Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 55th 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, 54th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 2-10-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

• #7 – The tag page for Alan Reeves on BlueCapra.com, with picture  (up 1 place from last week at #9) – A NEW RECORD!!!
• #14 – My videos on Vimeo (down 1 place from last week at #14)
• #49 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (down 20 places from last week at #29)
• #53 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (down 14 places from last week at #39)
• #54 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (down 2 places from last week at #52)

[Read more…]

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 54th 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, 53rd Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 2-3-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

• #9 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with no picture???  (up 1 place from last week at #10)
• #14 – My videos on Vimeo (down 1 place from last week at #13)
• #29 – Alan Reeves on BrandYourself (down 3 places from last week at #26)
• #39 – The tag page for Alan Reeves on BlueCapra (down 3 places from last week at #36)
• #52 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (down 5 places from last week at #47)

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UPDATE: Just when you think things are going well, things are too good to be true, they turn out to be wrong.  That is what happened to my bounce rate.  Back in December 2012, it was about 78%.  Once I moved to the Standard theme, it dropped to 10% or so.  I was so happy I wrote a post.

Fast forward to the end of March 2013.  While trying to get more info out of Google Analytics, I made a few changes that caused my bounce rate to shoot up to about 75%.  Days passed and hours spent looking online lead to the conclusion that I had my Google Analytics key on my pages twice (once from the theme and once from a plugin).  Apparently, that is a great way to have a very low but very wrong bounce rate.

The lesson here is to realize that drastic changes in your traffic, bounce rate, and other metrics should be investigated.  It doesn’t matter how much those metrics make you look good, help you meet your goals, or all that other stuff.  I lost about 3 months worth of bounce rate data because I took a drastic change in results at face value.  

On the plus side, it looks like my bounce rate has dropped about 5% in the past 3 months.  Always look on the bright side of life…..

How bouncy is your website?  I mean, what is your bounce rate?

The bounce rate of a website is a ratio of the number of visitors who only view one page to the number of visitors that view multiple pages.  A high bounce rate means that visitors are reaching your site on a specific page and leaving without exploring further.  This can be for several reasons:

• Your content is not compelling or just plain bad
• The visitor did not like the content or find what they were hoping to find
• The visitor liked the content but was not pointed toward your other great content
• The visitor stayed on your page for too long before going to another one of your pages
• Other technical problems

Most of these problems are under your control (writing better and more relevant content, describing your posts better, deep linking to your other content, etc) but there are a few behind the scenes things that can help.  If you are using WordPress, one of those things is your theme. [Read more…]

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 53rd 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, 52nd Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 1-27-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

• #10 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture  (down 1 place from last week at #9)
• #13 – My videos on Vimeo (down 3 places from last week at #10)
• #26 – Alan Reeves on BrandYourself (down 1 places from last week at #25)
• #36 – My LinkedIn profile (up 5 places from last week at #41)
• #47 – The tag page for Alan Reeves on BlueCapra (up 8 places from last week at #55)

[Read more…]