Jeff Bell | Web Analytics, Web Development, and other interesting things

Recently I had the opportunity to look at the analytics for a potential client. I had been informed that their bounce rate was upwards of 66%! SIXTY SIX PERCENT? – Holy smokes! That means of all the visitors that come to the site, two-thirds of them don’t find the content relative? As I looked at [...]

If you’ve been through the Mindscape Internet Marketing Academy, you know that it’s important to do your keyword research, filter the list based upon your research, and then start changing your on page content elements to work in those keywords.  However, after doing that, how do you know if you’re really gaining any traction?  If [...]

As a service provider, Mindscape often has clients ask us to help “increase awareness.”  As one of the people responsible for wrapping this often-undefined goal in some metrics, I’ve had to figure out what this really means.  Often clients aren’t able to distill this goal down into something measurable but, to gauge our effectiveness, it’s [...]

With Google’s latest Panda update and recent Google Account policy change, search results are becoming more and more customized to user’s individual habits.  As a result, it’s becoming a little more difficult to know exactly what your Google search position is.  You could be position 1 for yourself (c’mon, who doesn’t Google themselves often!?) and [...]

Have you ever had to graph or chart your search engine rank over time, only to find that the results looked less than impressive?  By default, when trying to graph these things in Excel, the picture looks bleak because all of our trend lines go down – toward 1.  We would all love to have [...]

I love using Windows Live Writer to create my blog posts but recently encountered an issue where WLW wasn’t able to connect to my WordPress install.  Have you ever tried to connect WLW to your WordPress installation and received this error? Ahhh – how infuriating!  I tried a million things after reading a half dozen [...]

Every once and a while there are reasons where you may have some site owners who want individual reports for themselves and then some other entity wants to measure each site against the others.  This can often be the scenario in the case of a franchise. Let’s say we have our BigCompany corporate headquarters with [...]

Link tagging is one ninja-like feature built into Google Analytics is surprisingly powerful and rarely used outside of AdWords campaigns.  Link tagging allows you to tag nearly any link with some special values to gain some interesting insights into your traffic sources. To Tag or Not To Tag So, why on earth would someone want [...]

I’ve been in the web development industry for over 10 years and I’ve heard a lot about WordPress.  I never really gave it a second thought as I had always heard it used in the context of a “blogging” engine.  It wasn’t until a client of ours requested that we use WordPress, that I really [...]