The SEO dance

A buddy of mine just launched Gale Force Sailing and when I first checked his page rankings, he didn't even make the first couple of pages (but his wikipedia entry did).

Then he got an email from a keen supporter and Search Engine Optimization/Marketing guy who did a few quick maneuvers on a sailing directory and he jumped to the top of Google. See the communication thread here.

That was pretty fast and there were immediate results. But it's not always that easy...or is it? I just chatted with the Social Media Group and they'd make you think it was pretty simple. And it may be. For us, the first step is to actually utilize our Google grants (I'm to blame here). Though our page ranking is decent and our backlinks is not bad (820), we could do a lot more.

Hopefully the Social Media Group can assist us, but until I can create a little more time prior to the launch of our national site as well as afterwards, I don't see us taking a significant step forward to increase our relatively low search engine driven traffic of 15%.

I was talking to a friend the other day about this stuff and as a joke (right?) he sent this interesting post. The video was amusing too, couldn't resist. See below:

Crazy Egg is pretty hot, literally

Last week I wrote about trying to decide what reporting tool we would want for our redesign(s) and I think I have an answer, both. Why have just one when you can have Google Analytics AND Crazy Egg.

Honestly, it seems like it is a good idea to have two systems in place so that there is a bit of checks and balances with web reporting. And, Crazy Egg has a heat map, very cool.

At first the heat map wasn’t working properly and my clicks were sky high compared to Google Analytics, but after rebooting my effort it worked and I can see where folks are clicking on the blog. Very cool if you want to test a new design to see what visitors like and where they go.

I’m still trying to test out a few pages on our national site, but it currently doesn’t seem to be playing nicely with Convio. Or the other way around. But then again, I have not ruled out human error, me.

Web metrics: Crazy Egg vs. Google Analytics

We're testing out two different reporting mechanisms, but man they’re off. I really like Google Analytics and have been using it to gauge interaction for this blog as a larger test for the redesigned pages of our national site.

However, I’m a big fan of cross referencing web reporting metrics, so a friend suggested I try Crazy Egg which gives you the first 5000 pages free. And, along with that you get some pretty cool visuals, like a heat map. I love the thought of a heat map—sort of a poor man’s version of eye-tracking—to get a sense of what draws attention on a page. This is great for testing new designs and figuring out what is hot (no pun intended), but the trouble is that I can’t quite get it to work properly. Arrggh.

Fortunately though, boldly placed on the top navigation bar is the link, “Report a Bug,” so I did—which, btw, seems too well placed. Not sure what is up with the heat map as well as the counter, but visits reported by Crazy Egg are 20x greater than my Google Analytic visits. That’s a pretty big discrepancy.

And, I won’t even get in to Convio’s reporting mechanisms, yuck. Not that I know a great deal about manipulating data (though I’d love to learn more), I get the sense that AWStats kind of bites for drilling down for more detailed information.

Upward battle: our Alexa traffic ranking

I recently learned about Alexa and found that our national site traffic rank was 909,229. Ouch, almost wish I didn’t see that, but on the bright side of things, we can only go up.

I'd like to know of other ways we can measure our online footprint. I think this is an opportunity to take some baseline vitals early in our redesign process and and share it with others in the hopes of demonstrating growth online down the road...specifically, during our FY07 budget session (March).

I've got to begin creating some metrics for our work online if I ever hope to grow the program within the organization.

Some more cool stuff to know:
Speed: Very Fast (80% of sites are slower), Avg Load Time: .9 Seconds
Other sites that link to this site: 475
Online Since: 29-Oct-1998

To put our traffic in perspective, some of our ‘competitors’ are below:

• Traffic Rank for waterkeeper.org: 1,693,919
• Traffic Rank for rivernetwork.org: 1,277,101
• Traffic Rank for riverkeeper.org: 649,695
• Traffic Rank for americanwhitewater.org: 193,381
• Traffic Rank for nrdc.org: 57,977
• Traffic Rank for greenpeace.org: 7,326

This is also interesting; at of the people who have visited our site, they have also visited:

• River Network - www.rivernetwork.org
• Clean Water Action - www.cleanwateraction.org
• The BPD Water and Sanitation Cluster - www.bpd-waterandsanitation.org
• American Water Relief - www.americanwaterrelief.org
• EPA Admits Fluoridated - Water Harms Millions home.att.net/~gtigerclaw/EPAresponse.html
• Clean Water and Oceans - NRDC www.nrdc.org/water
• Citizens for Safe Water Around Badger (CSWAB) - cswab.org
• Clean Water Fund - cleanwaterfund.org
• American Whitewater - americanwhitewater.org
• Australian Conservation Foundation: Rivers and Water Campaigmn