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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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’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.