Inside View

Four Takeaways from Matt Cutts in Dublin

I SPENT A FEW HOURS in Dublin's Googleplex to hear Matt Cutts' take on "How Google Works" and took away four thoughts that I will add to the Web Analytics, Social Media and Media Writing modules at Tipperary Institute where I work as a lecturer. Based on the event's Twitter chatter, I may elevate all four main takeaways to Final Exam status. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce arranged the well-attended event and Matt Cutts did the assembled group a big favour by bringing the warmest day of the year to Dublin during his visit. That personal feat also earned Matt a Dublin sunburn, something many Irish yearn to obtain.

An important note on the takeaways listed below the break: some of the commentary is mine, informed by current practise, while others are all Matt Cutts'. You can tell the difference by listening to the pocket audio recording that accompanies this post. If you're subscribed to my blog using Google's handy Listen application, you'll hear the background rumble of the warm weather air conditioning in the meeting venue.

Matt Cutts in Dublin

Chrome Arising

WHILE LISTENING TO John Collins talk about browsers on Morning Ireland, I glanced at my own blog's stats and saw how visits from Chrome browsers keep increasing while visits from Internet Explorer actually held steady at 37% for the last quarter. Visitors using IE6 dropped to 6% from 10% since late in 3Q 2009. The biggest surprise for me was comparing the growth of Chrome (just rose to more than 10% of visitors here) to the decline in visitors using Safari (down to 6% of visitors). I attract as many readers using Nokia browsers as Sony Playstation browsers.

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It's What's Upstream that Counts

THREE SIMPLE PEAKS from Statcounter document something I've suspected: if you want to reach people, you should offer a message in more than one medium because social sharing is driving web traffic. The graph above from the Irish-developed Statcounter site shows peak traffic on InsideView.ie as a function of three separate sources of traffic. The first spike came a day after a Sunday news report that I filed on Qik.com. While Twitter and a feature in the Sunday Times Culture magazine played key roles in driving traffic onto my Qik clip, the source of the referrers sits in my Qik clip. The second spike illustrated above occurred as people clicked from a Facebook paragraph over to the main source. I suspect many arrived because I cited an image in the excerpted paragraph but the cited image did not appear in the Facebook newsfeed. The third spike is the largest. It comes from a burst of traffic spawned by Google Buzz. The Buzz traffic pushed my blog's newsfeed into Google Reader subscriptions of hundreds of people. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent. At least 15 new people (shown in gold at the bottom of the graph) arrived to read about Ireland's smart economy. At least 10 more arrived because they were using Google Alerts for the term "smart economy."

What 1.9m Visitors Have Told Me

FROM 2002 TO 2009, according to Statcounter, the number of unique visitors to my blog ticked over 1.9m (just a little more than other prominent bloggers in Ireland) but as the area chart suggests above, the 2009 traffic represents a downward trend, something I've written about before. For the record, the 2009 brought me 325,340 page loads, 245,591 unique visitors and 230,350 first time visitors. I'm happy knowing I attracted three times more first-time visitors than the Rock of Cashel in the same year. I'm also comfortable with my slide towards niche traffic because I can use my blog as a case study in a Web Analytics module I teach next semester. I can also continue using my blog as a moblog (something I update most of the time from my mobile phone), teaching teens how to hone that skill as well. And on top of those things, my blog keeps teaching me things--something that makes updating it all the more worthwhile. Here are the posts I shared that attracted the most people throughout 2009. They're significant because in each of the cases, I received direct email or voice mail follow-ups. That behaviour confirms something that confirms a regularly updated blog in the virtual world can convert visitors into foot traffic in the real world.

Increase your reach

Bernie Goldbach in Kilkenny | 41 words

DAVE POLLARD OFFERS up a snazzy graph (not the one on this blog post) and suggests five ways to increase online readership, many of them similar to best practise in writing for the web.

He doesn't mention adding easily-discoverable RSS feeds, perhaps because hits from RSS news feeders don't register as page impressions. From personal experience, many active blogs serve up eight times as many RSS feeds as they do HTML pages. Pollard also doesn't offer the "add sex" tip. When I pulled down the sex links that had spammed my comments, I lost nearly 250 viewers each day.

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Dave Pollard -- "How to increase your Readership"

analytics

Man's butt on top

UPDATED HALLOWEEN 2009: I have dropped off the top spot because more than a half million sites can be found when searching for the exact phrase "man's butt". This is a competitive phrase and it deserves work. Accordingly, I am going to give more Google Juice to this post by illustrating it.

I have achieved the pinnacle of search engine placement, proudly planting this blog in the Number One Position for the search term "man's butt" on Google. In accomplishing this feat, I have trumped 275,000 other sites. Wouldn't you be chuffed too?

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Google searches for man's butt.

See the man catch a laptop with his butt.

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Temple Bar Webstats March 1997

HERE IS A REVIEW of the Temple Bar Website from  March 1997.