I posted this earlier in the WordPress 201 Commons page today, as it was liked by a few bloggers I thought it might be helpful to post it here.

For today’s task, as my site was started recently, (June2015) I have only 2 months worth of data from the WordPress Stats page. I wasn’t expecting a huge volume of visits as I started literally with 0, with a clean slate in terms of Social Media following. My plan for the blog is to see how much organic visits the site can generate from scratch.

For June there were a total of 150 views, 58 visits, 65 likes and 14 comments.
For July to date, 202 views, 117 visits and 45 likes, 12 comments.

(July’s data is skewed as this would also include traffic and data from the Blogging 202 course).

In terms of how I approached the content, I decided upon the subjects that I felt I could write about – family, beauty, skincare, home, food, travel, music and perfume. I guess in effect a lifestyle blog.

As I have a little knowledge around SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and used to looking at Google Analytics for clients, the stats within WordPress are a good starting point. Since this is a personal blog, I am using free search tools that would help me to generate topic ideas:

• The free search tool: Wordstream (this is free for the first 30 search words) This shows other suggested keywords that are the top searched keywords, to help build up the content / articles.
• Google Search Bar –  this is really basic and common sense. Since 93% of all website visits begin with Search through the Search Browser, (when was the last time you typed the full web address? I think all of us are so used to using search to find what we’re looking for on the web) the simplest thing to do is to enter in the search term you think you want to get traffic from. All the websites listed will give an idea of the type of content that is being indexed by Google and ranking. The top ranking articles/content pages are the ones on the top page, and I look through these to see what the content is about and how they approach the subjects. (BTW, it’s no good copying the content, Google will penalise against this in terms of search rankings)

That said, the tools are useful to provide ideas around what to write about. Most of the time, i’ve noticed that “Lists” work – eg. Top 5 reasons why…. or 5 ways to use…. type of content seems to work well in terms of search, though I haven’t tried this technique.

As I’m preparing a presentation on Search with a colleague, I had the opportunity to quizz him on some additional tools that could help with analysing site traffic.

Here’s his advice on Search tools:

SEM Rush, http://www.semrush.com as soon as you get to their landing page – you can type in a keyword. (this is free and a lot more sophisticated than Wordstream)

I’ve looked through my posts and the tags that I used for the posts – Skincare seemed to have the highest number of views both in terms of Category and Tags.

There’s a column of related keywords in SEM Rush – the results show “Skin care” as one of the related words. Now whilst I can include these words in the next blog post or create a series of posts around the topic of  Skin care, my chances of getting ranked high (1st page in search is desirable) are pretty slim at the moment because Google uses something called an algorithm to calculate what it considers the most relevant search results to present to you once you enter your search query. If you’re a Beauty writer, you’re in luck as this topic is among the highest in terms of search queries.

What Google is trying to do is provide a useful service to help users find a perfect match to their search query, so it uses information from websites to determine how many people have visited, the number of pages, number of images and so forth.

For now I will concentrate on creating the best content I can that I hope will be of interest to people. As more people find their way to the blog, the more relevant Google will determine the content to be; all in relation to the search query, so that’s how a blog post will rise up the search index. I don’t think there’s any short cuts to this.

The other invaluable piece of advice he gave was to look at Google Trends – this tool gives the top trending topics, and you can select by country as the trends will differ by country.

At the time of writing this post the lifestyle topic trending in the UK is “The British Bake Off”. Again, it’s unlikely that if I write a post about the British Bake Off that it will rank highly in search, but it may get picked up from within WordPress readers and the categories and Tags, if I set-up a tag around a post about Baking so that some visitors within WordPress will see the post.

Of course this is not an exact science – it is an approach that will help me work out a content plan based on the data from the WordPress site stats and some research using the free Search tools. It looks like I’ll be doing a lot of baking with the kids at the weekends 🙂

I’ll update this post in a month’s time and let you know whether this approach has helped. Thanks for stopping by and reading this post. Please do share any insights on what stats or tools you use to plan your content.

It’s day 3 of the Blogging 201 course and today, the task is about making sure the blog can be seen through any device, whether it is a desktop, tablet or mobile device.

I posted a note in the commons about this task as I’ve not been able to look at my site on mobile Android devices as I don’t have access to one.

I think testing your site to make sure that it can be viewed the way you intend people to see your blog is so important. If for instance you’re looking at a site using different browsers – by this I mean if you are using Safari, Windows Explorer, Google Chrome or Firefox, each of these browsers have slightly different nuances in terms of how they present your blog to the world, and depending on who is looking, what operating system they are using (e.g. Windows, Linux, Mac OS etc) this too could make a difference if they don’t have the fonts installed. Generally speaking if you pick a font that is not “web friendly” the browser, or operating system will default to the closest they have, which means the viewer will see something different to what you intended.

I hope for anyone reading this post, this information is helpful.

When I chose the Theme for this blog, I picked “Adelle” which was described as Mobile optimised/friendly. I checked it across the devices I had available to me and I thought in different views, it looked great, whether I had the template in Portrait or Landscape orientation, the site adapted to fit the size of the screen. This is what is meant by the term “Web responsive”.

The other thing to look for is whether the photos or images scale correctly, by this I mean if the photo automatically re-sizes to fit the width of the mobile, tablet or desktop device you are looking at the blog from. Sometimes the resizing can throw out the text to move it to wrap around the image a little strangely. When ever I think this is going to happen, I simply add an extra line break in the closest paragraph under the picture or above, preview this on both my laptop and mobile before publishing.

There were so many responses to my request, each came back with a positive note about their experience of my site.

Girl Independent let me know the site looked great on ipad. She has a great site already, but wanted to know if she should change the theme. I think it has a lovely scroll through the blog, which felt as if you are going on a journey with her while she is travelling and experiencing all the different places she has been and goes diving.

Susie Lovell let me know that the site looked good in Mac OSX, Her site is lovely if you’re after some short reads, these are great. I think writing short pieces is much more difficult than long, because you have to fit in so much in so little, characters, plot, story telling, it’s a great art and skill that is very sought after in the world of advertising.

Deb323 looked at my site on her Google Nexus, she also uses the Adelle theme for her blog, I love the fact that her blog is helping a lot of indie authors and I’ve discovered a few titles that I’ll be taking on holiday for the luxury of a long read while sitting on the beach.

Dawnlizjones checked my site on her Android Moto G Phone, and let me know it looked good on this device as well. I had so much fun reading her post on Long Playing/Loving Parenthood which is about parenting and some of motown music of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and then when I looked at a few more posts, I found she likes Prince’s music – ditto.

I am just enjoying blog meeting everyone, but back to the task and making sure the site is mobile friendly.

What’s great about WordPress is that if you have picked one of the newer themes, they are already mobile friendly.

I looked at all the blogs who commented, liked or followed me on my mobile devices during my lunch hour and at the end of the day at work and all of them adapted to the screen on my mobile, so I think WordPress is great as it’s automatically re-sized, re-scaled the blogs, it’s really, really great at doing this.

I’ve inserted music audio streaming from Spotify, a YouTube video and photos (I need to work on reducing the file sizes on the pictures I’ve posted) and each of these elements looked good in the blog posts, even looking at them on my little Windows phone.

So it turned out I wasn’t able to give much in terms of feedback on how different sites looked on different devices, because WordPress does such an amazing job on this. Instead I had a lovely time looking at the sites of people who had commented, liked or followed me.

It’s been a very inspiring day, I’ve added people to my Google+ and followed some blogs that I would never have come across. Thanks for reading this post.