This post is mainly for people interested in blogging. I just want to let friends know that I know I need to get my shared links setup, but also want to share some observations about blogging statistics.
Links Are Coming
To friends from the old Being Yordie Sands blog, I’m aware I haven’t transferred over all those great links yet. Bringing the links over is a bit more daunting than expected. For one thing, WordPress doesn’t have those handy Google Blog Gadgets to organize blog links. But also those handy Google Blog Gagdets don’t make it easy to transfer the links to a new format. I’ll try to get to these before my move to Seattle.
Stats Indicate Move Working
Ok, my stats are miniscule compared to the bigtime blogs, but they do indicate that my move to WordPress was the right plan.. And to those who told me my rankings would catch up, you were right. Here are some stats:
- Alexa Ranking…………. 1,579,923 (vs ~3,500,000 old low [lower is better])
- Monthly Pageviews…… 1,500 (vs ~3,100 old high [higher is better])
Prior to moving Being Yordie Sands to WordPress
I used this blog for other types of articles & posts.
Today (8/20) 1,142 and estimate is 1,500 for month.
This is the SiteMeter chart that confirms
the WordPress pageview counts, but
also shows hits (yellow) for new readers.
The Power of WordPress
Blog statistics have always interested me, but they became important to me after I joined Empire Avenue. When I started EAv I wanted to “win” the game so to speak. However, focusing on Facebook, Twitter and other social media kept me from doing the thing I wanted to do most, blogging.
About a month ago I just gave up on my old Empire Avenue strategy. I turned my attention to this blog and iRez magazine (both WordPress sites). After a short slump on EAv, my change of strategy now seems to be sending some key “social media” scores & rankings higher, including Klout, Alexa and others. Most interestingly, Empire Avenue seems to be giving me credit for my WordPress activity. As my Facebook and Twitter scores have faded, WordPress seems to be driving my EAv scores up. It’s too soon to say this is going to help me in Empire Avenue, but “Earnings” have turned up and that means Dividends are growing again. So we shall see.
I like WordPress and feel very comfortable here and want my level of “Engagement” to grow. I also believe the power of WordPress is tangible and measureable in “social media networking.”
Being Yordie Sands 
I really like wordpress too, huggsss! =)
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buy low… sell high!
oooh… I like that Alexa “analysis” — how do they get that info? I might have to break down and sign up! 🙂
Anyway, very sexy charts & graphs Yordi san… can you put a kimono on them? then they’d be perfect! 🙂
oh, and… YAY!!! Congrats ‘n stuff!
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Alexa is already keeping track of iRez. I think it’s about 700k, which is good (improving rapidly).
I’m just glad that this move to WordPress is going so well. Hugs
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aww, yay!
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Oh Vaneeesa, I just did a “Yordie Sands” Google search. The number of pages of links almost tripled (almost 60 pages) since I check last month. I attribute this mostly my participation in iRez salon.
btw, there’s a WordPress article today, it’s about “group blogs”. I haven’t read it yet, but will forward it, if it is of interest.
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Just opened the Alexa comments, interesting:
Yordiesands.wordpress.com is ranked #1,579,923 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings, and this site has attained a traffic rank of 58,705 among users in the UK, where we estimate that 77% of its audience is located. Visitors to the site spend about three minutes per visit to the site and two minutes per pageview. Roughly 66% of visits to Yordiesands.wordpress.com consist of only one pageview (i.e., are bounces). The site is relatively popular among users in the city of London (where it is ranked #33,323).
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Domain consolidation will often bring more traffic – so yes, I agree it was a very good move. From an SEO perspective, your two blogs were competing with each other for all sorts of keyphrases. For every search query related to your blog, Google needs to decide what to serve up as the definitive response to keyphrases like “Yordie Sands”, for example. With your two blogs, it had to decide between the two, hence your “search juice” was being cannibalised.
Further, WordPress has some built-in efficiencies, in the way it handles and names posts, categories and tags, that tend to better optimised for search engines like Google (according to Google themselves, who have said that WordPress is the most search-engine friendly platform out there).
I have a few doubts about Alexa’s validity here though, there is something not quite right. Over the past 6 months since “Songs From the Coal Face” started up, I’ve averaged just over 800 page views a month, which looks very similar to what you were getting from May through July.
But here is the weird thing:
http://Canarybeck.wordpress.com is ranked #930,630 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. Roughly 42% of visits to the site consist of only one pageview (i.e., are bounces), and the site has a relatively good traffic rank in the city of London (#11,710). ((What is it with the City of London???) The site has attained a traffic rank of 26,343 among users in the UK, where almost all its audience is located. Visitors to Canarybeck.wordpress.com spend approximately eleven minutes per visit to the site and two minutes per pageview.
Now, given the differences between our Alexa rankings, don’t you think that would result in more pageviews? It doesn’t seem to. Which makes me doubt how valid those rankings in predicting traffic – which in the end, is what we’re after right?
One thing I have noticed though is your site has a good number of sites linking into it (71) compared to mine (65) and even I Rez (66). It’s been a long held belief among professional SEOs that external links are the number one factor when correlated to organic search traffic. Getting a good quantity of authoritative links coming into your site is extremely helpful. So, your first comment about link sharing is right on the money – that has to be a priority – provided they are reciprocal. Also, it’s a great idea to link out and ask to be linked in from the posts in your blog community (something I think I Rez will help with massively). This should happen in every post, and if possible and appropriate, in comments as well.
One thing I’ve found to have a high correlation to page views is post frequency. I’ve noticed a correlation of 0.5 when I compare the number of posts I write in a given month with the number of page views I get in that month. Sounds obvious, but it’s good to see that validation – the more the you post, the more views you get.
Of course, that’s quantity. Quality can be measured to some degree by your page view time (which no doubt correlates heavily with the length of your posts) and site view time (which is a consequence of internal linking, the headlines that appear in your side bar and related posts, all things that encourage users to stay longer, seeing more and more of your posts.
Bounce rates, while higher for blogs than web pages in general (given the way blogs are read – post by post) might indicate how attractive your site is to people who want to poke around. A 50% bounce rate is a pretty good benchmark.
WordPress stats, while helpful, really don’t serve up even a drop in the ocean of data you could get on web analytics. Just wait till we all upgrade our sites to self-hosted blogs and attach Google Analytics to them. Then we’ll really begin to see the story behind the numbers!
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Wow Becky, such great information and insights. Where to begin?
Let me start with the first thing that jumped out at me, “sites linking” is a very relative number. One of the most successful blogs I check on Alexa is Strawberry Singh’s and she has over 600 sites linked. That might help explain why her ranking is ~300,000 in the world.
I’m a total believer in your idea that WordPress has built-in efficiencies. I think it’s interesting that WordPress is the only blog that Empire Avenue even attempts to analyze, it doesn’t even have Google Blogger in Beta. The more I learn about WordPress the more I can see that it is truly more than a blog. It is a true social network; Google looks poorly concieved by comparison.
I noticed that you have a great Alexa ranking, Becky. You write beautifully but with only 800 pageviews a month, your high ranking hard to explain. I mean, I always have equated high rankings with a large number of pageviews. Otoh, your bounce rate is outstanding and does lead me to wonder it that the reason for your success. I’ve noticed that many, many sites I’ve checked have >50% bounce rates. I can’t help thinking this is very important, not to mention time spent on each unique visit.
I’m with you one the London connection. I can’t explain it unless that’s where Alexa’s home is or some odd thing like that.
I think you are way ahead of me with regard to self-hosted sites. You tried to explain this to me once before, but I don’t think I’m advanced enough to appreciate the advantages.. yet. Right now, it’s hard for me to do anything other than write and prepare for my move to Seattle. Maybe when I get settled in there I can explore this. That is, after I move all my Blogger posts to this blog. hehe
Thanks for all the ideas, Becky.
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