Make Money from Blogs » Analysis

WordPress Plugin: Adding Google Analytics functionality to your pages

ashish — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 08:00:11 +0000

For those of you who do not know of it yet, getting data from Google Analytics is an important of your overall strategy. By integration of the code from Google Analytics, you are able to get a lot more information about your visitors, and do the analysis about which techniques work, and which techniques don’t work. Given all this, people find the process of installation still tough enough that they keep on putting off installing the code. How about doing the installation of Google Analytics via a plugin ?
Well, here is a solution. Refer to the “Google Analytics for WordPress” Plugin for WordPress available at this page.
What does this plugin do ?
This plugin easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code (the new ga.js one!) to all pages within your blog.
This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article.
It also adds the possibility to track just the domain, instead of the complete link, so you get a better view of how much traffic you’re sending where.
By enabling AdSense click tracking, your AdSense clicks are tracked to /outbound/asclick.
By default Google Analytics only tracks a select group of search engines, which might not include your local big search engine. With this plugin, you can add extra search engines to those Google Analytics tracks by default!

Optimizing your WordPress account – 2

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:09:48 +0000

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your WordPress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your WordPress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your WordPress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since WordPress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are – LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, WordPress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP’s Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) – Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on WordPress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on WordPress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.

Getting some quick information on your site – Analytics

ashish — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:54:23 +0000

When you run a site, getting accurate information and statistics about your sites viewers is very important, and people use a combination of measures such as installing the Google Analytics Program, or using a conter program such as Sitemeter.com. Such information helps them to find out where people are visiting their site from (their users geographic location), which section of the sites are more popular, what are the top referrers that people use to find their site (through search engines, through links on other sites, and so on). I regularly use these programs to ferret out such information and have learned much. As an example:
- I discovered that Google Search is absolutely essential in order to get viewers to your site
- A number of referrers to my sites have been through email programs, which essentially means that people are forwarding the subscription mails they receive when a new post is made, and encourages me to get effective subscription tools in place
- I often get surprised about which posts are most popular, and this helps determine that users think differently from what we expect, and also reinforces the belief that using such analytics tools is a necessary part of running a site

Apart from these tools, I also use another tool for generating information about how popular the site is on several parameters:
- How has the performance of the site been in getting number of users over the last few months (have more people started visiting, vs. have a lower number of people started visiting)
- How many sites link to this site (important for generating a better result in search engine results)
- Identifying keywords (very important in terms of defining which keywords should be emphaized in posts)

So, which is this tool that I use ? It is a site, called siteinfo on Alexa, at the following link : http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo. Suppose you have a site about Indian politics called Indiapoliticalblog.com, and you wanted to find out its result on Alexa, you just need to add the site URL (without the http: //), so that you end up with the following URL: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/indiapoliticalblog.com

Yahoo’s Site Explorer

ashish — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:11:03 +0000

Google is the most popular search engine right now, and it is the biggest target for folks wanting to get their blogs / sites up on the online net and have more people visit their site. One of the biggest factors for making a site or a blog successful is if you can get your site to appear in the first page of Google Search results.
In the midst of all this, we totally ignore the other search engines, including Yahoo Search. Yahoo search is not able to deliver the same kind of traffic as Google Search, but there are a fair number of people using Yahoo search, and the smart site owner will not neglect the promotion of their site / blog on Yahoo as well. Not too many people are aware of the tools used on Yahoo that help Webmasters.
The most important tool that can help is a tool called Yahoo Site Explorer (link). What does the tool do ?

Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool that lets you access the information we have about a site’s online presence. You can see which sites and subpages are indexed by Yahoo! Search, track sites that link into webpage, and view the most popular pages from any site. Use Site Explorer to:

- Find which sites and subpages are indexed by Yahoo! Search!.
- Find pages that link to that site or any page. (inlinks)
- View the most popular pages from any site.
- Submit and track feeds for your sites.

You can get even more detailed information and greater ability to manage a site or its URLs when you authenticate the site. You can:
- Find what subdomains of the site known to Yahoo!.
- See other information Yahoo! detects about your site, such as language.
- Delete URLs that you don’t want indexed by Yahoo!

Finding Blogs that link to your blog

ashish — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:26:31 +0000

Part of the currency of the internet is the concept of linking. The mighty Google PageRank is a very high indicator of the popularity of your blog, and also an indicator of how easily you can find it using Google Search (if your blog comes often in the first page of Google Search, then you can consider yourself to have achieved a major milestone, something that will drive a huge amount of traffic to your blog). Now, from the time that PageRank was a concept in the minds of the founders of Google, it is used as a very important factor in the popularity of your blog. The higher the page rank of your site, the better it is for you.
One of the most important constituent of PageRank is the concept of Page Linking. The more the number of people who link to your blog, the better it is for you with the following caveats;
1. If the people who link to you have a higher PageRank, even better. If you get a link from a site that has a PageRank of more than 5 (and your PageRank is much lower, then you should expect a boost in some time in your own PageRank).
2. If you get people linking to you who are not exactly desirable (people running Warez sites, porn sites, gambling sites, etc), then do not gloat. Links from such sites can be treated negatively, or at the most, treated as without any value.
3. Getting links from link farms is being seen as much more negative and detrimental to placement in search engines, so you should actively reconsider such steps if you are planning to do so.
Now that some broad rules for the linking of other sites to your sites is known, how do you find out other sites that link to your site ? There are 2 common online sites that will help you do this:
1. http://www.google.com – Suppose you are running a site for photography tips such as http://5phototips.com/, then just type the following in the Google search box: link:http://5phototips.com/. This search will find all the blogs that link to your blog
2. Technorati Search. Technorati is a very famous portal that fetches information about blogs. If you want to find out all the blogs that link to your blog, then go to the following page, Advanced Search on Technorati, and go to the URL seach option in the middle of the displayed page. Type in the Blog URL without the http://, so, as in the previous example, type in 5phototips.com and click on Search.
There are other tools that help you find blogs that link to your site, but I have found both of them to be the most useful, hence decided to write this post with these 2.