Blogging For Wedding Professionals Part 3

Tracking Your Stats

Blog Stats

I am fanatical about tracking the stats on my blogs. I don’t mean just page views and visits, either. While those can give you an idea of how you are doing, the real meat is in the referral stats and the entry page stats.

As I said in a previous post, the search engines read each post as a new page on your website, (disclaimer: at least they do on a good blog platform). By monitoring your entry page statistics you can easily see which post is getting the attention of your readers. Go back and analyze the top few posts and see what it was that you did that is attracting so much attention. Was it the topic, the image or a great use of key words and phrases? Is there a common thread among them? Whatever it was, repeat it.

Look at your referrals with the same mind set. Which words or phrases are resulting in visits to your blog? Look at the searches and follow the links if need be. Find out what terms brides are using to find you. I think you will be amazed by what you see. It isn’t generic “keywords’’ like wedding flowers; it’s extended strings like “wedding centerpieces with branches and crystals”. It’s not “wedding gown Denver” its “sweetheart neckline wedding gown by Monique Lhullier discount”.

This is why blogging is so powerful. Every time you post you add words and phrases that brides are searching on. Those build up over time. If a particular term is strong for you, keep posting on topics that relate to it using similar terms.

I also get a remarkable amount of referrals for Google images over on my Wedding Dish blog; something like one in three is from an image search. Now remember, the search robots cannot see what is in your pictures, they only read the words you put with them. The key is to title, label and describe your images when you post them. Again, click through the referrals in you stats to see what they were originally looking for when they found you. Now use that in your posts.

If you follow this, and continue to refine your posts by the referrals you are getting you don’t have any choice but to raise your traffic and your visibility.