There are a good selection of applications available including popular stuff like MSN Messenger, Skype, WinZip and Paint Shop Pro. For each application there are multiple versions available. Take Skype for example, there are downloads available right back to version 0.90 should you want to go back that far!

If you can’t find the version you’re looking for then there is an active forum where you can chat with other members who may be able to help out.

This icon enables your favorite web sites to notify you automatically whenever new content is added. The technical term for this process is RSS.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. Let’s imagine you visit 10 web sites on a regular basis to see if new content has been added. Visiting each of these web sites can be time consuming.

Wouldn’t it be better if these web sites could automatically notify you when fresh content has been added. This fresh content is known as a feed.

How to use a Feed

A feed’s content is read using a feed reader. These feed readers will do the time consuming work of checking all your favorite web sites for fresh content. Some of the more popular feed readers are Google Reader, Bloglines and Rojo.

If you’ve never used a feed reader before then Google Reader is a good place to start. It is free to use. Visit their web site and sign up. Once you’ve signed up you can start subscribing to feeds.

To subscribe to a feed you simply visit any web site, look for an orange icon and click on it. Here is my feed icon.

Try clicking on this icon if you like. A new screen will appear where you can subscribe to my feed. On this screen you select your favorite feed reader, like the ones I mentioned earlier.

Once subscribed to a feed, just sit back and wait for your feed reader to notify you of fresh content. You can either read this new content inside the feed reader, or you can click through to the web site and read the article there.

Other Feed Options

If this sounds too complicated, then you can subscribe to a feed by email instead. Whenever fresh content is added to this web site an email is delivered direct to your inbox.

Try subscribing to this web site by email if you want to give it a go. Enter your email address in the form below and click subscribe. Any new articles added to this web site will automatically be emailed to you. Your privacy is guaranteed, 100% SPAM free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Summary

That rounds up my beginners guide to RSS. I hope it makes things clearer. Any questions then use the comments form at the bottom of this page or visit my Contact Me page.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading a blog post about testing your web site in different browsers. I can’t remember where I read this story but it linked to browsershots.org, which is a free open source online service. This online service enables you to see what your web site will look like on different browsers, everything from Internet Explorer 5 on Windows to Safari on the Mac.

I’ve tweaked the layout of this web site a lot, especially on the CSS side of things. I’ve known this to cause issues in the past. I once had a situation where this web site looked fine on Firefox under Linux, only for it to look different on Windows XP using Firefox or Internet Explorer.

I therefore decided to submit my web site to browsershots.org to see how this web site would perform on a greater selection of browsers. Overall this web site looks fine in other browsers, but I did notice something odd with Internet Explorer 6.0. The right-hand sidebar was displaying directly below the left-hand sidebar, this made the whole web page look a bit strange – yuk!

I therefore decided to dig into Google Analytics to see if anyone was using Internet Explorer 6 to visit my site. The number of visitors using this browser really surprised me. Not only was it a large number, but all these visitors were seeing my web site display incorrectly. Obviously I wanted to fix things as soon as possible.

Here was the breakdown of visitor numbers by browser for the last month. Internet Explorer accounts for almost 40% of traffic visiting this site.

Next I wanted to drilldown and see which versions of Internet Explorer each visitor was using.

I was really surprised how many visitors are still using Internet Explorer 6. It is almost a 50/50 split between Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7.

I’ve now got this web site displaying correctly across all browsers on Linux, Windows XP and on the Mac. This isn’t bad considering this is a 3 column theme which are more difficult to work across multiple browsers than 2 column themes.

The motto of this story. Don’t assume everyone has upgraded to the latest browser and make sure your web site displays correctly across all browser platforms. Otherwise you could lose traffic as a result.

What are the most popular browsers on your site and are you are a fan of 2 or 3 column themes?

Many of you will be familiar with a Favicon. Favicon (short for Favorites Icon) is a feature that makes it possible to associate a special logo or other small graphic with a web page. If you visit my home page you can see an icon of my face in the browser address bar!

If you’re familiar with graphics packages and editing WordPress template files then creating a Favicon is a fairly easy task. But what about the rest of us who are non-coders, who don’t know how to modify template files and want an easier way of doing things?

Here are my 3 simple steps to follow that will get a Favicon up and running on your web site in minutes. These steps are aimed at WordPress users but could be modified to cater for other blogging platforms.

Create your Favicon

1. Visit Favicon from Pics. Favicon from Pics is an online tool that can generate a Favicon from a picture, logo or other graphic of any size/resolution. When you visit this web site you will the following section.

You simply click the browse button, find a suitable image on your hard drive, and then click the ‘Generate Favicon.ico’ button. You will then be prompted to save a zip file containing the Favicon to your hard drive.

Upload your Favicon

2. Unzip the Favicon zip file and copy the Favicon.ico file to the root directory of your WordPress installation. The root folder is the directory which contains folders like \wp-content and \wp-admin, etc.

Activate your Favicon

3. Install the Favicon Head WordPress plugin. Favicon Head is a simple way to automatically include a favicon in your blog. No template file editing is required, you only have to upload the plugin file to your WordPress plugin directory and activate it. The default favicon location is favicon.ico, but can be changed through the plugin options page.

Voila! Click the refresh button on your browser and you should now have a Favicon appearing on your web site.

One of my readers spotted that an article I wrote about Linux Command For Newbies contains an invalid link. It appears that the original website I linked to no longer exists.

I’ve found some additional Linux resources which you may find useful. Some of these links are a few years old but still contain useful information:

Linux Guide/Installing Linux

Linux for Newbies

Linux Command line tutorials for newbies

Navigating in Linux

The Linux Newbie Administrator Guide has a wealth of information. A good place to start would be Linux Shortcuts and Commands.

I’d like to summarize the recent series I ran on Webmaster and SEO tools. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series and found something useful. In case you missed any of the posts here is a recap:

Part 1 discussed the Webmaster Toolkit which provides lots of useful tools to manage and maintain your domains.

Part 2 covered Google Webmaster Tools which can be used to perform tasks like submitting site maps to Google, analyzing links to your site, which search queries are effective in driving traffic to your site, and other statistics.

Part 3 covered XML Sitemaps which helps your web sites become more search engine friendly.

Part 4 looked at tools to analyze your web traffic, such as Google Analytics and Clicky.

Part 5 discussed how to maximize your feeds using Feedburner.

Part 6 looked at how MyBlogLog can be used to help build up a community around your web site, and further ways to analyze traffic to your site.

Before finishing, I would like to mention one site that I have found very useful in improving the overall search ranking of my site. Back in December 2006, Chris Pearson ran a series on SEO for everybody. That series covered the following topics:

• Creating site maps to make your site more search engine friendly
• Using an XHTML Sitemap for better search engine indexing
• Constructing dynamic, descriptive web page titles
• How to harness image search results from Google

I strongly recommend you take the advice of that series. Don’t expect to get results overnight, it may take weeks or even months, but believe me it works.

Look at my Top 5 sources of traffic between mid November and mid December 2006. Google is top, but the overall number of referrals isn’t that high.

Now compare that with the Top 5 sources of traffic for the last month. Google is still top, but the overall number of referrals has increased dramatically.

Several articles I have written now rank within the top 5 of Google. If you’ve haven’t read Chris’ series on SEO for everybody then take a look and reap the rewards.

Over the last few weeks I’ve introduced Google AdSense onto this site. I’m not expecting to earn vast amounts of money from these ads, it’s more of an experiment at the moment so see how much income AdSense can generate. I’ve only had the ads up and running for a couple of weeks and I have a lot to learn in this area, but one thing that I’ve noticed very quickly is that positioning your ads makes a huge difference.

I currently have banner ads placed at the top and bottom of each blog post, plus a skyscraper ad out in the sidebar. So far I’ve had most success with ads placed in the actual body of the blog post. The top of the post seems the most popular, followed not far behind by ads placed at the bottom of the post.

This makes sense when you think about it. When someone visits a web site they tend to focus on the main body of the blog post, rather than other information you may have in your sidebar. So far the ads placed in my sidebar have received hardly any clicks whatsoever, in fact they are probably a waste of real estate on my sidebar and I may remove them if things don’t change.

There is certainly evidence to support that ads placed in the main body of the post will be the most successful. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen published an article on how the human eye scans over a week page. It’s a fascinating read and well worth a look.

To summarize his findings, readers tend to focus on the main content of a web page, rather than peripheral information that is tucked away in a sidebar. Therefore, if you want to grab your readers attention with Google Ads then focus on the main content of your blog post.

This is backed up further by Darren Rowse over at Pro Blogger. He comes to the same conclusion on positioning AdSense ads. Darren also mentions how placing too many ads on your site can actually lead to worse results. Depending on the internal structure of the web page, Google may allocate ads to you sidebar before the main content of your blog post. This can result in your sidebar stealing potentially the most lucrative ads from appearing where they’re most needed – in the main body of the blog post.

I’d love to hear how others have fared in this field. If you’ve got any tips your willing to share then let me know.

Welcome to the 6th article in the series on Webmaster and SEO Tools. In previous articles I have discussed how web sites like Google Analytics, Clicky and Feedburner can be used to analyze traffic to your web site.

Today I am going to continue the theme of analytics and discuss MyBlogLog. Not only does MyBlogLog provide statistics on traffic to your web site, it is also an excellent way to promote, market and connect with visitors to your web site.

A good introduction to what MyBlogLog is all about can be found on the MyBlog About page. If you like what you read then the next step is to visit their home page and register.

MyBlogLog Home Page

Once you’ve registered and logged into your account you are taken to your home page. This page will show you the most recent readers to your site, your MyBlogLog friends and contacts, any messages sent to you, plus a roundup of what is happening in other communities. This is what my home page looks like.

MyBlogLog Account Tools

The first thing you want to do is use the ‘Account Tools’ section on the Home Page sidebar to edit your profile and add any web sites or blogs you author.

You’ll also notice the following options on your home page, where you can view stats for your web site, get widgets for your site and edit other settings.

View Site Stats

The stats page will show you where readers came from, what they viewed, and what links they clicked. I like this page because it provides a very good executive type dashboard view where I can see at a glance what is happening on my site.

Click on the thumbnail below to see an example of what the stats page looks like.

You can also run reports on what users have clicked and viewed on your web site together with a list of referrals to your site. These reports can be customized to cover any time frame you like, previous day, week, month, etc.

If you click on the thumbnail below you can see what the reports page looks like.

In order for MyBlogLog to record these stats you need to enter a piece of javascript tracking code onto your web site. A good place for this would be in the header, footer or sidebar. I’ll go into this in more detail in the next section on widgets.

It is also worth mentioning that there is a free and Pro version of the stats. If your site gets a lot of traffic and you’re interested in seeing stats in real time then the Pro version may be for you. Pro costs $25 for a years membership or you can pay $3 per month if you don’t want to commit to a years membership up-front. If you only check your stats every couple of days, then the free version is probably the ticket for you. More information can be found on the MyBlogLog help page.

MyBlogLog Widgets

MyBlogLog provides you with widgets which you can add to your site. These widgets are essentially a piece of javascript which you add to your web site. This javascript also contains a piece of tracking code which is used to gather all the stats information about your site such as visitor numbers and what pages they viewed.

You can see one of these widgets in action on this blog. In the sidebar I have a widget which shows recent MyBlogLog members who have visited this blog. I like having this feature on my web site. It provides a way for me and other visitors to connect with other people who visit this site. It has also enabled me to discover other MyBlogLog member web sites and communities, so it is a great way to build up a network of contacts and friends.

MyBlogLog also provide a Top 5 Links widget which is updated hourly. This widget can be used to show the current most popular links on your web site. This widget also contains the tracking code for web stats.

If you’re not interested in having any widgets on your site then you can just add the tracking code on it’s own.

MyBlogLog Communities

The communities section of MyBlogLog is a great way to connect with other members and also to discover some pretty cool and interesting web sites. It is also a great way to promote your own web site. You can see at a glance who has joined your community, recent readers to your site, Top 5 Links on your site, plus the latest blog posts from your site. You can also send messages to other community members.

It’s a great way to connect with your readers. I always like to take some time to see who has visited my site. I’ve found some really useful contacts and MyBlogLog communities through doing this.

Summary

MyBlogLog is a great way to promote and market your web site and it provides excellent opportunities for networking with fellow bloggers. It is also a great way to discover web sites you might otherwise not come across. The MyBlogLog stats don’t go into the level of detail like Google Analytics or Clicky but if you’re looking for an executive dashboard view of visitor numbers it is an excellent tool.

This is the 5th in the series on Webmaster and SEO tools. To make it easier to know what each article in the series is about I am now including some additional text at the end of the post title. It therefore comes as no surprise that today I am going to cover Feedburner!

What is FeedBurner?

Well, each blog has a feed. Let’s say your web site is called www.example.com, typically your feed address will be www.example.com/feed. Visitors can subscribe to your feed using this feed address, but that’s about it. You have no way of knowing for example how many people have subscribed to your feed or for analyzing how many people visit your web site as a result of using your feed.

In addition the feed address is not very user friendly, the feed is displayed in your web browser as a bunch of XML statements. For a software developer like myself this is fine, but for people unfamiliar with XML it is hardly going to encourage people to subscribe to your feed. I’ll go into more detail about this later.

Why do I need FeedBurner?

This is where FeedBurner is useful. FeedBurner enables you to keep track of how many people have subscribed to your feed, plus a host of other stats. FeedBurner also helps you to optimize and publicize your site making it easier for people to subscribe to your feed. There is a really good overview of what FeedBurner has to offer on their blogs page.

FeedBurner Details

In this article I am going to discuss some of the features I find most useful in FeedBurner. If you are not already a member of FeedBurner then you will need to register first. Once you’re registered you can then create your FeedBurner feed. This process is well explained on the FeedBurner website so I won’t go into any detail here.

Once you’ve registered and created your feed you can then start analyzing, optimizing and publicizing your feed.

Analyzing your feed

When you login to your FeedBurner account the first item you will see is the Analyze tab. This page gives a nice overview of how many people have subscribed to your feed and what reader they used to subscribe to your feed, for example Google Reader, Netvibes, Rojo etc. In addition you can analyze how your feed subscription has developed over a given time period.

If you look at the bottom left of the above screenshot you will see a link for Total Stats Pro. If you want to get up close and personal with your audience then this is for you. Total Stats Pro provides even more stats on things like item views and clickthroughs from your feed. This used to be a paid service, but now Feedburner is part of the Google family, this service is now provided free of charge.

Optimizing your feed

There are loads of options on this page as you can see in the screenshot below, so I will cover just the main ones which I find most interesting.

The first of these is the Browser Friendly option. As I mentioned earlier, without FeedBurner your feed address will just appear as a bunch of raw XML statements in your browser. This doesn’t make pleasant viewing for visitors to your web site. Browser Friendly will take these raw XML statements and present them in a much more user friendly way in your browser as shown below.

As you can see, the feed is displayed in an easy to read way, and there are a series of buttons which enable people to subscribe to your feed using one of the many popular feed reader applications. There is one important thing to bear in mind which I’ll show in the following screenshot.

Pay attention to the checkbox which says ‘Landing page renders as a web page in all browsers’. I had to make sure that checkbox was checked before I could get a user friendly display of my feed in the browser. Without that checkbox checked, I would get a display as follows.

This doesn’t look as ugly as a bunch of raw XML statements, but it isn’t as nice looking as the earlier screenshot. It looks like this is Firefox trying to take over control of how to subscribe to my feed. So, if you want a user friendly view of your feed with all the subscriber buttons to Google Reader, Netvibes, Rojo, etc. then make sure you have that checkbox checked.

Next up is FeedFlare. This enables your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including links to social bookmarking sites at the bottom of your blog posts and feed. There are plenty of WordPress plugins out there which will allow you to include social bookmark links underneath each blog post, but the FeedFlare is the only way I know to achieve a similar thing in your feed.

Publicizing your feed

This page presents a series of options designed to help you attract subscribers to your site. One of the features I use on this page is the Email Subscriptions option.

This provides another mechanism for people to receive your feed. You cannot assume that every visitor to your site uses, or is familiar with, feed readers. Providing the option for visitors to receive blog updates via email is an excellent tool which I recommend you install on your site. About 10% of my readers subscribe via email so it does work in attracting subscribers. You simply activate the Email Subscriptions option in FeedBurner and then copy and paste the HTML provided anywhere you like on your blog, like the sidebar for example.

Another option I find useful is PingShot. This will automatically notify sites like Technorati, My Yahoo, Newsgator, etc. when you publish a new post. You can achieve the same thing within WordPress but I prefer to manage pinging these services from within FeedBurner.

FeedBurner Summary

There is far more to FeedBurner than I can cover in this article. I’ve found FeedBurner to be an excellent tool in analyzing my feed traffic and helping people to subscribe to my feed. It has helped in publicizing my web site and it is another useful tool in promoting and marketing your web site. Go burn that feed and reap the rewards!

The previous 3 posts in this series have looked at ways of analyzing and boosting traffic to your web site. Today I am going to delve deeper into the analytics side of things.

Learning how visitors discover your site, what they do at your site once they get there, and how they leave your site, can provide a useful insight into the type of audience you’re attracting. This information can be used to gain a better understanding of your visitors, such as which posts are the most popular, how visitors navigate around your site, or provide clues on how you can reorganize your web site to better cater for your visitors.

There are a host of Analytics packages out there, either standalone or as a WordPress plugin. I am going to cover three such packages today, Google Analytics and new kid on the block Clicky Web Analytics, and finally the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin.

Google Analytics

This is probably the best known analytics packages so I will start with this one first. The Google Analytics Home Page is probably the best place to start. This page will give you a brief overview of what it has to offer together with a product demo. You will need an existing Google Account service such as GMail before you can use the service, otherwise you will need to register first.

Once you’ve registered you will need to login to your Google Analytics account and add your website. The instructions are easy to follow. Once you’ve added your web site you are given a piece of tracking code which you need to add to your web site. This code will track all the user activity on your web site. If you use WordPress or some other blogging platform then a good place to put the tracking code would be in the header, footer or sidebar, as these items are displayed on every page on your site.

If you use WordPress then I recommend you take a look at the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. The plugin will automate the process of adding the tracking code to your web site, and the plugin is highly configurable.

Once the tracking code has been added you need to wait up to 24 hours for Google to start collecting the tracking information. You will then be able to login to your Google Analytics account and view the reports on your web site. The reports provide you with a dashboard type view. The reports cater for three user personas – executive, marketer and webmaster. You can select one of these personas from the View dropdown and the reports available will adjust accordingly.

I won’t go into exhaustive detail on each report available, but the following areas I find most interesting. The first is the Executive Summary which provides you with a graph showing the number of visitors over the last week, and pie charts showing ratio of new versus returning visitors and the number of referrals, and finally a map showing the location of your visitors. Here is an example of what this looks like. You can customize the view to cover whatever date range you like, such as weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.

Next is the Marketing Summary which shows the top referrals to your site, the top search engine keywords used to get to your site, and the top campaigns. This is useful for seeing at a glance where traffic is coming from to your site.

The Content Summary report will show you how long visitors stay on a particular page, whether they exit your site after reading a single page, or whether they continue their visit and look at other pages on your site. This is a good way at analyzing whether your content is retaining visitors. You can track this information over time which is a good way to see if particular campaigns are more successful at retaining visitors than others.

As you can see above, several pages have a high bounce rate which means people often leave the site after reading a single page. The lower the bounce percentage figure the better.

Finally there is the Site Overlay report. This will show the most commonly visited links on your page. This can be useful in refining your web site design to focus on the higher quality links.

There is a lot more to Google Analytics then I can cover in this post. The best thing to do is to explore the site yourself. There is a lot of information on campaigns, advertising success and ROI then I haven’t even touched upon.

For the average user though, some people might find the number of reports in Google Analytics daunting, it also could be improved from a usability perspective too. I would like to see hyperlinks included in the report, especially around the area of referrals, so I can be taken to the exact spot where a visitor came from. This is where the next analytics package excels.

Clicky Web Analytics

If you like simple to understand reports, with an easy to navigate UI and hyperlinks that take you to the exact spot a visitor came from, then maybe this is the package for you. It is free to register and installation is similar to Google Analytics, involving placing some tracking code on your web site. Their home page gives a good comparison of how Clicky stacks up against the competition. You can also try out a demo for yourself.

Here is an example of what your home page looks like when you login to your Clicky account. The report is plain and simple and I like the hyperlinks on the left which I can click on for further details.

You will notice at the top of this screenshot is a series of tabs which you can click on for further information.

The first of these tabs is the Visitors page. This will provide detailed information about your visitors, where they came from, what operating system they are using, what screen resolution they are using etc. What makes this page different from Google Analytics is a hyperlink to the Actions page. This provides an audit trail of each visitor to your site, how they found your site, what page they visited first, what other pages they visited, and what page they left your site. The report is in a clear and easy to understand format and far easier to digest than Google Analytics.

Next is the Content page which will provide information on top content and entrance and exit points. The Links page will show you the top incoming and outgoing links plus the top referrers. The Searches page will show the search engine keywords used to get to your site. There is also an interesting Spy page where you can look at user activity in real time and an RSS page where you subscribe to web site activity.

I have been using Clicky for almost a week now alongside Google Analytics without any issues. It is still in development and there are areas which you can’t drill into yet, such as viewing stats over multiple days, but this is being worked on by the author and will be available as a new feature soon.

You can catch up on all the latest developments and news at their blog. I did notice on their blog that they had a couple of issues recently with their Apache server, it looks like Clicky is hosted on a shared rather than a dedicated server but that shouldn’t be an issue. Hopefully these issues will be few and far between.

Overall this looks an impressive analytics package and is certainly one to keep on your radar.

Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress

For those of you that don’t want to register with any analytics provider, then consider trying one of the many WordPress plugins out there. One of these is the popularity contest plugin from Alex King. Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. You can view these figures from your WordPress administration panel and you can also display this information in your blog, such as in the sidebar.

If you use any caching plugin, like wp-cache, it will affect the ability of Popularity Contest to accurately record views. I’ve recently installed wp-cache so I will probably have to disable the Popularity Contest plugin now.

Summary

That sums up this article on analytics packages. There is something there for everyone, whether you want detailed statistics at every level or just an overview. If you want to get to know your visitors better then I recommend you take a closer look at one of the analytics packages out there.