100 Bucks Challenge

It is a good question and there are some huge differences sometimes between analytics and awstats. The main reasons for this are:

1. Awstats use the logfiles on your server. This means that visitors who have file cacheing enabled in their browsers will be shown a local copy of your webpage (cached version on their computer). This means those repeat visitors will not be recorded in your log files and not show up in awstats.

2. Analytics uses javascript code to send data to another server to record lots of data about the actual visit itself. Some visitors will have higher security settings in their browsers which will prevent this data from being transmitted to the analytics server.

The upshot of this is that there will be a lot of discrepancies between the 2 types of stats and as such neither are right completely!

However, used together the data both types of stats give you are invaluable and also different. Awstats is probably more accurate for unique visitor numbers and for information on spidering activity. Analytics though can really give you some great insight into visitor behaviour on your website. Basically you can see what people do when they get to your site.

Thanks Steve. Here is what I've been doing...

> Starting to add 2010 cruise info

> Adding a new "ship info" category with of course, info on the ships used

> Cleaned up the tabs along the top now, so it's home, plan your cruise, destinations and forum

> Cleaned up my Squidoo page, it had a whopping ZERO visitors (probably cuz I didn't realize I had to do the introduction part until today), so hopefully that'll do something

> Made a hub at Hubpages

> Keep adding articles, social bookmarking them

I'm going to wait till about 100 uniques a day before I get Adsense running, I'll be comfortable with split-testing (I think it'll be more effective) then. I have a couple of concerns, and they are:

> I'm not seeing traffic rise for some reason (apart from social bookmarking traffic, it falls right back down to around 10 uniques/day on Google Analytics). Steve, your traffic seemed to go up in a pretty linear fashion, do you have any theories as to why this is happening with me? Did I miss something? I keep re-reading your challenge updates, and the only things I haven't done yet are blog commenting (there are next to zero "gay cruise" blogs), Squidoo commenting (did this today, but I have the only gay cruise lens), link exchanges (emailed a few, no response, but didn't go too far with it) and a press release. Do you think a press release is important?

> I'm not seeing backlinks from Squidoo and some other places when I look for them at Yahoo

> Not sure how to identify Twitter traffic as it goes through Tinyurl

Go for some link exchanges with sites ranked well in google for your target keyword phrases and if you can persuade them to give you 1 way links then all the better. It is still a great strategy that is derided by many but I see a lot of success from it. The important thing is to get good links from sites that google respect and a good indicator of ggogle's respect is a site ranked well.

Should I search for gay cruises or "gay cruises?" (Quotes or no quotes)? Also, so many of the page 1 and 2 results are big sites... should I bother with them, or focus on the smaller sites?

I had an aha moment! I used one of those backlink checkers to look at what I have. Now, they're probably not accurate (because they all return different results), but here's what I know now. A lot of the backlinks I have are from blog directories that I submitted to in the beginning. However, the anchor text for all of them says basically my website name, which is yadayadayada.com, and the ones that don't say that say Yada Yada Yada. None of them have the "gay cruises" anchor text that I probably need! So I'm going to try and edit or resubmit to all of them, and hopefully, that'll make some difference.

Strangely, don't see much/anything from ezine, squidoo etc.; i.e. the backlinks I thought would matter or be seen the most.

Absolutely.. You need to let google know what keywords they should rank your site for. They get a good idea from the content on your site and the backlinks are like a vote of confidence. If you can make that vote of confidence in your site via a link from a site Google trusts with some relevant text then that is the way ahead. By the way it doesn't have to from a site in the first 2 pages, look lower than that. If there are some sites in the top 2 pages then brilliant but you are looking for sites that would be willing to exchange links.

Thanks again Steve.

Work update: Spent a few hours emailing websites today for link exchanges. It's Victoria Day here in Canada, so I dunno if everyone's checking their emails. I got two link exchanges right away, which I'm happy about.

Gonna try Steve's recommendation about Firefox + some plugin to find who is linking and contact them.

So I'm getting between 3 and 5 backlinks from emailing people, I suppose that's not that bad. All of the sites have a better pagrank than mine, and the anchor text is "gay cruises" like I want. Looked at Google webmaster tools, and last week, I was position 62 for "gay cruises," but I'm not even on the list at the moment. I'm on page 2 with Yahoo, but seriously, what percentage of web surfers use it?Steve, you said this fluctuates quite a bit, so I won't worry too much about it.

However, I do have a question (yes, I know, I have lots). I'm wondering how traffic actually increases. Is it a result of climbing the SERP? That makes the most sense to me. I look at your cruises blog, and how it picks up traffic on a pretty linear basis, and I'm not seeing that with mine. Do you think it might be because of the lowly Google position?

Second question Steve, how would you advise that I develop the blog further? Continue to add articles, social bookmark them, build backlinks? Any other tips you can give me at this point? Much appreciated.

There are 2 main ways to increase traffic..

1. Rank on page 1 of google for as many keyword phrases as possible.
2. Get as much content on your website as possible.

The two points go pretty much go hand in hand. Traffic and ranking will fluctuate for a new site, it is just something we have to live with. As your domain satrts to age then you will find greater stability and then the real magic happens when Google finally realise that your website is an authority on the gay cruises. It's a trust thing, and the best and only way to build that trust is via good backlinks and time..

Hmm, looks like I missed the point about lots of content. I only have ~50 pages at the moment. That would be a low number of pages, yes?

I guess I'll try to add more then! Thanks again.