Google Me

Someone last week asked me how I knew how many visitors I had each day to my blog. There are lots of tools you can use but I, like most use Google Analytics. I am not going to go into details on how to install it but if you need help here is a good beginner's guide from Mahalo for getting your account set up and figuring out how to initially use it. I rarely refer to Google's help section since I find it to be geared towards a user with a much more techie vocab than myself. When I need help I just google the question I have and usually someone else has translated directions it in a more user friendly way than Google itself. The above Google Love print is by MARCOART ONLINE and combines the Beatles Dynasty with the Google dynasty.

You are going to want to eliminate your own ISP address from your statistics if you are anything like me and check your blog over 20 times a day. You can add a filter from as many computers that you use, I have one for my work and home computers. WeepingWillowyOne on Artfire did a good step by step guide for how to do this here.

Last month I noticed a very alarming trend in my blog stats. I was experiencing a negative % change for the first time ever. I knew intellectually that it was because I had such a huge increase in numbers the month before while running the Lose the Winter Blues Contest. I had done tons of promoting and was linked on all kinds of contest blogs and was still seeing some residual effects of this throughout March. But it was so depressing to see my losses there, especially as they actually got as high as 18% at one point. That is when I jumped into action to try to stop the bleeding, so to speak. I threw myself into Twitter and StumbleUpon and was recently able to turn the corner. I thought it might be interesting for some of you to see where my traffic comes from. If you don't even like looking at your own stats then feel free to move along.

One of the first things I always look at when reviewing my Statistics is where my traffic is coming from. I think this is the most important resource since it helps us to see where we should or shouldn't be putting our energy. To find the whole list you go to your Traffic Sources Overview and click on view full report. I usually have over 70 referring sites, with some of them only referring a few but every one counts as a potential new follower.

Here are my top 10 referring sources from the past 30 days. The first number is the total number of visitors from that site, the second is the average number of page views per visit, The third is the average length of the visit, and the last is the percentage of new visitors.

1.	entrecard.com / referral	2,678	1.06	00:00:25	30.96%
2.	(direct) / (none)	1,217	1.11	00:00:36	54.31%
3.	blogger.com / referral	358	2.61	00:08:32	11.45%
4.	adn.entrecard.com / referral	266	1.06	00:00:30	43.98%
5.	sortafloweringdesigns.com / referral	179	1.12	00:00:49	41.90%
6.	twitter.com / referral	146	1.58	00:03:50	73.97%
7.	etsy.com / referral	80	1.12	00:00:22	81.25%
8.	stumbleupon.com / referral	74	1.19	00:00:31	98.65%
9.	google / organic	72	1.58	00:01:17	93.06%
10.	photodito.com / referral	33	1.03	00:00:39	33.33%

It's no surprise that my biggest source is entrecard. I put the most amount of time into promoting my blog with them. Even with all of their bumps and advertising debacles during the past month they are still the best way to promote your blog that I know of. I no longer do my drops on the weekend since it was taking away too much time from creating so I do have a pretty big drop in viewers by Sunday but I'm ok with that.

The twitter stats are very interesting for me. Those are actually very solid new numbers since I really just started working the twitter last week. Before that I had less than 20 views from them. What is promising from those stats is that they are actually spending some time here, with an average of almost 4 minutes.

The StumbleUpon numbers are about what I thought they would be. A lot of new visitors but not necessarily the same quality. They had an average of only 31 seconds. I will continue to submit some pages to them and it is a good way to search for interesting diversions.

I have been using the etsy forums to promote my blog some the past few weeks too which is where the etsy views are coming from. I'm not real impressed with the quality of these views as the average time is only 22 seconds but I think I will continue to do it as I have time. I also find some great blogs by participating in those threads which is part of the fun.

Do you have any interesting trends or thoughts on Google Analytics you would like to share?

SEO For Dummies

When I started my blog over 6 months ago I had no idea everything I would need to learn to be even remotely successful at this new hobby of mine. I saw the term SEO batted around and had no idea what it even stood for or how it related to me. Eventually I picked up that it meant Search Engine Optimization, which really didn't explain much to me. I started to gather that it had something to do with how we come up in the Google search and involves backlinks and code, which are terms that made my head hurt so I just went back to looking at pretty pictures of yarn. The past few weeks for some reason I've suddenly gotten inspired to understand more about how my blog gets seen. I am in no way even close to an expert about this stuff so if you are looking for answers I'm not the one to come to but I figured that there are probably some others who are as clueless as I am that might appreciate a few places to start.

To let you know how clueless I really was I didn't even know that Google WebMaster Tools even existed. I had installed Google Analytics early on but was only using it for the bare necessities like seeing what searches people used to find me and how many unique visitors I had. A few weeks ago I stumbled across a very user friendly blog with some great tips that even I was able to put to use right away. Gary Conn puts things in easy terms and goes step by step showing screen shots so that I was able to start using the Webmaster Tools to find out how many links I had and any errors that Google had discovered in my site. It also helped show me what searches I was most visible in. Surprisingly I found that a post that I did as a throw away a few months ago about the Facebook MeME, defining your life by song titles, was the top of the searches for some reason. I still don't know how to recreate this phenomena but it helps to know how people are finding you anyways.

So from Gary I learned how to add a sitemap to my blog for Google here. I also learned how to add meta tags and site descriptions to my template code on blogger here. I promise it sounds scarier than it is. For some of you this is probably like baby stuff that you conquered the first week of blogging but I am so not a techie.

I'll share my observations of blog directories and trying to get links later in the week. I really had no idea how important those links really were until recently. I now understand why my Google ranking is so bad, since I had made no effort to get or trade links in the past. If you have any beginner tips on SEO please share!

I am sharing a few bad pics of my niece Jess with her obsession. She has now made close to 60 finger knitting creations. It was so inspiring to see her find pure joy in the act of making something with her hands. She has now started a club in her class where she teaches kids how to finger knit and they work together after school. They are planning on setting up a booth at their church fish fry the next few Fridays to sell them and donate the money to charity. How sweet is that?