Website performance monitoring

If you are investing time or money into your website, you need to know if it is working.

There are plenty of website statistic programs, and many webhosts provide them for free, but the stats they report often vary wildly and confuse the issue with terms that seem the same but are vastly different like "Hits", "Visits", "Pages".

We have found that Google has a very slick solution for reporting and it is free. Google Analytics requires you to enter a small piece of code into your website, and each time a visit browses your website the event is recorded by Google. Each day a raft of daily reports is generated allowing you surgically tune your website.

One of the most useful stats is the "bounce rate". A "bounce" is a visitor to your website that looked at the page they landed on, and then immediately left your website without looking at any of the other pages. If you have poorly scripted and designed landing page, you might have a very high "bounce rate". Improving your landing page will obviously encourage more people to stay and surf further into your website. 

Before you starting making efforts to bring more people into your website, make sure you are maximising your return on the visitors you already have. 

Search Engine Optimisation 

There are plenty of websites that can offer advice on optimising your website for search engines, and we won't try to re-invesnt the wheel here. These are just a few things that we do to make sure our websites are viewed effectively by the search engines.

1. Write quality content. Search engines are terribly clever things these days, and will 'read' your website to determine whether it is clearly written and whether the content is something that other people might be interested in if they are searching for that topic. After you win the battle of getting someone to visit your from a search engine, you will also have a much better chance of getting them to continue visiting your website. If your content is relevent, you might also get people linking to your website, and that is the best thing ever. A link from another website to yours is considered an endorsement of your website by the search engines and will help you rise the search engine ranks.
2. That's it really. Write good content. There are some other little things that we do when we create a website which can help with your popularity but if you only do one thing, it should be to write good content. The Internet has enough crap on it with you adding to it.