Back when I was just starting to blog, trying to social climb with who would turn out to be Manila’s self-proclaimed users influential bloggers, I was not just pushed out to the dark corners of internet pit of the world but would constantly be compared and lambasted that I’d be labeled to be just uberly green with jealousy in terms of ranks. Such has always been the cry. Well, I’m sure given that we have already trounced them on their own standards, proved them wrong, they’d have to come up with another reason to debunk what I will soon tell you.

But let’s not go there yet. Because typically, bloggers who’d cry foul for what I am going to tell you are the ones who are needing some serious social climbing tips from Reyna Elena. What I wanted to share you this time is how to read the Alexa charts and how to use it to make your website a lot more effective.

What’s Alexa? Well it’s a very useful resource for people to discover information about websites. You can use Alexa to discover how popular a site is or use those to improve your website. If you’re a regular here, you would have noticed how Barrio Siete’s Alexa gone wild from 20 million to what you are seeing now as 209,648. I expect that in a few weeks or days, we’d be hitting the sweet 100k mark.

I decided to compare Barrio Siete’s Alexa performance with one of the highly ranked website in the Philippines. Why did I chose that site for comparison? Nothing negative. It was a perfect comparison for my presentation. Very simply. The site is engaged in SEO. We’re not into SEO or we don’t do it. [That's your clue.] The site is up there and Barrio Siete? We’re nowhere near their rank. Which could be seen from this graph.

Daily Traffic Trend

In fact, if you look at the daily reach in percentage, he’s way up there and we could not even get passed that 1 bar.

Daily Reach

But if you look closely, you will notice something. This is the pageviews. What is pageviews? It’s a request to load a single page of your website. And if you look at this graph, there are more requests from Barrio Siete readers to load more pages compared to our sample site.

Daily Pageviews

As a matter of fact, if you look at the pageview per user on a daily basis, now you start to notice something. And that is quite a big difference. It could be telling you of the quality of the content. Now the “quality” means, that you reader finds your content of value to them and so they stay. Others, they stick around for more or they come back.

Daily Pageviews Per User

What is going on? You might ask. Well, it could be on the bounce rate. And what is bounce rate? Well, in “English” it means, a web site visitor only views a single page on your website, then leaves the site without visiting any other pages. So, in other words, the higher the bounce rate, the more you should take a shower and put on some perfume and paint some makeup because they don’t like you. Once they land on your page, off they leave – in a mouseflash. In our example, you could see a very high bounce rate from this site. You know what that means, there was some form of a “bait” to drive them to their site. But once there, nothing. That’s why they leave. That “bait”? Those are SEO tricks.

Bounce Rate

To prove that the high bounce rate is not good, as you can see from this graph, Barrio Siete lurkers and readers spend more time in the Barrio compare to that site.

Time on Site

You’d ask. Why would they leave so quickly and don’t spend too much time in our sample site? Because these visitors are mostly coming from search engines. In other words, these types of websites are good in putting out some keywords out there as bait to get to their site but not enough quality to offer their visitors to stay and stick. That’s why they come in a flash, they leave in a flash.

Search Visits

What’s the relevance of this?

• First:

You have to re-think about your strategies and what your blog offers. If you are getting that many visitors in your blog, what are they looking for? Are you giving them that information? Or better still, are you able to? Do you have the necessary quality content? The most important question is that, can you convert that information to a click or a value? If not, then you better start cranking out that keyboard and start to deliver otherwise your bounce rate will continue to remain very high. They’ll leave you as fast as they arrived.

• Second:

If you’re trying to be an SEO expert, then be an SEO expert and do what SEO people do. Otherwise, you’d be wasting that traffic if you can’t convert. The bottom line for traffic is conversion and that’s what SEO people does.

• Third:

If you’re into SEO, this is like fishing. Once you get them on you net, your next challenge is to convert. How effective you are in conversion could be determined by your $ haul every month.

By your Resident Alexa Consultant:



La Kapitana de’l Barrio Siete
~Manghuhula din po po ako at bumabasa nang palad.~



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