Questions You Should Be Asking Yourself, Mike Moran on Improving Your Site Through Metrics Options

[bragadocchio]

I came across an excellent article from Mike Moran which has a series of questions about websites that you could ask yourself if you are a site owner. Thought it was worth sharing:

Checklist for Improving Your Site Through Metrics

He includes 24 items on the list. Here are two of them:

• Which products seem to be seasonal? How can we compare our performance without being tripped up by month-to-month seasonal fluctuations?
  
• What issues about our company do we see most repeatedly discussed in the blogosphere?

I suspect that if the average webmaster were to sit down with this list, and try to answer the questions that they can, that they would learn quite a lot about their sites and their businesses.

How well are you or your clients able to answer the questions that Mike asks?

[saschaeh]

Printed

i had something similar once but it was more about site design and usability this seems more about site profitability.

Thanks for sharing!

[EGOL]

That is a good article... anyone should be able to read it and grab one or two or more of his points to work on.

I am mainly experimenting right now to determine how changing the format of an article can improve/damage engagement and income. This can also have an impact upon search position.

[bragadocchio]

There are some pretty good questions in the list. Some of them may not apply to everyone, but it's good having meaningful questions in your face worth investigating.

Interesting, and worth looking at EGOL.

When I think of formating of articles, I'm drawn to thinking that you are either:

1. Making changes to underlying HTML, and experimenting with headlines, drop quotes, font colors, bold, italics.

2. Incorporating ads, links, calls to action, and persuasive design elements into the layout of the articles

3. Putting articles across multiple pages

I'm not sure which of those that you are trying, but it's good to experiment. Are you using any tools in particular? Does the subject matter of your articles lend itself to one approach that might be different for articles of other types?

[EGOL]

I am experimenting with one page vs multiple pages.

Moving to one long page (2000 words) from several short pages (400-500 words each) cuts my SERPs on the minor terms that were specifically targeted by the many short pages. However, I seem to now rank better for the major terms and I believe that natural link accumulation is faster.

The result is a bit less traffic and a lower income per visitor. - I now have fewer pageviews and my ad density is a lot lower.

However, visitor time on site is up nicely. I think that visitors see more of my articles than when they had to click through multiple pages.

On this one long page I am experimenting with a two column format... one column on the left for the text and a column on the right for images, ads, call-outs, data tables.

I like the "look of authority" that the long pages have. But..... this isn't an experiment that will yield a fast answer.

[iamlost]

Bill: every once in a while one of these 'lists' has value. I see the real value in the query format - it is demanding thought over a broad spectrum rather than suggesting implementing the bullets to success.

Egol: I have always liked the 'one long page' approach. One can always add followup pages for less prominent terms as time and potential revenue dictate. A quick potential traffic gauge is to link each first instance of those secondary terms to a glossary or stub page and track interest.

[EGOL]

I have always liked the 'one long page' approach. One can always add followup pages for less prominent terms as time and potential revenue dictate. A quick potential traffic gauge is to link each first instance of those secondary terms to a glossary or stub page and track interest.

Great idea on the linking to a glossary or other resource to gauge interest. I never thought of that but am going to add a few right now. Thanks for the tip.

[DianeV]

Iamlost, if I could ask, what is a "stub page"?

[iamlost]

A 'stub' was a programming term that got transfered to CMS, especially wikis. It means that the page has minimal content: perhaps only metadata, more likely a page title that includes the term, a couple of sentences and a link back to the referring page.

As I don't like to irritate visitors my stub pages are simply a (much) shorter than normal article that I know can be be expanded with more information/time. Note: consider blocking SE bots from real short stubs.

[yannis]

Iamlost, if I could ask, what is a "stub page"?

One website which uses tonnes of 'stubs' is Wikipedia. Many of their pages are stubs!


Yannis

PS Did you know that currently Wikipedia is the No.1 on google SERPS for SEO?

[DianeV]

Ah, okay. Thanks, both of you!

[projectphp]

The one that is tough is:

What's the difference between the subject lines of the most-opened and least-opened e-mails?

What is the sample size, between emails, that makes that relevant? I wonder if it is seasonal as well...