I’ve been busy the last 10 days – no sorries. This pause helped me realize a lot of previous blogging mistakes and delusions. The base of the most of those delusions and mistakes was the misunderstanding of my blog’s traffic.

You see.. one thing is to treat your web traffic as clicks.. or a number of reads or pageviews, but treating it as people is completely another. And this is where begins web traffic demographics and the next level of your online success.

Now let’s get to the details.

4 Most Common Reasons of Delusions and Mistakes

Find yourself here. You still can fix your blogging mistakes. Just avoid the following delusions.

1. Comments: Lately I have faced one interesting fact. After I publish a new post.. I wait for comments. I look for people’ opinions. I want to be praised for my work.

   Isn’t that funny and stupid at the same time?

   In most cases we get comments from other bloggers, who simply visit your blog to get another backlink. They have to praise you (or to thank you), because otherwise you won’t accept that comment.

   Sometimes blog owners even mention, that they won’t accept negative or offensive comments.

   You see.. this whole system of commenting on blogs is built wrongly. So, why do we think, that these are our readers’ sincere opinions?

   Even when we get some beautiful, nice and big comment.. don’t rush to treat it seriously.

   Why?

   Because it might be some bloated comment in attempt to get more attention. Just check that author’s other comments and decide whether you’re right or wrong.

   Be careful. Sometimes people improve their comments with good motives.

2. Negative Feedback: I used to treat negative comments or e-mails too seriously. It distracts.. I know that.

   But one little thing I have learned so far is that you will keep getting negative feedback as long as you become more popular. People now even do not regret their time to judge you or to humiliate you. And this is a good sign.

   Again.. in most cases those people simply are losers. But.. sometimes it’s not that easy.

   Sometimes you get negative feedback, because you, actually, deserve it. But, you know, it’s about your experience, when it comes to treating the feedback seriously or not.

   Anyways, your blog development shouldn’t depend on single feedbacks… even if you’re about to lose your mind.

3. Reading Irrelevant Blogs: Of course we are not automatic machines nor robots. Sometimes we let ourselves read blogs we like even if those particular blogs do not relate to our blog’s niche.

   And there comes one problem.

   As we all are humans, we have to share our thoughts – we just need to, because they stick in our heads. And what do we do? We begin to write a post on our blog on that topic sharing our thoughts and opinions. But this is not what your readers are looking for! At least not most of them.

   If you blog about «blogging mistakes», then follow the plan. You have it done, right? If you haven’t, then your chances to get new subscribers decrease.

   The solution of this case is to try to belong to the targeted social media sphere of your blog’s niche.

4. Temptation to Be Like…: This is in our blood. We, bloggers, all were tought by A-list bloggers.. like.. whatever :)

   Today most of them are our idols and good examples.

   The biggest problem here is that we intuitively copy some part of their design or writing style or topic or else, which decreases the amount of signs of your own unique style… and that makes you look like an average blogger.

   How to avoid being like others?

   There is no certain solution, because this is about fixing your intuition and sticking to the plan of your business. This is why you need a plan or the list of the rules, which should help you not to lose your own unique way of your online journey.

How to Treat Web Traffic?

The answer is very simple.

Just treat your traffic as people, visitors, readers, commenters, students, pupils, children, pals, freinds. Treat it like that despite the traffic demographics.

Be aware of thinking that your web traffic is simply traffic or customers. They all have their families, friends and pets. They fall in love, they eat and sleep and they are just like you.

This simple method just looks so easy. But following it demands a lot of inner qualities, which can help you remember – it’s about Internet, that separates you and your site visitors.

Find out even more about Web Traffic Demographics. This article is written in 2008, but it is still actual.

Analysis of Web Traffic Demographics: 2 Web Tools

There are only 2 basic web tools to help you analyze your site traffic demographics.

• Quantcast.com – This tool gives you a lot of details about your traffic demographics, but it also needs a lot of time to analyze your site: 5-6 days to display basic info about your traffic and at least 1000 US visitors. Plus – Business and Geographic data will populate after 30 days of being quantified.

  But the data is great, so you better wait until it’s ready.

• Alexa.com – I, personally, like this one because of the simplicity. The more traffic you get, the more accurate data will be available.

Who Are My Visitors?

In the very beginning I thought, that my potential visitors are young webmasters and bloggers. I mostly imagined them as young men (male, 20-25 years old). But I was so wrong…

Here’s what Alexa says about my traffic demographics:

This means, that my readers are mostly 35+ years old.

Can you now imagine my shock? I’m only 22 years old and I’m, actually, teaching those, who are twice older, than me. This information has crucially changed my blogging way and standpoints.

This is why I have been thinking of my blog improvements for so long! This is why I have done the following changes…

5 Blog Improvements After Reading the Information About My Traffic Demographics

Blog Structure

1. I have replaced «10 Facts about iWoodpecker» with «Featured Post», because most of the bloggers are mostly used to «About» pages, rather than creativity like that :)

   Besides, «Featured Post» on the home page can give some general sense of the blog’s niche for newcomers and can help to promote that particular post.

2. I have changed the general look of the home page and the blog itself to make it look like a blog. Because I’m, actually, speaking in my posts with other bloggers. And they are used to sites that look like blogs. Otherwise, I can lose those potential visitors.

Sidebar

1. The phrase «Subscribe» changed to «Free Updates». There is one certain reason – it sounds more friendly.

2. Now I run a poll, which should give me a sense of my audience’s likes and dislikes. It’s not working now as good as I wish, but I believe this is a matter of time and the amount of traffic.

3. I have uninstalled several widgets from my sidebar, which were taking too much room. I have left only those ones, that relate to the content. Well.. it’s not 100% like that, but the general view of the sidebar is now much more better. Cleaner and more useful.

4. I’m still thinking of adding a list of my blog’s categories… But there are still some doubts whether it’s needed or not.

Post Page

1. I have removed a lot of social media buttons from my posts. And I still can’t get enough. I think it’s some kind of a rocket-science… I mean the playing with the number of social media buttons. At least.. the less the best.

2. Completely changed the design of «related posts», «categories» and «tags» parts, that come after the main content on the post pages. There is only one purpose – to make it look cleaner and more attractive.

3. I have moved «trackbacks» to the right side of the comments section. The reason is to encourage bloggers to link to my posts, which gives them in return some decent amount of web traffic and the guarantee, that their trackbacks will be visible enough.

4. I have also added gravatars and improved the comment form to encourage bloggers to leave comments. Not sure if it’s working, but I like the way it looks now :)

5. I have also changed some instructional phrases for commenters. Deleted the phrase: comments are moderated.

   Who, actually, thinks today, that comments on blogs are not moderated? So on and so forth.

Page Load Time

1. Removed SexyBookmarks.

2. Removed a lot of Ads by Google. Though I’m still playing with them. The only thing I have figured out for sure is that I don’t get clicks on image ads at all.

3. Removed a lot of tracking scripts including «MyBlogLog».

4. I have made my main CSS file cleaner. Though I should also think about plugins’ CSS files, which also should be improved.

5. I have also removed ~14 plugins (9 were inactive). I have deleted even my «contact form» plugin, because it was not needed at all, though its CSS and Script files loaded on each page.

Video Desserts

There are several reasons.

I know only one blogger, that also includes video desserts, though this is a great idea to improve visitors’ time one site and bounce rate.

And according to my traffic demographics I choose which videos to add.

***

Video Dessert: «Chat Roulette: Funny Piano Improv #1»

This site was a real discovery for me yesterday. And here’s Ben – the pianist freestyling in real-time with random strangers.

Thanks to Ileane I’m writing this post. In the previous post “Shorten URLs with Su.pr…” she mentioned, that she doesn’t like those URL shorteners, that have frames, because they don’t count the traffic, which affects your Alexa ranking and PR a little bit. I didn’t even think about it before, so I’ve started digging the info about it.

Sebastian showed some advanced material on this topic. Thanks to that, I’ve compiled several the most important reasons why url shorteners are bad… and risky for seo of your website. Sure, feel free to shorten others’ links, but let me show you why it’s highly not recommended for your website’s links.

1. Stop working

URL Shortening Services can stop working. If you’re working with Tinyurl, then you have, probably, met that problem, when Tinyurl was off for awhile. This means, that every single shortened URL to your site is broken (not working ). You’ll get no traffic at all, because it’s not possible to even recognize the native domain of the shortened URL.

2. They absorb traffic?

Framed URL shorteners absorb your traffic stats. One word – thievery. Nothing more. Visitors, actually, visit your website or blog, but they are not counted as your traffic. It’s worsened even more, when those frames include social buttons like “retweet”, “digg” etc, because people promote not your website, but those URL shorteners – technically.

3. Less authority

With framed URL shorteners you lose also visible authority signs like the number of retweets and so on. Just look at my previous post about Su.pr URL Shortener.

You can see, that there are 14 diggs and 1 retweet (by the 25th of Jan., 2010). This is not normal, because usually the number of retweets is more, than the number of diggs.

This is because I’ve used Su.pr shortened URL of that post in tweets promoting it. Though, actually, there was a rather positive number of retweets for my blog:

4. Links don’t belong to you

All shortened links don’t belong to you. They belong to those services, which produce them. And the shortened links raise those services rankings, not yours. All the traffic data belongs to them.

5. Meaningless, unattractive and irrelevant looking

Most of shortened links are meaningless, unattractive and irrelevant looking. For example, compare http://www.iwoodpecker.com/getting-website-traffic-in-2010/ and http://nxy.in/3jlj9 . Which URL makes more sense? Yeah, the second one looks compact, but it’s just a set of letters.

6. Redirects?

301 redirects are not your friend. Every redirect slows down your page loading time. Now it’s crucial for SEO and traffic. Don’t forget about those rushing people, who surfes through the net all the time. They hate everything, which is slower, than “Formula 1″ :)

7. Short term

In the short term of using URL shorteners for your website URLs you have some nice stats and reference. But this is not what should matter, because it has too many risks. You have to be sure, that your links would be working in a year or two.

Today it’s getting popular to make your own shortened links. I think, that this is all blogs’ future. Read Sebastian’s tutorial about the integration of your own URL shortener.

***

Video Dessert: «7 Scary, Fun Halloween iPhone Apps in 30 seconds – AppJudgment»

This is monthly 30 second challenge. Each one has 30 seconds for his/her revision of some certain app..

Recently, I’ve been trying to get to the top of Google with the certain phrase – “getting website traffic“. I, actually, haven’t managed. Let’s analyze this problem.

What things I did one-by-one

1. I’ve analyzed the first 10 results of the search query – getting website traffic. I even made a table with the stats of those competitors.. but I’ve deleted it, so I’m showing you the approximate variant, in order to make you see the main principle of my work. As you can see from the above screenshot, the competitors are pretty tough, but most of them have much smaller articles;
2. I’ve decided to make the big article, because my pagerank is only 1, which means, as I thought, I should compensate it with a huge post;
3. I’ve used the word “getting” 14 times, the word “website” 52 times and the word “traffic” – 46 times. The whole keyword phrase – 6 times, including the “H1″ title. I knew, that my competitors from the top results are using keyword phrases a lot – from 8 to 40-50 times (for each word separately);
4. I’ve tried to speak about the most important factors related to my topic;
5. The keyword phrase was used in the title, in the “H1″ tag title and as the first keyword for the post page;
6. I’ve submitted that post to about 6-7 do follow social bookmarking sites with PR 5+;
7. I’ve left about 5-7 comments on do follow blogs with CommentLuv enabled and PR 3-4;
8. The total number of characters in the title was 31;
9. Finally, I’ve used the keyword phrase as the first words in the title;
10. That’s it, I guess;

How Google was showing the results during the first days

On the next day after publishing, I had a great result of getting to the 5th page of the search query;

The 2nd day gave me the 3rd page;

But.. when I began to comment, my result dropped to the 7th page. That was already the 3rd day after the publishing. A coincidence?

This is the funniest thing, that Google still didn’t count any of a backlink to my post;

Now Google is playing with the post showing it somewhere between the 10th and the 13th result pages. And I think it’s getting worse each day. Will see what happens, when Google would count those backlinks, I’ve made;

Why I haven’t got to the top results with that certain keyword phrase?

I’m not a SEO expert at all. I don’t have 10 years of experience. So, my opinion may be wrong, but I think, that this whole thing is about 2 factors. Backlinks to your website is the number 1 reason. The second reason is still your website’s pagerank. Now look at the above screenshot again and tell me why I’m not right, because I really lose to those competitors only because of these 2 factors :)

PS. By the time you’ll get to this post, my results may change significantly.

***

Video Dessert: «The Sneezing Baby Panda»

Baby Panda sneezes and scares her mommy :)

This is an offtop for my blog, but I would really like to write about this issue.

All we know, that WordPress 2.9 has lots of bugs, so here’s another one. WP Comment Remix is no longer compatible with WordPress 2.9 . Huh.. on the WordPress page of this plugin is said, that it’s compatible up to 2.5.1 . Well.. it worked fine with 2.8.5 for me, now it’s not.

Which problems I’ve noticed:

• Ajaxurl is not defined – this one was the most annoying.
• There were some issues with admin panel. Tabs or those things, that supposed to expand, didn’t expand at all. They were as still, as lake :)
• I couldn’t change titles of the URLs of my posts.
• Besides, page loading decreased significantly.

So, it means, that some incompatible plugin is your headache in the most cases, if you’ve got problems after upgrading WordPress to 2.9 .

By the way, look again at my screenshot. You can see there issues with Google Ads. And, to tell the truth, I have no idea how to solve the problem. I’ve also noticed, that some other blogs have the same.

No related posts.

I’ve spent several days submitting my site to various web directories, bookmarking my web pages, twitting.. The result is really terrible. I’ve been waiting much more stats than these:

This screenshot shows how many visits I had for the last week. Is that normal? I don’t think so..

Anyways, let me show you what I’ve been doing.

First of all, I’ve submitted my website to almost half of this list of web directories. Most of those web directories haven’t accepted my site yet.

Secondly, I’ve submitted my posts to my list of social bookmarking sites. I used about 80% of the list, because the rest sites didn’t fit with their categories.

Lastly, I’ve started twitting! As you can see from the screenshot, it gave me 20 visits. Ok, not bad. But wait, look at my twitter profile! It has 300+ followers! And only 20 visits.. Come on! What’s wrong with social media? Is it overfulled or what?

I have to figure it all out. Who can tell me what to do now?

I’ve recently got the main idea, how Google decides whether to come on your website or not. The most ridiculous is that it’s all said by Google. Somewhy we ignore what Google offer us to learn about indexing. But still.. this is all so true.

I won’t write a book about this. I’ll just show those things, that really matter, when it comes to indexing your web pages by Google.

Why Google stopped indexing my website?

• You’ve deleted lots of URLs from your website;
• You spam. That’s not good;
• You’ve used duplicated pages;
• Your robots.txt file blocks too many pages. Google bot doesn’t like you;
• Your updates are rare. Maybe you should make them a little bit more often?
• You have too small total number of pages. Less than 50-100 pages, right?
• You have an ugly code;
• You don’t have any external link, or there are only some of them;
• You overuse the “noindex” tag;

The above events are the most common ones. How you should fix them? First of all, read the above events once again and do exactly the opposite. That’s really it.

How long you should wait until Google again indexes you?

• Don’t wait, he will;
• Focus on publishing;
• Focus on your external links;

The most important thing, that I’ve got is that all the mistakes, that you make in the beginning do not mean anything, when you have tons of good and quality content/pages.

2 little advices

1. Do not write too quality content in the beginning. But write a lot. When you have several hundreds of pages, Google bot indexes you a lot more often. When he does, you shouldn’t be afraid, that someone would steal your content before it’s indexed.
2. Trust Google, not Blogs.