I have a google analytics account which I use to monitor activity on the half dozen sites I’m involved with in some way. Analytics is a fancy term for a fancy version of what we used to call ‘hit tracking’ or ‘log analysis.’ This new generation of software is much more accurate than the old stuff, like Webalyzer, the old free-with-your-cheapo-web-hosting market leader. You instantly notice that Analytics doesn’t count bots, spiders, or your own hits, for example.
As a result, it’s possible to see your site flatline at absolute zero, as this site has done for some time now.
The personal website, of course, is a silly thing, made obsolete by social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and those other ones nobody uses anymore. Photosharing services and youtube, specializing in that kind of content, combined with social networking and blogging platforms round out the suite of venues for user generated content.
Looking at my other sites, my parenting site, my energy conservation site, my fantasy magazine site, I can see that there is a steady stream of traffic that emerges from search engines and links; it may be a small stream, but it’s always there.
One of the things that differentiates these sites from a personal site is the site URL; specifically, the first name last name URL. Nobody is searching for your name. They’re looking for stuff they’re interested in. So if you have a popular name, appending your profession or your chief interest to your domain name isn’t really a bad thing at all, if it gets some search terms into your URL.
I’ve been able to drive traffic to this site from Facebook on occasion, but again, why bother posting to this site at all? There is no permanent trickle of traffic from this activity. So I have gradually peeled the personal stuff out of this site, and will eventually leave only the resume type stuff. What’s fun is that if I give someone a business card, I can actually tell if they have looked at the site, as any activity at all stands out from the flatline!
The flatline tells us a lot of things. Here are a few:
- Eclectic scatterings of keywords and meta tags unrelated to your URL do not attract search-engine traffic.
- Random walks through the web don’t produce a trickle of traffic. Web 2.0 has interstates; nobody drives by your coffeeshop on route 66 anymore.
- Traffic driven from social media doesn’t necessarily turn into repeat traffic.
- Stale content creates zero traffic.
Of course my other experience here, of offending a client with the bald statement concerning how difficult it can be to create web traffic (heh) proves that unique strings of keywords can still light your site up like a highway flare for the tiny populations of people narrowly focused on those unique keywords.
So don’t badmouth your high-school gym teacher by name; he’ll find you and give you a wedgie.
The small business site now exists as a crossroads, a clearing house and an archive for content that is primarily viewed in different venues; Facebook, Twitter, and RSS newsreaders, for example. It’s an important asset as part of a coordinated marketing strategy, but don’t let anyone tell you that ‘if you build it, they will come.’
In my higher traffic sites, the small percentage of hits which come natively from search engines also tells us that focusing narrowly on tricking the search engines into giving you a higher ranking is probably not something you should be spending a ton of money on; content creation, linking, pushing your content out to higher traffic sites, and community building are more important.
You can’t pay a shyster a blob of cash to create a site which will just sit out there and draw a ton of traffic without further effort.
The glistening lanes of the information superhighway are not paved with gold, but with the blood, sweat and tears of hardworking, crafty and dedicated individuals, forever scrambling, aiming and firing at a moving target.
The web is another evolutionary space. No surprise!
