I integrated(*) the Thesis WordPress theme to this blog 30 days ago. Granted, 30 days isn’t a long time, but it’s long enough to begin to look at some data. In particular, I want to see if what the makers of Thesis claim is true – that inherently it will help SEO performance out-of-the-box.

* The theme is up-and-running, but obviously I haven’t done anything to customize the design. Work comes first, you understand.

Here’s what good old Google Analytics reports for thew 30 days since Thesis was integrated:

Basic Data:
Traffic: UP 39%
Pageviews: UP 40%
Pages per visit: UP 0.5%
Bounce Rate: DOWN 5%

It’s always nice to see traffic up. I’m not pleased about the bounce rate actually getting worse, but all of the other high-level numbers are going in the right direction. At first glance, bounce rate got worse most likely because I haven’t done anything to incorporate my brand into the blog and don’t have a really great call-to-action.

Let’s look a little deeper – into some SEO indicators to see if Thesis is actually delivering new traffic from the search engines:

Organic search traffic (all search engines): UP 7%
Google organic search traffic: UP 8%
Yahoo! organic search traffic: DOWN 15%
Bing organic search traffic: DOWN 26%

Pages per visit from organic traffic: DOWN 11%
Bounce rate for organic traffic: DOWN 13%

So…overall organic traffic is up, but it’s down on Yahoo! and Bing fairly significantly. And again, it looks like the engagement metrics have gone in the wrong direction. This data points to the fact that I need to do more to make this blog more sticky.

Here are a few qualifiers to go with the data:

• The data compares the last 30 days to the previous 30 days
• I try to blog once a week. In the first 30 days I posted 3 times. In the most recent 30 days I posted 5 times.
• When I integrated Thesis, I stopped using “All In One SEO” and opted to use Thesis’ built in SEO tools.

After 30 days of having Thesis integrated it looks like traffic is a little better, but engagement is down. At this point, Thesis’ claim that it works well for SEO out-of-the-box appears to be true – it definitely didn’t hurt (which can happen when you change your internal SEO Structure like I did). My best guess for the downside is a lack of engagement. Readers are not feeling compelled to click on other posts and visit other pages once they finish reading the first post they read.

How do you interpret the numbers? Have you integrated Thesis on your blog? What happened to your traffic? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Quick update for Brand5 Blog readers – I’m also going to be writing for Outright’s Community. Outright is a free automated bookkeeping software for entrepreneurs & bookkeepers. It’s an awesome product that I wish had been around when I started my business more than 6 years ago.

I hope to post there a couple of times per week, so make sure you check out what I have to say over there as well as here.

My first post is actually already up. I talk about what a pain it is to have to pay overseas vendors via wire transfers.

Back on July 1, we re-launched this blog after a an 18-month hiatus. We renewed our commitment to writing quality content that we hope will be helpful for business owners. The added hope was that the blog would increase and better our brand’s presence in search. In terms of numbers, our goal was, and continues to be, to write at least 8 blog entries per month.

We now stand at a little over 90 days since the re-launch. It’s a good time to take a step back and look at how the blog is affecting our website’s presence in organic search. Is the blog helping us cast a wider net (like it should)? Is it too early to tell?

I assembled some really interesting and telling statistics for brand5.com taken from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. They compare the three months prior to the blog’s relaunch (April 1 – June 31) to the three months since the relaunch (July 1 – September 30):

TRAFFIC
71% increase in Overall Traffic
391% increase in Organic Traffic
373% increase in Google Organic Traffic
480% increase in Yahoo Organic Traffic
1,650% increase in Bing Organic Traffic
Assessment: These are all very encouraging numbers. Let’s be honest, Brand5 doesn’t attract rediculous traffic. So it’s not like this increase has us scrambling for more servers. Nonetheless, these are really serious increases for us. More traffic means more chances for business. This is exactly what we want.

SITE USAGE
1% increase in Pageviews
15% increase in Bounce Rate
48% decrease in Average Time Spent on the website
Assessment: This is really valuable stuff. I was surprised that Pageviews weren’t significantly higher. If you look deeper into the numbers, you can see what’s happening. People are finding our blog entries through search. They are not entering the site via our home page (which would probably lend itself to longer visits with more pages viewed). They read the blog entry and they leave. This is hugely important for us because it tells us we aren’t doing enough to keep people on our site. We aren’t doing enough to either tie-in our services or to get people to read other blog entries. We’re going to address this from now on and see what happens to the numbers.

KEYWORD STRENGTH
398% increase in traffic that came from non-paid search
402% increase in the number of keywords that bring traffic to the website (for example, “web developers”)
Assessment: This shouldn’t be surprising. This tells us that our blog entries are being indexed and that people are finding them through organic search. That’s what should be happening. Between our SEO knowledge and WordPress’ search-engine friendly makeup, this should happen for everyone if they crank out quality content consistently.

VALUABLE KEYWORDS
Because of it’s popularity and importance to our industry, we’ve tried hard to gain a presence for the keyword “website development”. In April, our website was nowhere to be found. It received zero impressions. In September, it gave us the most impressions of any keyword and yielded a whopping 25% click-thru rate. Our average position for that terms had increased from oblivion to 20. It’s not on page 1, but we are inching closer.
Assessment: This is really good news. We’re starting to make a dent in our most valued keywords. This is also a reminder that this is a process. It takes time. While what we’ve seen in 90 days is encouraging, it’s going to take perhaps 3-6 more months to get the type of penetration we want.

Overall, we are proving that consistently blogging quality content can help a website’s fundamentals. I look forward to keeping you posted of our case in future months.

Have you been tracking similar stats for your blog? Let’s talk about your results in the comment section below.

Ever wonder if anyone clicked the link you included in a Twitter post? Wonder no more. Try bit.ly.

bit.ly is an extremely simple-to-use tool that shortens URLs. As a result, it makes sharing links via Twitter or Facebook even easier. That’s valuable because sharing quality and helpful content is important for your credibility. Best of all, it allows you to track have many people clicked on your link and if they have reTweeted your Twitter post.

Here’s an example of how and when to use bit.ly. Let’s say I wanted to publicize my latest blog post over twitter.

The real URL is this: http://www.brand5.com/blog/best-wordpress-plugins.

If i go to bit.ly and paste that URL into the “shorten” box at the top of the page, bit.ly will shorten the URL to something like this: http://bit.ly/pLtfh.

You’ll notice that both links go to the same page on my blog. By shortening the link to my post, bit.ly saved me a whole bunch of characters to write more in my Twitter post – which is crucial when I am limited to only 140 character per post.

But the coolest part of bit.ly is the tracking feature. After I create a link, I can tell how many people clicked it and if anyone else reTweeted my link through their own Twitter account.

Here’s an example of a tracking report from a Twitter post we did for a client of ours, Easy Estimated Taxes right around the September 15 estimated tax deadline:

This report shows that Twitter post received 141 clicks. It also shows the breakdown of those clicks by day. If someone had reTweeted this post or if it had ended up on FriendFeed, I would have seen it on this page under “Conversations”.

So from now on, every time you want to share a link, track it through a bit.ly account (setup an account).  Then keep an eye on how many of your readers click and circulate your links.

Watching your clicks will help you do two important things:
1. Learn what topics your audience wants to know more about. High click amounts will tell you what’s popular.
2. Write more enticing Twitter posts  – you’ll determine what makes those links attractive enough for people to want to click. That’s a skill. No one will click a link unless they think there’s value for them at the other end.

Let me know how what you think of bit.ly.

In case you aren’t one of the cast of thousands (slightly exaggerated) that regularly reads the great content we generate here, a blog adds a lot of SEO value to your website. If you don’t have a blog as part of your current content strategy, then you need to set one up. As always, I recommend WordPress.

Once you have a WordPress blog, I highly recommend you socialize it – make it easy for people to spread your content virally through social media. If you don’t socialize your content, it’s going to sit on an island waiting for the search engine to rescue it. Socializing can bring your blog traffic it probably wouldn’t otherwise get.
Think about it this way – most social media sites (Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon) have way more users than your site ever will. Don’t try to compete. Instead, make your content available to more people through those different mediums and bring in extra traffic.

Besides this blog, we’ve setup some other blogs for clients (here’s the most recent). In doing so, we’ve had a chance to try most of the plugins available.

Here’s a review of some of the ones we’ve used:

Disqus Comment System (download)
From my experience, this is the best commenting system available. If you want comments on your blog, you need to use this. There are a lot of features, but the coolest part is that it integrates with Facebook and Twitter. That means that commentors can elect to have their comments automatically post to the Facebook wall or Twitter account.  From a moderator’s perspective, you can either approve all comments or let them all ride. You can also build your own commenting profile that works all over the web on other sites that use the same commenting system.

TweetMeme ReTweet Button (download)
I rank this plugin as a “must-have”. First of all, Twitter is the hottest thing out there and is not going away anytime soon. If your readers are on Twitter, this is the most effective way to make your content re-tweetable. What’s cool is that you can easily see who else has ReTweeted your content by just clicking the grey box. This week they just added an analytics program (with a 30 day free trial) that sounds like it might be valuable.

Facebook Share Count (download)
I first saw this being used on Mashable. It’s just one click to post a blog entry onto your Facebook wall. And the counter updates pretty much right away. Out of all of the Facebook plugins I’ve tried so far, this is the best one.

ShareThis (download)
This plugin adds a little button to the beginning or end of your blog post that allows people to share your content with virtually any bookmarking or social media site available. I used to think this one was really cool because it’s so comprehensive. But from what I’ve seen, it offers too many choices. Plus, only really techy people know what it is (and click on it). Also, this one is kind of a pain to install. You need to wait to get an email from the developer and then paste some code into the settings in WordPress. For these reasons I have switched to Sociable.

Sociable (download)
This is my pick of the moment for plugins that allow you to share your content. I like it’s simplicity. As a reader, you see the logos of the site you want to share it on, and click it. No scrolling to find the one you want. This too has the option to add share buttons for seemingly every single bookmark website out there. The difference between this and ShareThis is that it’s way easier to pick which ones you want included on your lineup.
Give these plugins a try and let me know what you think. I’d also love to hear about any other you’ve tried and either liked or disliked.

Does your business have a Facebook Fan Page? If not, you should consider creating one. It’s a very valuable way to connect to your customers amongst an incredibly committed user base (more than 300 million active users and growing fast).

If you do have a Fan Page, do you promote it either on your website or blog with a Fan Box? A Fan Box is a little snippet of code that you can paste into your website or blog. Here’s an example:

A Fan Box is the perfect way to drive awareness of your Fan Page. More importantly, you will get more fans!

Here’s a real-world example from Matt Hasselbeck, one of our clients. Just before the first game of the NFL season on September 13, we added a Fan Box to his home page. At that time, he had 2,716 fans. According to Insights, a handful of users became fans every week prior to adding the Fan Box.

Since we added the Fan Box, his fan base has jumped to 3,023 (as I write this). That’s better than a 11 percent increase in just over two weeks. Since we launched his Fan Page in early 2008, there’s never been a spike like this.

Here’s a screenshot of the chart over that same time from Insights.

It shouldn’t be too hard to believe that promotion raises awareness which leads to more “conversions”, especially with something like a Facebook Fan Page. Fan Pages are still relatively obscure. And, people don’t really know where to go to find them for their favorite brands.

So if you have customers on Facebook, connect with them through a Fan Page. Make sure you use a Fan Box to publicize to your customers your presence on Facebook. Once you do that, watch for your numbers of fans to increase.

Bear with me on this one.

In response to my post about the importance of a having a blog, people have asked me if adding a blog to a website is like putting a bandage on SEO wound.

My response: it’s actually more like a wig. A wig can change, and even improve someone’s appearance, but it doesn’t cure baldness.

In an ideal world, a blog complements a website that is already intuitive and informative. The blog’s content is completely original, helping the website cast a wider net in the search engines for that business’ most valued keywords.

But the world is not always ideal. When it comes to spending money to improve a website’s search engine positioning, a lot of companies either can’t reinvest in a revamped website that includes a new blog or they just don’t want to make the effort to do both. In cases where a website has poor SEO fundamentals and history, then the addition of a blog is like throwing a wig on. It will help, but it doesn’t undo mistakes previous made when the website was launched.

The bottom line is this: the value that a blog brings to the table from an SEO-perspective can’t be argued. Whether a blog is added to a website that is performing well or poorly in the search engines, it will bring value by way of more indexed paged, traffic, and links.

This is a quick follow-up to my last post about why your website needs a blog. There are a lot of tips I could write about blogging. Here are some of the most basic, and valuable, tips I share with business owners who ask me about blogging.

If you are planing to add a blog, or even if you have a blog already, keep these tips in mind:

1. Allow and encourage commenting. It’s the best way to get to know your readers. Remember, they may very well be potential customers or future partners. I highly recommend a comment management system called Disqus.

2. Treat comments like a conversation. Don’t let comments sit unanswered. Thank people for commenting and give them feedback. After all, they’ve taken time out of their day to write something for you to read.

3. Pay attention to your META data. Just like you already do on the rest of your website, be sure to use your most valuable keywords in each post URL.

4. Get on a regular content schedule. The worst mistake you can make is start a blog and then ignore it. Start off small, maybe by posting once a week, and expand as much as time allows.

5. Be social. Make sure you give your readers a way to follow your blog through an RSS feed (Feedburner is great). Also, give them a simple way to virally spread your post via sites like Twitter, Facebook or Digg.

I hope these tips are helpful. Good luck with your blog!

Are you debating the value of adding a blog to your website? Hubspot recently posted results from a blog study that you need to consider. This post is essentially a recap of the study.

The study included websites for more than 1,500 small and medium sized businesses. The results were very clear cut – your website needs a blog. And the more you can blog, the better!

Check out these numbers:

1. Websites that have a blog received 55% more traffic. Makes sense, right? The more quality content a website has (i.e., the more pages in that website’s library of pages), the more opportunities for links and landing pages. Even more important: the more traffic, the more chances for conversions.
2. Websites with blogs had 97% more inbound links. Stop right there. You don’t need to know anything else. If links are like gold in the world of SEO and blogs deliver that many more links, then you need to blog as soon as you’re done reading this post.
3. Lastly, websites with blogs wracked up 434% more indexed pages. This one’s a no-brainer. The more quality pages created, the higher the amount of pages that are indexed. But the key thing to remember here is that Google likes sites with lots of original, quality content. So the more pages indexed, the better.

I realize this hardly qualifies as breaking news. But if you don’t have a blog on your website, you seriously need to consider adding one right away. There are clear benefits from an SEO perspective that you need to start leveraging. If you do have a blog and it’s neglected, find the necessary resources and start adding as much quality content as you can.