Re: You're bad for me, Steve MacLellan....

Hi MaaMaw,

> =========================
> What I need to know:
> =========================

> 1.

> site:friendsinbusiness.blogspot.com

> How come so many of my listings say nothing? What am I doing wrong?? I
> can't see any obvious difference between the listings that do show the
> first couple of lines and the ones that don't, but the ones that don't are
> obviously worthless.

I haven't used blogspot for a blog so I don't have a working knowledge of this software. However from typing in the URL above I see one post that has a description:

MaaMaw's Morsels: Chargebacks When the Names Don't Jibe

... Chargebacks When the Names Don't Jibe. Yes, "jibe"... I looked it up. (Well
knock me over with a wet noodle! I guess I looked like a "jive" turkey all ...
friendsinbusiness.blogspot.com/ 2005/02/chargebacks-when-names-dont-jibe.html

...so I would think this is a clue. What did you do different for this post? Did you add something to a textarea block called an excerpt?

> 2.

> site:rehab-america.blogspot.com

> Zippy, Skippy.

> Funny. I paid little attention to keywords on MaaMaw's Morsels, but this
> one is packed with them. It's not there!! It's not anywhere!! Even when I
> feed in an exact phrase from my blog description -- nothing!!

> Could it be it's just too soon? I started it February 28.

It could be... or else Goggle might have thought you "over done" the keyword thingy and feel it is a ploy to get it listed higher. So they may have penalized that particular post.

> I've been in the midst of a personal crisis and haven't posted since
> Tuesday. Does it completely fall off the radar with three days of neglect?

I don't think so. There will be a few people who bookmark a blog and visit it daily. I suppose if you don't post regularly you might lose a few of these. But most people, like me use a feed/news aggregator and use this to subscribe to many blogs. I use the Sage extension for Firefox but some professional bloggers are using software like Lektora. It wasn't "my cup-o'-tea" but other people who have read that post and tried it have emailed me to tell me it is great.

> ===============================
> While we're NOT on the subject:
> ===============================

> You said you had 16,000 *visits* -- and after seven years, I *still* don't
> understand my stats. My website uses "wusage" for stats.

Although I'm not familiar with this software, the terms are similar to what I am using.

> Picking a random month, it says the following:

> Overall accesses 598,886.
> (Means absolutely nothing, right? Is this the one that counts each
> graphic as another access, etc.??)

That's right. Those are "hits" -- don't mean anything.

> The web site received 58,996 visits.
> (I generally ignore this since it counts my own bzillion visits, all the
> repeat visits to the board, etc., right??)

Ahhh!

See... my 16,000 per month is visits. Unique visits was (for example in February, was 6214. Stats aren't an exact science. They are, at best, a rough idea of the amount of traffic to your site) So out of the 6214 unique visitors... a percentage of them (and there isn't any way to tell what percentage) decided to come back more then once. An example -- someone visits my message board once per day. They visit it every day for a month. This counts as 30-31 visits (or in the case of February -- 28)

So it is preferable to have your visits a lot higher then your unique visitors, because it shows you people are coming back to your site. That's good news because no one is likely to hire you or buy from you the first time they visit. The frequent visitors are those who you have the most chance of converting to paying clients or customers.

> Visitors came from 14,981 distinct Internet addresses.
> (If somebody needs to know my traffic -- i.e., to get approved for an
> affiliate program -- this is the one I use. Is that right?)

That would be unique visitors... but again this isn't a science. There is a big flaw here if you consider these visitors absolutely unique; let me explain:

Internet Service Providers purchase a block of IP addresses, that range in a consecutive order. All dial-up providers assign these IP addresses (because every computer on the Internet has to have its' own IP) to a modem pool so that when one person logs off the Internet, that IP can be randomly assigned to the next person who logs on. High speed, such as DSL or ADSL providers, typically have assigned more of a static IP since most of their users are connected all of the time, but with a scarcity of IP addresses looming, they can re-assign these IPs if they detect one not in use. So it is possible for these unique IPs to belong to more then one person. "14,981 distinct Internet addresses" means (more or less) you had at least that many visitors... but someone using a dial-up service may be more of a regular visitor because when he/she logged onto the Internet, they may have been assigned an IP that hadn't yet appeared in your stats.

Let me reiterate: stats are a rough idea of the amount of traffic you are receiving only.