David Chan’s Blog

By bounce, I am referring to bounce rate. A bounce is recorded when a visitor views only one page of your site during the visit. As someone who runs a blog, I strive to make my content coherent (ie. my blog contains a lot of programming and technology content) so that it appeals to a certain audience. A good indicator of whether my blog is coherent is if people view more than one page per visit on average, or if I have a low bounce rate.

People usually find my blog through search, and so they land directly on a post (instead of the front page). Likewise, when my blog get Stumbled, the landing page is always a post. When visitors finish reading that post, ideally they’d take a look around to find more of the same content. With that in mind, would the bounce rate of visitors from Google and StumbleUpon be the same? Here is my referral data from the last two months (July 1st - Sept 11th):

As you can see, the bounce rate from StumbleUpon visitors is very low compared to visitors from my other top referrals.

My conclusion (well, it’s more or less an assumption, but an educated one) is that the StumbleUpon Interests selection works very well to channel interested readers to your content. It’s not a bad bet that users who go through the entire process of signing up to StumbleUpon, installing the tool bar, and setting up their interests must really be passionate about the selected topics.

That or they have a lot of time to kill, which, admittedly, is something that StumbleUpon also does very well.

The moral of the story? Tag your Stumbles wisely!

P.S. If you have a blog which gets Stumbled often, post some of your findings on your bounce rate!

My coworker Nick Simpson is truely amazing.  He is one of the most knowledgable sys admins I’ve known and I’ve been with many different companies (ie. I’ve been around the block).  His blog is neatly designed and he stumbles on many neat things.  Just recently I’ve been introduced to a new Facebook app to keep track of birthdays, and I got that information from his recent post titled “Facebook iCal birthdays“.

But if you do a search for “Facebook iCal Birthdays” on Google, you won’t find Nick’s post.  Even a search for “Nick Simpson” doesn’t return much from his blog.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the permalinks for his blog posts are in a very machine unfriendly format.

This doesn’t translate into any searchable keywords, and makes it hard for anyone to find this via a keyword search.

I’m a big fan of searchables and many readers of my blog find my content via search engines (actually, only through Google…is there any other search engine?).

I hope Nick reads this and changes his permalink structure to include the post’s title, or the post’s keywords, as part of the permalink for the story.  You may already know this, but in WordPress, going into Settings->Permalinks will allow you to choose a suitable link for your posts.

What good is creating content if no one can find it?

I used part of my weekend to play around with WordPress themes, and honestly they were easier to edit, change and implement than I thought. While I was changing things around I decided to give this blog a new name and feel. I felt that the old “Brain Barn” wasn’t at all accurate with describing the kind of content I tend to write, and from the knowledge of the kind of keyword searches and incoming links to this blog, I have decided to rename it to “Everyday Extra”.

Brain Barn gets the boot; enter Everyday Extra. It was better than just “David Chan Blog”, and besides, I like alliterations.

Edit: the layout still has a minor alignment issue in IE6, working on fixing it as I find time. In the meantime use Firefox

The name David Chan is definitely a common one. Firstly, the last name Chan is the Asian equivalent of Windsor or Smith. Lee and Wong top the list of most popular Chinese surnames, but Chan, which is sometimes spelled Chen, is definitely in the top five. Secondly, the first name David happens to coincide with that of a certain Biblical King of Israel. You get the point.

I’ve met several people with the same name in Vancouver, and even went to high school with one who is the same age as me. There’s no lack of David Chans in the world, but what about on the internet?

Searching for “David Chan” on Google.com will give roughly 17.7 million results. As of this writing I am result number 52:

In the Google.ca search I occupy results #45 and #46. My search position is not bad given the relatively short span that I have been running this weblog, however my goal is to make it into the top 10. Unfortunately, looking up http://blog.dekandustry.com on a Page Rank calculator reveal that this url currently has a Page Rank of 0, out of a possible 10.

Positive linking, and optimizing the site to web crawlers are things which top my current research list. Other popular blog rating/ranking sites like Technorati and Digg are also of interest and they contribute to my daily visit count.

I look to break into the top 40 David Chan search results soon, and will be writing about my findings and experiences in experimenting with increasing internet traffic.