What this means for your small business website is that your customers are probably (*) spending a decent slice of their time searching for stuff (hopefully your stuff) on Twitter, rather than the traditional search engines.

So -  it’s important to keep your tweets as search-friendly as possible. This comes down to using keywords in your tweets and tweeting often about useful stuff.

Drilling down into the numbers a bit, it seems that a lot of the searches are not done at Twitter at all but by Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. There’s also a decent number of searches from widgets on web pages that do continuous search of keywords, users, and so on. This doesn’t change things though and it’s definitely time to start thinking about how search-friendly your tweets are.

(*) Of course your customers may not be on Twitter at all!

So it’s probably a good time to start checking your site speed now and plan any improvements that you’ll need to make.

To get you going, here are a few links to try out:

The Site Performance Tab on  Google Webmaster Tools

Try out the Page Speed extension for Firefox

Definitely look at Web Performance Best Practices at Google!

How fast is your site?

Firstly, don’t panic. It doesn’t mean your traffic has actually dropped – it’s just that these different tools use different methods to measure your traffic. Logfile analyzers like AwStats look at the actual activity on your server and track the downloads of every single file – full pages, images, PDFs, scripts and so on. Google Analytics uses a tiny piece of Javascript on each page and tracks opens of full pages from visitors browsers.

Here are some factors that can make the results from these systems different:

• Robots (like Googlebot) don’t run Javascript so these visits won’t show up in Google Analytics
• Browsers cache website pages (i.e. keep a local copy on the computer) so they don’t always have to download pages that visitors read often. If this happens the web page view won’t show up at all on a log file (AwStats). Google Analytics can track the page view though because it runs on the browser
• Some browsers have Javascript disabled so Google won’t track any website visits
• Some visitors will have security software that stops Google working

There are pros and cons to each approach and I won’t confuse you with the detail (leave a comment or ask me if you’d like an explanation though!)

The basic message is that Google Analytics probably will show you a smaller number of visitors (maybe even a lot smaller). Many of these missed visits will be from automatic bots that are out there on the net crawling and indexing your site. You probably shouldn’t really care about them anyway, unless you’re worried about your site being indexed.

If you want some proof of this, take a look at a log file from a typical day of activity. Your internet host should provide these for you. Take a look through for robots (try a search for ‘bot’) – you may be surprised how often these visits happen.

Google Chrome

Chrome is Google’s own browser that promotes speed, fast loading pages and (not surprisingly) direct access to search from the address bar. Give it a try – it’s really fast.

The report shows that Firefox usage has dropped for 2 months running. The top browser is Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). IE6 usage is falling but unfortunately has still not reached zero  (I say unfortunately because IE6 is old and has a lot of ‘features’ which mean it doesn’t support certain web standards properly).

So what do these trends mean to you as a website owner? Overall it means more and more different browsers to support, which means that you’ll need to do your homework and ensure your website works well across all of these. It’s good to get to know a few tricks to ensure compatibility across multiple web browsers. Some of the best tips are to start off well with clean code that meets the W3C standards and is validated and free of errors. Use a STRICT DOCTYPE to force browsers to apply the rules properly and test your site on as many different browsers as possible.

The survey is based on a limited sample of 40,000 users and might not reflect your own site. The best way to do this for your website is to check your Google Analytics results under the visitors tab. For example I see Firefox is the most popular browser for one of my technical sites but IE8 is the most popular for my non-techie sites.

One of the most common questions I get from people with small business websites (especially blogs) is “what should I write about?” They know that one of the keys to a successful website is to include lots of high-value content, but struggle to find ideas for new topics. Well, here’s a way to get some great ideas. It’s free, the answers are only a couple of clicks away and they use a nice thing called ‘time on site’…

Why is This Useful?

If you own a small business website then you need to spend your marketing time wisely and this includes time spent creating new content for your website. Rather than guessing at new ideas for content, this technique uses clues that are already there in your website traffic.

Analytics First

The key to this technique is to use the visitor analytics results for your website. If you don’t have analytics already running, you’ll need to install this first and run it for a decent slice of time – probably at least a couple of weeks. Google Analytics is very popular and works well, so I’ll use this as an example.

To install Google Analytics for your site, just head over to www.google.com/analytics and register your site. You’ll need to grab the tracking code and add it to each web page.

What to Look For

You can use the keyword traffic report as inspiration for new content. Just look under Traffic Sources -> Keywords. Take a look down the list of keywords and look for ones which match these criteria:

1. They bring you a decent number of visits already (definitely more than 1)
2. Average time on site is low (probably zero)
3. They’re relevant to your business and your website

The image above shows the ‘time on site’ column in Google Analytics.

OK, so why are these numbers important?

It’s because these keywords are already bringing you some organic search traffic (from Google, bing, etc) but your visitors aren’t finding what they want on your pages.

You might find that these are long tail keywords, and the phrases may not appear word-for-word in your pages. You’ll probably find that the pages where they appear aren’t really focusing on these keywords as a topic. Remember that visitors scan your pages very quickly and may move away if the search term doesn’t appear in the title, or early in the page.

What to Do Next

So now you have some ideas for new keywords and topics to write about. Create some new pages around these keywords, and make sure the pages really are focused around these terms. Use the keywords in the title, and several times in the page content (and as near to the top of the page as possible)

Other Questions and Ideas

Can you use bounce rate too? It depends. Bounce rate shows the number of visitors to a page who exit your site as soon as they’ve read it. You might think that a high bounce rate shows a bad page, but for some websites it’s probably fine. Blogs are a good example of this – your readers probably come to your site to read a new post, and then move away to their next favorite blog.

So what about keywords that are already successful for your site? Maybe you have some of these – lots of visitors AND they spend a long time on your pages (i.e. time on site is high). By all means write some more content around these keywords. This comes under the heading of ‘improving what works already’, which I fully support. You should  see more growth if you target the poorly-performing keywords though.

You might also see the time reported as ‘time on page’ instead of time on site. This is just the page-specific version.

Wrapping It Up

So there you go. This is a nice technique for finding new stuff to write about, and it takes away the guesswork. If you’re a small business website owner I think you’ll find this useful. Have a go and let me know if it works – you can leave a comment below or contact me directly.

[UPDATE: I got a few questions on the 'zero time on site' measurement. How can a visitor get to your site and spend zero seconds here? The answer lies in the way Google Analytics measures time on site. It looks at the time between the first page view on your site and the last page view. If only one page is looked at, there is no second page view so a zero is recorded. Visitors may be spending some time on the page, but this isn't recorded. ]

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Or is it?

In case you haven’t heard, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a technique for making your site appear prominently on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc).

Let’s start with the free bit. Tweaking the tags and the pages and collecting links are great free things you can do to improve your search engine position. Nobody charges you for these so yes, they are free.

The problem here is that this tweaking takes time, and time isn’t free. If you have a business then you should be accounting for the time that you spend. Even if you don’t do this, it’s easy to see how SEO work sucks up a ton of time.

Is it easy to do? I think it’s pretty easy to create links from Squidoo, or digg or forum posts, but once you’ve got a couple of these from the easy sites, it starts to get harder.

If you’re busy on a forum, you can easily collect a lot of links. 100 links from posts on the same forum aren’t really worth much more to Google than one link. So where do truly valuable links come from? From other people’s sites. It’s good if they are buried inside lots of relevant content, and it’s even better if the number of these links grows over time.

So I’d say these types of links are hard to get.

As for success, it depends on factors such as search volume and competition.

You’ve got to choose your keywords really, really carefully to be successful. Vacation rentals tend to have a lot of competition on search results (don’t forget SEO is a popular method, like I said).

Even if you’ve done a great job of choosing your niche it’s pretty hard to translate that into a long tail keyword that come top on search results. Maybe your niche is “I’ve got the only 8 bedroom house by the water in Vancouver and I’m only targeting married couples with 16 children”. Do people type that phrase into Google? I doubt it.

So where does that leave us? As I said, I’ve been thinking about this and I reckon that SEO can be tough for your vacation rental website. It certainly isn’t free. I’m sending some tips to my vacation rental subscribers later today and you can catch them too if you sign up for my free guide.

A good keyword has to be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

4. A term that has very, very low SEO competition

If you can get all of these right, you’ll succeed in the search engines. Another way to put this is that if your keyword doesn’t seem so good for any one of these points, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful.

I’m making a bold assumption here of course (it’s Friday after all). I’m guessing you don’t have a major website with a huge presence like Apple or Google and that you don’t have 10,000 backlinks and a PageRank of 7. Am I right? If you are one of these sites then well done! You can probably let go on a few of the points listed above.

If you’re one of us little guys then read on.

My Four Points listed above might sound a little bit harsh. Why shouldn’t you be able to compete on a nice, simple keyword like iPhone or Gordon Ramsay or 24? A direct answer would be “OK. Have a go then”. I’ll see you in 6 months after you’ve spent all your time collecting links, tweaking pages and checking your Google position.

The point is, you can’t win on these highly popular keywords. There’s too much competition out there. Too many other websites and too many relevant backlinks to these sites. You’ll blow your entire marketing budget and still not get the search traffic that you deserve.

The better approach is to find a niche that you can dominate and build from there. Follow the keyword rules above and you’ll get site that appears high in the search rankings for relevant, good volume keywords. This will help to grab the visitors.

Next time we’ll go into some more detail on why the four points are important, what happens if you don’t follow them and some handy tips to check how you’re doing on each point.

Sounds like one of those cheesy internet marketing ads doesn’t it?

I’m happy to say that this is real though. It’s happened to 3 of my lenses on Squidoo. Oh, and I now have a few PR3 lenses too, so it’s not just a one-off. You can check them all out via my Squidoo lensmaster page

OK. Enough bragging. Why is this good and why should you care about it and how can you do the same?

If you’ve never heard of Squidoo here’s the five second introduction: you get to build a lens (= a page) on any subject you like. Free. You tag it and promote it within Squidoo and it gets rated with a LensRank score. Successful lenses get the benefits of lots of focused traffic and high Google PageRank.

There’s also a Top 100 list. My CSS Background lens is #74 today, so it gets lots of exposure and traffic (another reason to brag by the way. Sorry. I’ll stop now. )

So you should care about this because it can get you a lot of targeted traffic. Targeted traffic equals focused visitors which you stand a great chance of converting to real customers.

You also get a share of Squidoo’s high Google PageRank. The ‘link juice’ flows from the Squidoo site (it has PR8 today) and down into the successful lenses. A high PageRank gets you a high position in Google’s search results and therefore a greater number of organic search visitors.

Things have definitely improved since my first attempts on Squidoo

In short, it’s all good. Now how can you do it?

1. Choose a good niche with decent traffic and low competition. Define some keywords.
2. Try to choose a subject that’s interesting to people who hang around Squidoo
3. Create a high quality lens, full of interesting content, good layout and some nice pictures
4. Choose your Squidoo tags carefully to match your chosen keywords
5. Get promoting!!

Sound easy? I reckon you can do it too. The real trick here is to build something that’s useful, interesting and the highest quality you can make it. Why not have a go?

If you’re thinking of looking into long tail searches (eg vacation rentals) for your site, where do you go to find them? These are the odd combinations of keywords that Googlers look for such as “vacation rental with extra barbeque”. They give you insight into what people are looking for.

There are some great resources for this, such as the free version of Wordtracker or Google Suggest. Just type in your basic keyword (vacation rentals here) and you’ll get a list of combinations. The many long combinations at the end are the long tail.

The problem with this idea is that you get a public list. It’s also a list of general searches, rather than something specific to your site.

It’s better to look at your own website visitors. What combinations are they looking for? Your analytics tool such as Google Analytics will tell you what keywords brought people to your site. That’s the big difference

This information is incredibly valuable and you can use it to find out what makes your site unique. I’ll bet there are some combinations in there that you never expected!!