Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 67th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves.  If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 66th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 5-5-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

• #4 – My Triberr profile (up 6 places from last week at #10)
• #11 – My About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (up 3 places from last week at #14)
• #18 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves with picture (up 1 place from last week at #19)
• #27 – My videos on Vimeo (no change from last week at #27)
• #59 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (down 5 places from last week at #54)

[Read more…]

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 66th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves.  If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 65th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 4-28-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

• #10 – My About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture – back on the first page!!! (up 5 places from last week at #15)
• #14 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves with picture (up 2 places from last week at #16)
• #19 – Week 61 in this series (up 11 places from last week at #30)
• #27 – My videos on Vimeo (up 19 places from last week at #46)
• #54 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (up 5 places from last week at #59)

[Read more…]

Heat maps are a great way to test how a visitor interacts with your website.  Face it, you don’t really know how someone uses your page.  Sure, you may think you do but how do you really know.  You don’t… unless you use a heat map.

A heat map is a graphical overlay of your website that when viewed, will show you where people clicked, how much time they spent looking at one screen (scrollmap), the site where the visitor came from, plus more.  There are several services that offer heat maps but the one I use is CrazyEgg.

CrazyEgg has a simple interface and provide great data.  For sites with a lot of traffic, this data is amazing.  If you are not lucky enough to have a lot of traffic, you results can be skewed.  Here’s what I mean; every time you visit your site, unless you exclude your visit visit, your have added a small bit of useless data.  So, every time you go to your home page and check the tweaks you just made, you could be counted as a visit.

Most analytics programs and plugins have the option to exclude tracking for logged in users.  This works great for Google Analytics (which I use) but is lacking in the CrazyEgg plugin.  As a dedicated code geek and WordPress tweaker, I had to see if I could change that.  With just a few extra lines of PHP code, you can too. [Read more…]

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 65th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves.  If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 64th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 4-21-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

• #15 – My About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (no change from last week at #13)
• #16 – Week 61 in this series (up 11 places from last week at #27)
• #30 – My videos on Vimeo (up 18 places from last week at #48)
• #46 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (up 3 places from last week at #49)
• #59 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (up 3 places from last week at #62)

[Read more…]