Herself's Webtools

By now I expect you are using Google Analytics, StatCounter or another tool to watch and see who’s coming, from where, what pages they load and why.

One of the best ways to build traffic to a website of any kind is to give your audience what they are looking to find. Especially if it is something no one else has covered. As an example, I put news stories about house plants up on the house plant site occasionally. With in a week of posting a news story I started to get lots of visitors from people looking for a specific plant. This was a plant I had only mentioned in passing. I had no information on it. It was just included in a list of plants in the news article. A quick Google search showed no one else had discussed care of this particular plant either. So I immediately hunted down pictures and information on this plant. It now gets a steady stream of visits every day.

What pages do your visitors visit most often? Are those pages as good as they could be? If not; rewrite them, redo them, do what ever is needed to make them sparkle.

What labels are your visitors using the most? Add more articles on that topic. That’s telling you either you’ve done a better job than others covering that topic or no one else has given people what they are looking to find. The net is a big place. Anything you can find that is not covered or covered well you should be all over. If you are not unique no one will find you.

If people are frequently searching for something on your website put links to those pages right on your front page. Put those sidebars to good use. No one is going to hunt around your site to find something when he/she can hit the back button to Google and hit the next search result that had been returned.

You’ll find some pages that get visited often but that no one stays to read. Take a hard look at those pages. What is missing? Are they too slow to get to the information someone desires? Are those pages not indepth enough? Or are they too indepth and the reader is looking for a quick and dirty version? Rework those pages too. The metrics for ranking websites are changing and time spend on a site is going to matter more. Also you don’t want people not finding what they want. Or the next time you come up in a search they will skip any pages from your site in the search results.

So when you go through your logs don’t just look at the body count. Put in a little time digging and you’ll find your traffic will grow.

More information:
Know who is visiting your website

I’m going to be writing some more PERL scripts to make website maintenance easier. Today I hunted down some information on RSS feeds and using PERL to download them.

Ah but since I had not done much with PERL on this computer I got caught in the seemingly endless ‘Can’t locate BlahBlah/Blah.pm’ Egads. For every one I found and installed another one needed to be hunted down.

The very easiest way to do this and retain your sanity is to use the CPAN module that comes with PERL.

As root so you have permission to install modules in the Library Path type:
perl -MCPAN -e shell;

It will ask if you want to do the manual configuration. Hit enter and for almost every question you’ll just be able to hit enter and agree with the option it chose. There’ll be a couple you have to give it response other than enter so pay attention as you go through the questions.

Once that is done you’ll be dropped into a cpan shell
cpan>

Now all you have to do is try to run your program in one terminal window and install missing modules in the cpan window. For example:
./rss2html.pl

Can’t locate LWP/Simple.pm in @INC blah blah blah

So in the cpan window type
cpan> install LWP::Simple

Just replace slashes with :: and drop the .pm. It will locate, compile and install the module for you. Occasionally you will have to force a module.
cpan> force install LWP::Simple

Perl is case sensitive. This is the most painless and easiest way to collect all the modules you will need to run PERL scripts.

* You will probably need to install a module or two to use the Perl Blogger backup scripts I posted in the top left sidebar last weekend.

More information:
Using RSS News Feeds