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April 6, 2010

Improving Bounce Rates Can Dramatically Improve Effective Website Traffic

Filed under: SEO and SEM — Eric @ 6:46 pm

There are many ways to increase traffic to your website. Greater visibility in the search engines organically, pay-per-click search engine traffic, social media referral traffic, direct marketing or any of the millions of other non-search related listings that produce referral traffic. Examples of this non-search related traffic would be click-through traffic from sites like Yellowpages or Dexknows or Craiglist or any of the other millions of directory sites that can bring a visitor directly to your website. These are all easily understandable sources of increased traffic to your website and they take varying degrees of time, money and marketing to achieve.

But what many people don't realize is that there is traffic and then there is effective traffic. Traffic that comes to your site and then immediately leaves without staying is called a bounce and every type of traffic will produce a different bounce rate depending on how well the referring site matches the visitor with the content and interest of your website. A floral shop referring visitors from its site to your site which is an Auto Body shop may produce a very high bounce rate for you. There are many obvious reasons why this might be the case. A website that sells auto tools that then refers its visitors to your Auto Body shop will have a better chance at producing relevant or highly motivated traffic and that referred traffic should have a lower bounce rate ... provided of course that the Auto Body shop site is functional and doesn't look terrible.

Anyway I think you get the idea. The effective website traffic to your website is your Total traffic - (Total traffic * bounce rate). Thus one can greatly improve their effective web traffic merely by improving their site's bounce rate. If your site is getting alot of traffic but has a very high bounce rate, say something over 60% a wiser marketing initiative for your company might be to work on reducing your website's bounce rate. Or at least analyze why it is you have such a high bounce rate.

To illustrate this the graph below shows the total monthly traffic coming to a website located within the state of Washington along the blue line and the monthly average bounce rate for the entire site is indicated by the red line. In the most current month the bounce rate is dramatically cut in half, due to the exceptional effort and guidance by a company such as say .... SlickRockWeb.

graph01

Because of this dramatic improvement in the website's bounce rate, even though the total monthly traffic actually goes down slightly from March to April, the effective traffic (shown below in green) goes up dramatically. This reduction in bounce rate produces the highest effective traffic levels in the past 9 months even though total traffic is only 60% of what it was 6 months earlier. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that this increase in effective traffic will correspond to an increase in sales.

graph02

The moral of the story is make sure you know what your site's bounce rate is and make sure you have a company strategy in place to analyze the monthly bounce rate and compare it to industry averages to make sure you are not losing significant amounts of effective web traffic every month.

From this simple example it is clear why having an SEO expert like SlickRockWeb as a partner and resource is such a valuable asset to any successful business.

For more information about our proven SEO strategies call us at 1-800-975-5695.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services - "Bringing you business one click at a time."

Finding a Text String in Protected Files on Mac OS X

Filed under: Mac OS X Tips — Eric @ 4:15 pm

Looking for strings of text in thousands of files at one time on a Mac can usually be accomplished using a simple "Find" function in a program such as BBedit. This method becomes problematic when you want to search for text strings within hidden files or files with restricted permissions such as config files in the hidden directories like /private or /usr.

Why would someone want to look in these folders? We for example recently had problems with our DNS changing hostnames without our knowledge and wanted to track down how this was happening. Because we knew the hostname was changing from powerbookG4.local to gmail.local we simply wanted to search for all system config files that might contain the text string "gmail".

After much searching and educating ourselves we found a simple solution using the command "grep" and Mac OS X's command line tool, Terminal.app. Because the text string "gmail" could appear in lots of files that might contain a gmail email address such as  myemail@gmail.com we made use of Regular Expressions to exclude text strings that would be email addresses and would thus give us false positives.

Here is the solution:

1. Open Terminal.app

2. change to root access by typing at the prompt # su root

Last login: Mon Apr  1 14:22:31 on console

powerbookG4:~ user$ su root

3. Enter your password when prompted

Password:

4. Navigate to the directory of files that you want to search using the cd command.

5. Enter the grep command to search for the appropriate text string: grep -irl '[^(@|o|n)]gmail[^(\.com)]' *

sh-3.2# grep -irl '[^(@|o|n)]gmail[^(\.com)]' *

I won't get into all the details of how grep works but the flags we used were -i (for case insensitive) -r (to search all files within the directory recursively) and -l (to list all the results). The next section is the regular expression of the text string you want to search for. Lastly the wildcard * just means to search in all files. If you wanted to only search in html files for example you could use *.html.

We used the regular expressions such as ^ to exclude any gmail email addresses and only find files where "gmail" occurred and exclude any strings such as xxxx@gmail.com.

After grep runs it will list all the files that contain your text string. Example list of files below.

var/log/asl/2010.04.04.U501.asl
var/log/asl/LongTTL.asl
var/log/daily.out
var/log/install.log
var/log/krb5kdc/kdc.log
var/log/samba/log.nmbd
var/log/secure.log
var/log/system.log

This method can be very useful if for example you know a certain virus string and are trying to find all the files on your system that have been affected by the virus string. An example of this would be for instance last summer's iframe injection trojans.


April 3, 2010

How to Clear the DNS Cache in Mac OSX Leopard

Filed under: Mac OS X Tips — Eric @ 7:40 pm

The Macintosh operating system and most computer operating systems for that matter will cache DNS requests. That is a good thing as it speeds up the DNS lookups within the same host. But sometimes this can become problematic when the cache contains values that are no longer valid or legitimate. Also nefarious software, viruses, or spyware can poison a DNS cache. Thus it can be necessary to clear (or reset) the DNS cache on your Mac and  to do that in Mac (OS Tiger and below) you open the Terminal.app program usually found within your Applications/Utilities/ folder and you type the following command:

lookupd -flushcache

However a Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard user will tell you this command did not work on their terminal. In Leopard a new command has been used to replace flushcache, so to clear DNScache in Leopard, just type this in your Terminal and hit enter.

dscacheutil -flushcache