Over the years, I’ve discussed a lot of ideas to help your business flourish online and today I’m going to show you what it looks like when it all comes together.

The East Cobber is a free local magazine in Marietta, GA that was created back in 1993, and they’ve had an online presence for nearly a decade.  However, with the ongoing shift from print to digital, they realized the the site could do so much more.  Last year they enlisted the help of Green Mellen Media, and the results have been amazing.  Here is a chart showing their growth since the new site launched last fall.

The beginning of that chart is October, 2010, when they had 1,509 visitors.  Last month they had a total of 16,498.  For a year over year comparison, they had 1,691 visitors in May 2010, and then the 16,498 in May 2011 — an increase of 875% in a single year!  Even better, this wasn’t from a brand new site; this was a very well-established site from a popular magazine.  So what made the difference?  There were quite a few things, but here are some of the big ones.

WordPress

We moved the entire site over to WordPress, which helped with quite a few things.  It not only made it easier for them to publish articles, but WordPress has excellent Search Engine Optimization by design.  Using a StudioPress-powered theme helped even more, as they add some additional SEO tweaks to the mix.  Here is their incoming traffic from search engines over the past eight months:

Content

This is the big key.  Rather than posting a few articles each month when the new issue came out, they’re posting multiple stories every day to keep the community informed of local news and events.  They’ve published over 2,900 entries since the new site went live, making them a true hub in the community.

Social

I recently pointed out how you can’t fake your way to social media success, and they’re an example of social media done right.  Their Facebook page auto-posts some new items from the site, but they’re quick to respond to comments and often run contents to give away prizes from area businesses.  They’ve gone from just a few hundred likes on the page to well over 1,000 and it continues to grow quickly.

The key here is that they work hard at it.  People are always looking for shortcuts, but the East Cobber folks simply got to work and are engaging with the community daily.  We’ve given them some tools to help make it easier, but there is no substitute for actually diving in and connecting with people.

The Little Things

Little things can add up too:

• We didn’t put our name in their footer in order to help them rank as well as possible in Google.  The results above speak for themselves.
• They post a new photo of the day on their home page every day to keep things fresh.
• They trusted us and we trusted them.  When we assured them that a feature or idea wouldn’t work, they believed us.  When they told us that their readers were interested in certain topics, we believed them.
• We used most of my favorite WordPress plug-ins, plus a few others to help add additional functionality to the site.
• We use Google Analytics (which generated the charts above) see what content people read the most, what needs to be improved, etc.

The magic solution

People are often looking for the magic solution to put their online business on autopilot, but things just don’t work that way.  A properly configured site, using a solid platform, with lots of hard work put into building content and the community, can lead to a very successful site.

Traffic is continuing to grow for them, and I expect it will for some time.  Congratulations to Cynthia and her team for such great success over the past year!

How to make it all come together is a post from: MickMel

Three years ago I wrote up a list of my favorite plug-ins, and decided that it was well past time to give the list a fresh look.  While many of them have stayed the same, I’ve got a few additions and a few deletions.

The ones that stayed the same

These plug-ins have certainly been updated in the past few years, but remain part of every blog I manage:

Akismet – Amazingly awesome spam fighting plugin.

FeedBurner Feedsmith – I still run all of my blog RSS feeds through FeedBurner, and this is a great plug-in to quietly redirect visitors over there.

Google XML Sitemaps – A simple way to generate an XML sitemap and automatically notify search engines of your new posts.

Highlight Author Comments – Make your replies stand out when you reply to comments on a post of yours.

Subscribe to Comments – Allow users to get email notifications of new posts after they leave one.  I love when blogs have this, so I can be notified if someone replies to my comment and then we can continue the conversation.

The ones that I’ve moved away from

Here are the plug-ins that I no longer use regularly, for one reason or another:

All in One SEO Pack -Most of the themes that I use (typically from StudioPress) have great SEO baked right in and this is less important.

Enhanced WP Contact Form – I’ve switched to Wufoo for virtually all of my forms.

Fancy Zoom – I still use it from time to time, but most themes have better image management.

Top Commentators – This isn’t really a bad plug-in, I simply don’t use it any more.

Sociable – I’ve removed this in favor of Twitter and Facebook-specific plug-ins, shown below.

Twitter Tools – I now use dlvr.it to handle this instead, but I use it rather sparingly; be fresh on Twitter, not automated!

WordPress.com Stats – Still a great plugin, and I use it on a few blogs, but I primarily rely on Google Analytics.

The new additions!

I’ve dropped some plug-ins, but also added some new ones over the past few years such as:

Canonical URL’s – A very simple plug-in to add the canonical tag to your pages.  Not overly helpful in many cases, but can be excellent for your SEO sometimes.  (What is the canonical tag?)

PuSHPress – This enabled PuSubHubbub support for your blog. In short, it makes sure that RSS readers and others will get your posts instantly, rather than the next time they check in a few hours.  (more about the PuSHPress plugin)

RSS Footer – This adds a line of text (with a few links) the bottom of each post in your RSS feed.  The basic idea is that if someone is scraping your site and posting it as their own, you’ll at least still get some free links back to your site!

Twitter Button for WordPress – A simple way to add a “tweet” button to your posts.

WP FB Like Button – A simple way to add a Facebook “like” button to your posts.

WPtouch – A great plug-in that creates a mobile version of your site and automatically serves it to mobile phones when they connect.

You?

What about you?  Any other killer plugins that I’m missing from the list?

My favorite WordPress plug-ins is a post from: MickMel

I was talking to @jasonbhuffman on Twitter about search engine optimization on his church site, and he told me this:

I was informed that on Google, more clicks on a particular site would cause it to be listed higher in certain searches.

Google won’t confirm or deny whether or not clicks can help, so know one knows for sure, but most experts agree with the following:

• Clicks from Google search result pages possibly help. If you come up fourth for a particular phrase, yet more people click your result than the third listing, it seems there’s a chance you could move up.
• Clicks from other pages (like Twitter) to your site are unlikely to help. While Google can often see clicks from other sites via the Google toolbar or Google Analytics installed on your site, it doesn’t appear to have an effect on your rankings at this point.

Of course, clicks from sites like Twitter are still certainly excellent, since they’re visitors!  Even if it doesn’t have a secondary benefit, you’re still getting someone on your site, which is the entire goal.

So what can be done?

Jason’s site is First UMC Palestine, so I thought I’d offer a few other on-site SEO tips that might help.  There are really two things that we need to focus on:

1. Make sure that Google is aware that the church is located in Palestine, TX, so they can rank well when people refine their search to that area (like “churches in palestine tx”).
2. Make sure pages focus on their primary content, so Google will know when to show those pages.  As a result, we want to rank well when people search for specific things in the area, like “palestine preschool” or “vbs in palestine”.

So, here’s a few things that should help:

• First, clean up the page titles.  The title on the home page is incredibly long, and titles on the internal pages are missing some nice keywords.
• Add more internal links. For example, the list of worship services on the left side of the home page should link to details about those searches.  Use the main text on each page to link to other relevant pages, but do it naturally.  If you mention the preschool, link to that page, but don’t try to force extra links in there.
• Build separate pages for each staff member, with the full list of them on the main “staff” page.
• Avoid saying “click here”, which I noticed in a few places.  Link the relevant text every time.
• Keep posting great blog entries.  Each of those have the potential to pull in some visitors from Google, especially if we can get the page titles cleaned up so that each one has more of a “palestine” pull to it.
• Remove the link to the “Arras Theme” in the footer.  They allow you to remove it, but I agree that you should give them a small donation in exchange for it ($10?). Here’s why that will help.
• Get more links pointed to your site.  Our link at the top of this article will help, but now you need a bunch more as well.  Get church members to add a link from their personal blogs, see if any Palestine-centric sites (Chamber of Commerce, etc) will link to you.  Any inbound link will help.

Over time, those should help you rank better.  You don’t appear to have Google Analytics installed, so I hope you have some way of accurately tracking your traffic to see how things change and improve.

More clicks = better rankings in Google? is a post from: MickMel

Most of my clients use Google Analytics.  In fact, most people I meet online use Google Analytics.  However, many of them don’t know how to use it.

While Google Analytics is incredibly powerful and can be complicated, there are some simple things you can look at to get an idea of how your site is performing, which pages are being viewed the most, etc.  I hope the video below will help you to get into Analytics and check it out.

Please note that this video requires that you already have Analytics installed.  While installing it isn’t especially difficult, it can vary quite a bit from site to site depending on what platform you’re using (WordPress, Joomla, some other CMS, plain HTML, etc).  Feel free to contact me if you’re having trouble getting started and I’ll be happy to help you out, and then check out the video below for tips on how to use it.

What other ways do you use Google Analytics?  Did I miss one of your favorite metrics? Leave a comment and let everyone know.

Update: This video is now also available over at A Brighter Web

The basics of Google Analytics is a post from: MickMel

A few weeks back, the popular comic strip xkcd posted an image titled “University Website“.  It was simply a Venn diagram that showed the difference between what universities put on the front of their website versus what users actually came to their site to find.

Your church site is likely the same way.

In reviewing a handful of church websites over the last week (and checking out dozens of others), I’ve found that many of them carry common traits that aren’t helpful to users.  Here’s some of what I found.

Unnecessary clutter on the front of church websites

• Links to conference/denomination affiliation sites. Your average church member doesn’t come to your site looking for a link to umc.org, and I can promise that a first-time visitor isn’t interested in that either.  Being proud of your denomination is certainly great, but not as a primary item on the home page.
• Hit counters. These are a relic of the past; they slow down your site loading speed, draw attention away from your content, and provide no real useful metrics for your church.  Install something like Google Analytics instead.
• Upper Room devotional. Churches love to put Upper Room stuff on their site.  There’s certainly no problem with that, but not on your home page.
• Auto-playing music. This isn’t good on any site, but churches seem to be the worst offender.  Never play audio of any kind for a user unless they specifically request it (when they click a video, etc).
• Big photo of their building. I just mentioned this again yesterday, but I can’t say it enough.  While I’ve always said that a nice “facility” page is a great thing to include so that people know what the building looks like, but people need to come first.  Show smiling faces, not rows of bricks.
• Online Giving. While you certainly want to make it easy for people to give online, don’t make this too much of a focus.  If you must include it on the home page, make sure it’s near the bottom.  Better yet, put it in a sub-page somewhere so you can keep the home page as clutter-free as possible.
• Mission Statements. While a focused mission statement is important for a church to have (and follow), it likely doesn’t belong on the home page.  Most mission statements have roughly the same concept (Love Jesus and Serve Others), and they simply add clutter to your page.  I expect to be able to find it when I browse around the site, but consider it carefully before you add it to your home page.

What people really want to find quickly on church websites

• Service times. They should certainly be on the front page, and ideally on every page (perhaps in a sidebar).  In addition, I should be able to click any of the services that you list and get more information about it.
• Location/directions. Every page should include information about where you’re located, and that should always be linked to a “directions” page to help people get there.
• General contact information. At the very least, including phone and email on the front page.  Your full “contact” page should also include your address, Twitter account, Facebook Page, and any other means that might be a useful way for someone to get in touch with you.
• Staff Members. This doesn’t need to be on the front page, but needs to be easy to find.  A typical location would be a subpage under the “About Us” section.
  • If your church has more than 2-3 staff members, then build out a section devoted to your staff; a page that lists them all, with links to details on every one of them.
  • On the detail page, include a photo, phone number, email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  If I’m new to a church and I know I need to find the youth minister after the service, I’d LOVE to have a nice photo to look at beforehand so I know what they look like.
• Upcoming Events. Include a few upcoming events on the home page, and link each one to more details.
  • Don’t tell me “Bible Study on Wednesday at 6pm”.  For who?  Where is it?
  • If you tell me “Men’s Bible Study on Wednesday at 6pm in the Fellowship Hall”, I still expect a link for more details.  What age men?  Where is the Fellowship Hall?  Always provide a link with more information.
• Sermon Series. Some people (especially existing members) will come to the site to learn about the current sermon series, or to download notes or MP3s from recent sermons.  A quick blurb or icon on the home page with a link to more info is usually a good idea.

What did I miss? Anything you find particularly annoying on church sites?  Anything that is often missing?

Don’t be like a “University Website” is a post from: MickMel

As of today, Google Analytics is now showing “Chrome” as a browser type in Google Analytics.  Visits from Chrome users over the last few days will be retroactively updated to show their use of Chrome over the next few days.

We’re showing Chrome usage at over 10% on this blog for the last three days, but webmaster/SEO blogs would certainly be skewed a bit high for something like that.  It’ll be very interesting to see what the numbers look like in a few weeks.

What percent of visitors on your blog are using Chrome?

Chrome now listed as a browser type in Google Analytics is a post from: MickMel

BlogStorm has an excellent post today about something very simple you can do to help protect your site.

The problem, as they see it:

Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.

I agree with them — it’s a substantial issue.  The bigger problem is that many sites don’t realize they’ve been hacked for a quite while; often they only realize it when their traffic from Google dries up.

If you get hacked, Google will stop sending traffic to your site but they won’t tell you about the problem.  However, you can build a few simple Google Alerts to notify you instead.  BlogStorm suggests you set up and alert that looks like this:

viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:mickmelseo.com

If you get hacked even a little bit, one of those terms is bound to appear.  If it does, Google will let you know about it very quickly and you can dig in and fix the problem.

I’ve used Google Alerts for a while now to notify me of any news items that might have slipped past my Twitter and RSS reading, but this is a new take on it.  It’s simple and effective.  Great tip!

Get notified if your site gets hacked is a post from: MickMel

GreekBrief.TV has a short video clip that introduces Woopra, a new analytics client. It’s similar to Google Analytics, StatCounter and others of that nature, but does a few things very differently:

• Stats are delivered to a client that you install on your PC.
• Stats are shown in real-time, with details about each visitor.
• You can initiate a chat session with visitors on your site!

The site is open and you can create an account, but you are not yet able to add any websites or download the software, so I don’t have any firsthand experience to share. Once I get in, I’ll be sure to post my thoughts.

I don’t expect that this will replace Google Analytics, but I think it might complement it very nicely. Check out the video below for a bit more about Woopra.

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

Woopra looks awesome is a post from: MickMel

About two weeks ago, Google added an option to include your Analytics data into their beta benchmarking program. Today, that data is now available for use for those that opted in.

From analytics, you simply go to [Visitors] –> [Benchmarking (Beta)] and the data will appear. By default it compares your site to “All sites of similar size”, which is of little value. You can click the [Open category list] to choose a category for your site, after which it will compare you to sites of a similar size within that category. Much better!

Most categories have a handful of subcategories, and look something like this:

• Entertainment
  • Music
    • Lyrics and tabs
    • Musical Instruments
    • Music Streams and Downloads
  • Movies
  • TV
    • TV Programs
• Home and Garden
  • Home Furnishings
  • Home Improvement
  • Gardening
  • Home Appliances
  • Homemaking and Interior Decor

All told, there are 28 top-level categories and untold numbers of sub-categories.  I wondered how Analytics would determine what sites to benchmark mine against, and there is the answer.

For an example of the data you get, here is a screen from our church website, showing data similar to our weekly trends (high on Monday, slow decline through the week):

The data goes back as far as February 8. It’s kind of a shame, as I was curious how other NFL sites looked around the Super Bowl when compared to mine.

How do you think a webmaster could best use this data to improve their own site?

Benchmarking now live in Google Analytics is a post from: MickMel

Google Analytics is something that I use on every site of mine.  A few of them employ other analytics beyond that, but they all use Google Analytics for a baseline.

Today, Analytics is adding “industry benchmarking” to their site.  If you choose to opt-in, this will do two things:

1. Share your site statistics with other sites (anonymized, of course).
2. Allow you to compare your data with other sites in your industry.

Why should you care?  It makes it easier to determine whether your stats are up/down because of an industry-wide trend of if it’s something unique to you.

For example, suppose your traffic yesterday was much lower than normal.  You could open analytics and then see that all of the traffic in your industry was lower.  From there, you could figure out why (holiday, etc) and not stress out about it so much.

This feature will require you to opt-in — it won’t be enabled automatically (which is a good thing, privacy-wise).  I’m still not seeing this option available in my Analytics, so please post in the comments when you see it in yours.

Google Analytics is adding Industry Benchmarking is a post from: MickMel