Web Analytics

The book I read to research this post was Web Analytics for Dummies by Pedro Sostre et al which I got from amazon & which is an excellent book. Note this is a 2007 book so some of the info might be a bit dated ie I think google analytics has been updated since. There is a free version of google analytics which is recommended if you just want to monitor the number of hits on your website. Web analytics can tell you quite a lot of information about who is visiting your site and things like what pages they click on. Some packages are very expensive and the number of features goes up in line with this but unless you’re a company selling something substantial it’s not worthwhile. A couple of www adresses which are free are.

http://www.awstats.org/

http://www.google.com/analytics/

It’s important that search engines are able to pick up sufficient keywords and also that you submit your site to these search engines. The main ones are bing, google and yahoo but particularly if it is a niche blog there maybe specialist search engines.

 

Syndicating Web Sites With RSS Feeds

The book I read to research this post was Syndicating Web Sites With RSS Feeds for Dummies by Ellen Finkelstein which is a very good book. I got this book from amazon some time ago. RSS & atom which are two major types of feeds use XML although if you need to read them in a browser there are web sites that will convert it to javascript. Typically you will use an RSS reader which will display a headline and a summary of each post. RSS 0.90 and 0.91 work with blogs and RSS2.0 and atom work with blogs and podcasts. The most popular RSS site is http://www.my.yahoo.com in fact yahoo has really embraced RSS a couple of other good sites are http://www.feeddemon.com and http://www.feedster.com  Some sites like blogger automatically add RSS to your blogs.