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It’s been well publicised recently that following a European court case, Microsoft have had to follow it’s European Windows users the option to download a new web browser,

Has this impacted on the percentage of users that use IE?

In this article I noted the percentages of which browsers visited my sites. Here are the figures for the last month and comparisons to Firefox:

JPMBlog.com: 17% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 56% use FireFox)

Netbook-experience.com: 16% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 58% use FireFox and 18% use Chrome)

Techplay-experience.com: 31% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 27% use FireFox)

The number of visitors to my sites using IE has definitely decreased  there’s no wonder Microsoft are investing lots of money in IE8 adverts.

With France and Germany both strongly advising its users not to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer due to security issues in some versions, I started wondering how many people still use the once dominant browser.

Using Google Analytics I performed a quick report on the percentage of IE users to 3 of my Blogs over the last month:

JPMBlog.com: 29% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 47% use FireFox)

Netbook-experience.com: 18% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 63% use FireFox)

Techplay-experience.com: 30% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 27% use FireFox)

Microsoft certainly don’t have the market share it once did.

Following on from this article I thought I would see which days are the busiest for Internet traffic to my sight.

The general opinion across the Internet is that weekends are the quietest time for Web hits but my original investigation for Septembers traffic on Netbook-experience.com showed that Fridays were the quietest.

How that I have more data to examine, 3 months on Netbook-experience.com and 1 complete month for Techplay-experience.com I wondered if my results changed.

Here are the results:

As you can see Tuesdays and Thursdays are the quietest but Weekends continue to be amongst the busiest day.

I’ve previously written about the difficulties I had in getting Google to send traffic to  My Netbook-Experience site. I eventually made a break through and managed to get Google to send me traffic by following these instructions.

With this is mind I thought I would investigate how long it would take for Google to crawl through my blog and send me traffic if I follow these instructions right from day1.

I’ll give it a go and report back here how it goes.

I’ve found myself posting more and more technology and videogame news and articles on this blog, and as they are topics that really interest me I thought I would create a dedicated blog where I can write just about these subjects.

I’ve registered a Domain name: http://techplay-experience.com/ and created a blog there and my first task has been to install Google Analytics using the Google Integration Tool Kit.

I thought it would be Interesting to see if any days generally bring more traffic then others. The general opinion around the Internet is that Weekends are generally bring less visitors then week days, so I thought I would see  if the traffic to my Netbook Experience Blog reflected this or not.

So using Google analytics I pulled of a report showing how many visitors visited Netbook Experience each day during September.

I’ll repeat this expercise for a month to get a better picture overall but the results for September are shown below, and show that Fridays are on average the Quietest days for my site and Sundays are the businest days.

The average number of vistitors every day in September: 

Fridays: 27.75 visitors on average
Thursdays: 30.75 visitors on average
Tuesdays: 33 visitors on average
Wednesdays: 33.4 visitors on average
Saturdays: 35.75 visitors on average
Mondays: 38 visitors on average
Sundays: 40.25 visitors on average

Here’s an update on how much traffic my Netbook-experience blog is getting, and also how much of an impact Google has made since it started (finally) sending me traffic.

There are 2 graphs shown below (you can click to enlarge them), the top graph shows how much traffic the blog has recieved since it launched and the second graph shows how much traffic Google has sent during the same time frame. You can see that the general trend to the blog is positive and that Google has had a positive impact on the blog.

It’s finally happened – Google has started sending me traffic to my Netbook Experience Word press blog.

I thought I would summarise the steps taken as it has taken a while to achieve with my Word Press blog – it was certainly easier using a blogger hosted blog as most of this process seemed to be automated.

Step 1: Tell Google your site exists, go to Google’s add URL page and enter your sites details.

Step 2: Register an account with Google Webmaster tools. This will give you a meta tag so that you can be tracked by Google’s tool set.

Step 3: Install the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful to integrate a number of different Google tools into your blog i.e. Webmaster toolkit, Adsense, & Analytics.

Step 4: Install the XML-Sitemap plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful as it automatically creates and updates a XML-Site map of your site. Sitemaps are useful as they help search engines like Google crawl through your site.

Step 5: Install the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to potentially  increase your page ranking by incorporating SEO techniques into your blog. When you create a post a new section is visable which allows you to fill in a few details for SEO, the plugin does the rest.

Step 6: Create some internal links. Google appears to like internal links, so I wrote a blog post which linked to every other post.

Step 7: Allow Google to see your site. Make sure your robots.txt file allows google to crawl through your site – Google WebMaster tools can easily provide a working robots.txt file. There is also an option in the privacy settings of WordPress to block or allow search Engines, make sure this is set to allow   .

Google started sending traffic over night.

  This may be one of those DOH moments. As I’ve mentioned before I used to get a significant amount of traffic from Google to my old Netbook Experience but ever since I moved to a WordPress blog I’ve not had a single hit from them.

I’ve tried several steps to try and change this, I’ve added SEO plugins and XML site maps to my Blog, I’ve altered my robots.txt file, but although Google webmaster tools was showing me that Google was picking upkeywords for my blog I still no joy and no traffic from them ….and then I saw this setting in my blogs Privacy Settings.

The default setting looks to be block all search engines and ping utilites. DOH. I’ve now changed my settings to allow my site to be visible to search engines and I’ll see if this brings an improvment and I’ll report back here.

So the question is “Why isn’t google sending me traffic to my WordPress Blog?”

The Answer might be “Let it”

I had been trying a few different plugin’s to implement Google AdSense and Analytics, with varying success – especially with AdSense ad’s not being relevant to my Blog.

I’ve found a different plug in called Google Integration Toolkit, you can find it by searching the available plugins through the admin dashboard.

In one plugin you can set your Analytics Code, set your tracking code for the Google WebMasters toolkit and also insert a couple of settings to help your AdSense plugin.

Certainly since I made the change Adsense is definitely becoming more appropriate to my content.

After a few days break I thought I would provide an update on much traffic is going to my Netbook Experience Blog.

On the third of August I started adding links from the posts on the old blog to the copied blogs on the new blog.

Since then  98 visitors have been sent from the old blog to the new blog.

On the 8th of August I made some changes to my posts on the Aspire User Forum (as described in this post). Since then 26 users have arrived from that forum.

I’ve also had 13 hits from GetSatisfaction.com a site where people post solutions to common problems, a visitor to my blog saw that I had posted how to solve a common problem and posted a link there.

What is disappointing is that Google hasn’t sent me a single visitor yet, where as my old blog got plenty of traffic from Google, so I’ve manually tried to add this site using the google add url tool, so I’ll see what happens.

My increase in traffic

Despite my Google Hate, I do like their Analytics service, it’s free and does a great job of tracking traffic. Integration into Blogger was straight forward but how easy is it to add Google Analytics to WordPress blogs….it’s easy

There is a widget availbile for WordPress called

To install the Plugin:

1. From you Blog’s admin Panel click on Plugins.
2. Click on Add New
3. Search for “Google Analytics for WordPress”.
4. The Google Analytics for WordPress will be top of the list. Click on install.
5. When the Information page appears click on Install.
6. When the Plugin has installed click on Activate Plugin.

To configure the Plugin:

1. From the Manage Plugins screen click on the settings option for the Plugin
2. Enter your Web Property ID (you get one of these when you create a profile for your page in Analytics) in the Analytics Account ID Box.
3. Click on the Update Google Analytics Settings box

Job Done