an index of your collections posted online let the World know.

a. Newspaper articles are great traffic boosters, just ask the reporter to forward you the story prior to release...this helps cut down the mistakes and misquotes.

b. Showcase your collections by displaying some at the local library, community center, bank(s), etc... Be sure to have your web address displayed too.

c. Showcase your photos in calendars, either print your own or partner with a bank or real estate office. Be sure to have your web address displayed on every page.

2. If you wish to become strictly an online source of information you will need to digitize your collections of historic documents and photographs. It is not an easy task and will take a considerable amount of effort but in the end it is worth it. The reason why digitizing is important is- Search Engines, digitized content can easily be filtered and ranked by their robots, PDFs or scanned images take the Search Engines longer to filter thru and thus suffer in the rankings. Because you wish to be an online source of information you need to take steps to make the information you have as accessible as possible and that task starts with digitizing (i.e. transcribing print material).

As an online source of information the traffic you generate will come from partnerships you create. Don't believe anyone who tells you they can get you to the top of the rankings, even if they say they use "safe" or "legitimate" tactics. The only way to the top is good, relevant content for the keywords that people are actually using to find sites like yours. To find out what these keywords or terms used by actual people you can use wordtracker.com or keyworddiscovery.com. It will cost you a fee but it is worthwhile. Why rank #1 for "locomotive" when everyone is searching on "trains"?

Once you have your content posted live keep track of it. Use web statistic programs and Google's Webmaster's Toolkit to track which pages are most popular with your visitors and what search terms are being used to find your web site. This will help you to focus on what is important to the general public when you create new content. New content is essential to the success of your web site, do not get complacent once you achieve a high ranking, you need to maintain that ranking and the best way to do that is with new content on the subjects you are promoting.

In the next post I'll discuss more about tracking your online successes and failures.