I have been keeping track of my blogs traffic and doing some research and case studies. I have found that the traffic for all my blogs goes down during Saturdays and Sundays. Have you noticed this for you blog?

What could be the reasons for this fall in traffic?

It could be a simple reason, during weekends the internet usage will be less. People are at home and they want to spend time with their family rather than spending time in front of the computer. They may not check their emails or go through the RSS Feed Readers to read your posts and click on the links.

What should you do for this?

You cannot force anybody to come to your site on weekends, so you can plan your postings and avoid or do less postings on weekends. I would suggest that you don’t publish posts on weekend unless its something related to the day or a breaking event or news. You can also take a break on weekends or do your site maintenance, plan your posts or go through the stats of your blog. You can reply to pending emails and clear your inbox.

Do you see fall in traffic during weekends? If you are not checking the stats of your blog or Adsense revenue, you are not in the right path, you should do that. You can use free tools like the Google Analytics for tracking your blog performance.

I presume that you have a new blog or a blog that you are really working hard and using some campaigns in Increasing your blog traffic, but how do you know that its working well? For this purpose you need a tool to check your website stats and I do use Google Analytics which is 100% free and I feel the best for managing multiple websites and domains

So how do you start off?

Go to Google Analytics and create an account. If you are already a Gmail user, just sign-in using the same login credentials and start configuring.

Click on the Add Profile Link as shown on the image above and enter the website details

You need to enter your website URL and the Time Zone and click on the continue button as you see in the image above

You need to select the code, I prefer to use the New code, Just copy that and paste it on the footer.php of your selected wordpress template file before the tag

Once you complete it, just click on the finish button, you will get the page shown above. Once you add the tracking code to your template and click on the Check Status link, you will get the message shown as on other websites (Please refer to the image above)

Now you are done, just go to the view report link and explore the different reporting system

I will be posting a page on using the reporting system soon

You should first Creating content for your blog, and do the necessary for Traffic for your blog, before you start analysing your traffic.

Today I am starting off the planned study of search results of selected search key phrases on Google

Key phrase : Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine : Google

Result Page

This is the search result page I have got and its on Google.Com

Results Analysis

Result No 1

Page URL – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

Website – http://en.wikipedia.org/

Website Pagerank – 8

Page Pagerank – 7

Backlinks – 835

Backlink URLs

• http://www.cws.net/blog/2008/01/how-to-get-your-site-to-top.html (No PR)
• http://www.maxgen.co.nz/touch/seo (PR 3)
• http://mikrobiolog.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html (PR 3)

Alexa Information

Last Updated – Today 14th March 2008

Related Site : No (Encyclopedia)

Backlinks are from related websites

Result No 2

Page URL – http://www.seochat.com/

Website – http://www.seochat.com/

Website Pagerank – 4

Page Pagerank – 4

Backlinks – 3460

Backlink URLs

• http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/developer/ (PR 6)
• http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Content-Management/Liferay-Brings-Desktop-Capabilities-to-the-Web/ (PR 0)
• http://blogs.eweek.com/desktop_confidential/content/security/the_password_is.html (PR 3)

Alexa Information

Last Updated – Today 14th March 2008

Related Site : Yes, related website. the traffic seems to be falling, the backlinks are from different sites. I am not aware of the previous pagerank, has it fallen because the traffic seems to come down

Result No 2

Page URL – http://www.submitexpress.com/

Website – http://www.submitexpress.com/

Website Pagerank – 6

Page Pagerank – 6

Backlinks – 5420

Backlink URLs

• http://www.stansfireplace.com/ (PR 2)
• http://www.avant-gardening.com/basicbotany.html(PR 4)
• http://www.unixtools.com/submit/ (PR 4)

Alexa Information

Last Updated – Today 14th March 2008

Related Site : Yes, related website. the traffic seems to be falling, the backlinks are from different sites. I am not aware of the previous pagerank, has it fallen because the traffic seems to come down

Traffic seems to be falling for the sites in results no 2 and 3. There could be some reason, but they are ranking well for the key phrase analyzed

I have been working with search engine optimization for a few years now and I was really inspired by the Google algorithm to output the search results. The SERPs of Google are really interesting and most of the webmasters and SEO experts try the best to reach the top ranking in Google as Google is the most used search engine on the World Wide Web. Google can grow a site without limits and give traffic to websites which rank on top on high traffic generating keywords.

How can a website or a web page get into the top rankings in the SERPs?

Google algorithm to display the Search Engine Result Page is not a clear or a written public document, but through different experiments and experience, many SEO experts are successful. It can be a White hat SEO technique or a Black hat one. It’s very important that webs masters go through the Google webmasters guidelines before using techniques to get on top of the SERPs. Websites who try to get on top using tricks are mostly penalised and removed from Google’s search index.

The question above is to be answered clearly yet and I do not have an exact solution for this question. You can find various tips and to get on the top, but keywords with high value are very difficult to break. It’s just not machines which do the ranking, but even humans get involved into this. A small loop hole in the algorithm can manipulate the search results and many try and succeed in this. This success is not permanent as there are, as I said, humans who keep checking the sites ranking top on high valued keywords. It will be very easy to get on top for keywords or key phrases which are not searched commonly, but to get on top of high valued keywords is really a tough job and only deserving websites get on this.

I am not planning to explain the steps to get on the top of the search result pages in my post, but this post is just to start off my keyword analysis series of post. I have been analysing search results on Google for the keywords related to my sites and have found many interesting information which are worth discussing. There are many factors that decided the result ranking on the SERPs like the website pagerank, information on the page, keyword density, backlinks, anchor tags, Google trust, age of the website, category of the website, and many more which I do not know and many nobody knows other than Larry page or Sergy Bin who had developed the Google pagerank algorithm as their project at Stanford University. This original pagerank algorithm has been modified many times to improve the search result ranking, again through the research team in Google. Many spammers have been successful in breaking the algorithm loopholes in the past and Google spam expert like MattCutts are continuously working on such problems.

I will be posting a series of posts which will be taking up a top search keyword or key phrase and analysing the results on Google search results. My plan is to take 100 very high valued keywords / key phrases and 50 less valued keywords.

What will be covered in the analysis?

Pagerank of the webpage

Most of the webmasters believe that pagerank has very high importance in manipulating the search results, so I feel this is to be of high priority. I will be using the Google toolbar to get the pagerank of the web page

Pagerank of the website, if the result page is not the home page or the index page – There are many websites which have their home page with high pagerank and no other pages have any pagerank. Some sites have pages with high pagerank and they have a low pagerank for the main page. I have this on one of blog

Backlinks to the page from related sites

Its believed that backlinks play very important role in Google SERPs, let’s check this out

Tags used in the backlinks – There are many tags used with a link which is also very important, so we need to study on that

Link analysis

We need to find if the links are paid links or real natural links, again this is a very tough job, but I am sure we can do that and I will be needing your help in this regard

Backlinks to the page from irrelevant sites

Is the site successful in breaking Google’s algorithm or if it’s a spam? We find many links with a text like Web Hosting and when we click on the link it goes to a gambling site.

Content and information related to the search keyword / key phrase on the webpage

For example, I am doing the analysis of the Key phrase “Search Engine Optimization” and I do expect some amount of information. We will be analylizing the content to see what is the amount of information provided on the page which Google has ranked on the to?

Category of the website

Does category of the website plays any important role in SERPs. For example, I have a blog which has pages related to cricket, football, SEO tips and we get my page on top of the website which is fully dedicated to the key phrase

Age of the website

Its debated that the age of the website or domain has some importance in the SERPs, but how much is the question?

Traffic

What is the amount of traffic that website or webpage has, again its difficult to get, but I am sure that I will be able to get this information. If you have some information in this, please do post it as a comment

Alexa ranking

We can check if Google Ranking has any relation with Alexa ranking

Source of the content

Content duplication is something Google is against but I see that many websites which copy content from the original website which has a low pagerank or importance gets on top.

Copyright

Is the content copyrighted material or not

Unique Content

If the content is unique or it’s the same information which are available on 1000’s of web pages

Site update frequency

Is the site updated frequently or what reliability of the result is. For example, if you search for the latest pagerank update on Google, you will get results showing the pagerank update 3 months back. These are the points that have come in my mind and its appreciated if you can add up some

If you know any top keywords which can be included for this analysis, please inform me so that I can take up that particular keyword and include in my post. I will be analysing the top 5 search results with the most available information with respect to Search Engine Optimization

I am starting my analysis with the key phrase “Search Engine Optimization” which will be posted this week. Your comments are anticipated