Joe Hayes {dot} Org » Web Development

Google Trends – Learn More About Your Competition

Joe — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:37:31 +0000

Where have I been? Well, extremely busy with local projects and folks breathing down my neck to get things done. Eh, good problem to have I guess. Been so busy actually I just now got a chance to read through some of my favorite blogs, namely Matt Cutts (head of the spam team at Google) – and I came accross a post late last month about Google Trends.

Basically, it offers a free service similar to that of Alexa, Quantcast or Compete - of which the latter has been my primary indicator of competitor’s traffic. Neither one, however, including Google Trends is going to give you an accurate measure of traffic but for the most part they’d all give you a good comparison. Note that I’m referring to trends on “websites” not “searches” – which is also useful in it’s own regards.

I personally am going to prefer the use of Google Trends now, over Compete for traffic analysis, mainly because Google is the main source of traffic for most websites and would be a great way to measure the potential of websites you’re doing SEO work for.

One of the drawbacks of the new Google Trends service, unfortunately, leave new or low traffic websites drawing a blank with no data showed. Apparently there is some sort of threshold a website must reach before the allmighty “G” will spend resources to track it. Another is that you don’t really get much data, like search terms etc. for your competitors as with some of the other services, but again in my opinion it’s the most valuable indicator of search traffic – at least from Google.

One thing I really like is the “Also searched for” and “Also visited” data… once again this is very simple and very limited – but very accurate information based on the traffic levels Google delivers. And something important to point out is that, if you sign into Google, you’ll see estimated traffic numbers on the Y axis of the graph… which seems to be about 70% of the actual unique visitors the handful of sites I checked actually receive.

One question that keeps coming to mind is… where does Google get this information? It’s no secret they track clickthroughs on their search results (the redirect link gives that away), but do they also get data from their famous Toolbar?

Overall, I like the tool very much. While the data is not as comprehensive as it’s competitors (discussed earlier), I believe what little is shown is very accurate (at least for comparisons) and a very valuable SEO tool if you know how to use it. I suppose it’s at least good for determining the traffic potential for niches you’re working on.

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Using Multiple Words In Awstats Exclude Filter

Joe — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:04:15 +0000

You know, for years (literally) I’ve always wanted to be able to exclude certain words when looking at things like “links from an external page” while using Awstats. This especially comes in handy when you have alot of subdomains, as those links are counted as “links” the same way (actually worse, or more often) than links from other (completely different) domains. In my case, I manage free forum and blog hosting services which offer free subdomains… so that’s literally thousands of listings cluttering up what I really want to see (websites passing the most traffic via incoming links) and often eliminated just one word isn’t enough.

I’ve tried everything I could… commas, colon, semicolon, plus signs etc… then tried searching Google, Yahoo, MSN… hell I even searched Ask.com to no avail. Well today I really needed to get this working, and eventually found a delimiter that worked – the “|” – which really doesn’t suprise me. I though I tried that before… maybe I had but used a space or something (you can’t).

So, at anyrate, maybe everybody knew but me… but in case you didn’t you can use multiple words for filtering Awstats results like this keyphrase1|keyphrase2

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Displaying RSS Feeds On Wordpress Pages

Joe — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:04:30 +0000

Recently I have been working on a large project, BlogSavy, a free blog hosting service. Other than the typical stuff like updating the software to the lastest version of WPMU and getting all the plugins and templates playing nicely with each other, recently there was a forum installed for support. As such, posting updates on both the host’s homepage and in the forum cumbersome, as well as a time waster.

The answer was using RSS from one or the other, and even though Wordpress already has RSS functionality I’d prefer using the blog’s homepage in a static manner and keeping all the info in the phpBB forum. So, a quick search found a quick and dirty simple RSS mod that required no template edits, and am going to use Wordpress’s built in RSS functionality to display this in a blog template.

Regardless of where you generate the RSS feed from, the code to display it will be the same. Since Wordpress already handles imported RSS to display info in the admin panel, we can just tap into that code using a php includes and then use those functions to our liking. So, on any template page (outside of the loop of course), you can throw in this code which can be downloaded in this text file.

Some things to note, you must include the file rss-functions.php before you can use the RSS functions. Change the $url = to your feed url. The variable $href will output the post’s url from the feed, $title would output the post title, and $description would output the post. You can change the number of items feed with $i == 5 to whatever you want it to be. Enjoy.

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The 100 Oldest Domain Names

Joe — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:22:59 +0000

Came across this list of the first registered domain names on the internet. Thought it was rather interesting who jumped on the bandwagon first. It’s great to see they weren’t poker domains, heh. At any rate, here’s the list.

15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
24-May-1985 THINK.COM
11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM
19-Mar-1986 IBM.COM
19-Mar-1986 SUN.COM
25-Mar-1986 INTEL.COM
25-Mar-1986 TI.COM
25-Apr-1986 ATT.COM
08-May-1986 GMR.COM
08-May-1986 TEK.COM
10-Jul-1986 FMC.COM
10-Jul-1986 UB.COM
05-Aug-1986 BELL-ATL.COM
05-Aug-1986 GE.COM
05-Aug-1986 GREBYN.COM
05-Aug-1986 ISC.COM
05-Aug-1986 NSC.COM
05-Aug-1986 STARGATE.COM
02-Sep-1986 BOEING.COM
18-Sep-1986 ITCORP.COM
29-Sep-1986 SIEMENS.COM
18-Oct-1986 PYRAMID.COM
27-Oct-1986 ALPHACDC.COM
27-Oct-1986 BDM.COM
27-Oct-1986 FLUKE.COM
27-Oct-1986 INMET.COM
27-Oct-1986 KESMAI.COM
27-Oct-1986 MENTOR.COM
27-Oct-1986 NEC.COM
27-Oct-1986 RAY.COM
27-Oct-1986 ROSEMOUNT.COM
27-Oct-1986 VORTEX.COM
05-Nov-1986 ALCOA.COM
05-Nov-1986 GTE.COM
17-Nov-1986 ADOBE.COM
17-Nov-1986 AMD.COM
17-Nov-1986 DAS.COM
17-Nov-1986 DATA-IO.COM
17-Nov-1986 OCTOPUS.COM
17-Nov-1986 PORTAL.COM
17-Nov-1986 TELTONE.COM
11-Dec-1986 3COM.COM
11-Dec-1986 AMDAHL.COM
11-Dec-1986 CCUR.COM
11-Dec-1986 CI.COM
11-Dec-1986 CONVERGENT.COM
11-Dec-1986 DG.COM
11-Dec-1986 PEREGRINE.COM
11-Dec-1986 QUAD.COM
11-Dec-1986 SQ.COM
11-Dec-1986 TANDY.COM
11-Dec-1986 TTI.COM
11-Dec-1986 UNISYS.COM
19-Jan-1987 CGI.COM
19-Jan-1987 CTS.COM
19-Jan-1987 SPDCC.COM
19-Feb-1987 APPLE.COM
04-Mar-1987 NMA.COM
04-Mar-1987 PRIME.COM
04-Apr-1987 PHILIPS.COM
23-Apr-1987 DATACUBE.COM
23-Apr-1987 KAI.COM
23-Apr-1987 TIC.COM
23-Apr-1987 VINE.COM
30-Apr-1987 NCR.COM
14-May-1987 CISCO.COM
14-May-1987 RDL.COM
20-May-1987 SLB.COM
27-May-1987 PARCPLACE.COM
27-May-1987 UTC.COM
26-Jun-1987 IDE.COM
09-Jul-1987 TRW.COM
13-Jul-1987 UNIPRESS.COM
27-Jul-1987 DUPONT.COM
27-Jul-1987 LOCKHEED.COM
28-Jul-1987 ROSETTA.COM
18-Aug-1987 TOAD.COM
31-Aug-1987 QUICK.COM
03-Sep-1987 ALLIED.COM
03-Sep-1987 DSC.COM
03-Sep-1987 SCO.COM
22-Sep-1987 GENE.COM
22-Sep-1987 KCCS.COM
22-Sep-1987 SPECTRA.COM
22-Sep-1987 WLK.COM
30-Sep-1987 MENTAT.COM
14-Oct-1987 WYSE.COM
02-Nov-1987 CFG.COM
09-Nov-1987 MARBLE.COM
16-Nov-1987 CAYMAN.COM
16-Nov-1987 ENTITY.COM
24-Nov-1987 KSR.COM
30-Nov-1987 NYNEXST.COM

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The Importance Of Writing Compelling Content

Joe — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:20:07 +0000

So you’ve started a blog? Congratulations, unfortunately though - if you build it, they will not come. Who’s they? Visitors, traffic, people coming to your website to read what’s on your mind. There are many things involved in the building of a successful blog, none more important than writing stuff people actually want to read.

Write with attitude. Nobody wants to read a boring tech filled article with mindless specifications or a plainly written fact filled article. If they did, they’d pick up a newspaper or watch the news. Having the right mindset when writing posts will inspire your readers to come back to see what you’ve got to say.

Write with emotion. Either love it or hate it, everyone likes strong opinions. Those are the blogs getting linked to, and of course links mean serps (search engine rankings), which leads to more readers and more links. If you’ve got a movie review site, throw some opinion in there and create some controversy. This is also great for comments, as folks are much more likely to strongly agree or disagree.

Write with confidence. Do some research on your topic before making a post, link to your sources (even your competition), show your readers that you know what you’re talking about and they will respect it. This goes hand in hand with previous two points, you can’t be confident without putting your attitude and emotion into it. You want to be an authority in your niche? Act like it.

Above everything else when it comes to driving massive traffic to your website, content really is king. Of course powerful, relevant links are extremely important as well – and those will come as you continue to write compelling content.

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