Moveable Type Web Design

Don't assume that your website is easy to navigate. One of the neatest things about the web is that we have instant feedback on use. With just a little tracking we can see what pages people are looking at, how they're finding our site and what they're doing once they're here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are currently using four different tracking methods. Most utilize javascript "bugs," tiny snippets of code that send individual results to an advanced software tracking system. I put the code inside a Moveable Type "Modules Template" which is automatically imported to all pages. Installing a new system is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Template and rebuilding the site.

AXS Visitors Tracking System
This software installs on your server but don't let that scare you: this is one of the easiest installations I've ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can narrow it specific pages on your site, or even particular search engines or search phrases.

There's also a option to view the lastest traffic by visitor. I love watching this! You can see how individuals are using the site and where they're navigating. I've been able to identify different types of visitors this way and understand the complexity of the audience.

It doesn't seem like AXS is not being developed anymore. The latest stable version came out over two years go, which is a shame.

HitTail
This service watches search-engine links and makes recommendations for new keywords. I wrote about this service yesterday in Blogging for the Long Tail.

Reeferss.com
This is a simple simple bit of software. Like every other tracking system it keeps track of referrers: search engines and websites that bring traffic to your site. But unlike the others that's all it does. Why care then? It provides a real-time RSS feed of these visitors. I bring the feed into my "Netvibes" page (a customized start page, see below) and scan the results multiple times a day.

Google Analytics
The internet's gatekeeper bought the Urchin analytics company in April 2005 and relaunched the product as Google Analytics shortly thereafter. This is becoming an essential tracker. It's free and it's powerful, though I haven't been as impressed by it as others have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It's easy to find out what people are saying about you online.

Technorati
This service tracks blogs but you don't need to have a blog to use it, for Technorati will tell you where blogs are linking. Give it your URLs (or those of your competitors!) and you'll know whenever a blogger puts in a link to you. You can also give it keywords and find out when a blog uses them.

Google Blog Search
Google can also let you follow blog references or keyword mentions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type "site:www.yourdomain.com" into the main Google search page and you'll see who's linking to your site (or to the competition). There are lots of other services that track blogs and mentions--Sphere, Bloglines, etc. They all have different strengths so try them and see what you think.

Feedburner
The best RSS massager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They've recently introduced page tracking software too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it's as good as Feedburner's other offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It's easy to get overwhelmed by all of this information. Most of the tracking services provide RSS feeds (See The Wonders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a customized start page, to pull these all together into a single page that I can scan every morning. Here's a screenshot of part of my Netvibes tracking page--the full page currently shows fourteen tracking feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With tracking you find out what people are looking for on the internet. This helps you create pages and services that people will want to find. You might be surprised to see what they're already finding on your site. Some examples:

• Analyzing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bringing in high Google traffic. I looked at these pages again and realized they did a good job of describing the company's mission. I consequently redesigned the site homepage to feature them and I made sure that those pages contained direct links to its most important services.

• When I started work for another client I looked at their site and suspected that they're most important articles were not being seen--visitors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of tracking confirmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to convince the executive director that we made some small modifications to the design. Having this strong content linked right off the homepage helped bring in Google traffic.

Here's some of what Johnson has to say:

Distribution, content creation, and the ability to more easily compete with established local players online... blogging is perfect for that. I mean a blog is chronologically arranged, in columns, divided by categories and changes (in many cases) everyday. That's the broad definition of a newspaper, right? A blog is so much more than that, but the basic structure lends itself very well to developing an online competitor for newspapers.

It was three years ago that I followed Brad Choate's instructions for using Moveable Type as a whole-site content management system. What started as an experiment became a way of life for me. The MT interface lends itself so well to content management that I'm now using it for my non-techie clients: Quakersong.org and Quakeryouth.org are both put together by MT and I've been surprised that there's been almost no learning curve for the client's adoption of this software.

Given this, it seems odd that the kids at Moveable Type haven't taken MT in this direction (even more surprising since they hired Brad himself a few years ago!). I see a big market in my niche sites for this sort of functionality and three years later I'm still having to tweak templates to get this to work. Anil, what's up? If Drupal had better documentation and smoother installation it would have been the brawn behind MartinKelley.com.

It would be fun to follow Until Monday's example and create a hyperlocal site (hint hint to VW if she's reading this). Of course, locality is not just geographically-based anymore. Quakerquaker.org is a local portal of a different kind. I'm a big believer that the hyperlocality of niche and geographic sites are the cutting edge in the next-wave of the social web.

There's a lot of pioneering to be done in this regards. The net has a lot of power to take down culture monopolies by confronting old boy networks and business-as-usual thinking with innovative social networks that harness the talents of the outsiders. The smart newspapers, magazines, churches and cultural organizations will come on board and leap-frog themselves to twenty-first century relevance. Too many of the Philadelphia (and/or) Quaker institutions I know respond to change by shuffling job titles and putting blinders up against recognizing the ever-narrower demographic they serve.

An important part of the redesign was an automatic keyword generator. Posts were run through a script that automatically pulled out keywords from the text. My 2003 article, Going all the way with Movable Type generated the following tags, which appear as links after the post:

• choate
• nonviolence
• curly quotes
• personal blog
• php
• org
• moveabletype
• movable type
• hmtl
• dashes
• textile
• garbage
• blogs

Following the links takes you to similarly-tagged articles. At least that's the conceit. When you follow a tag's link you're simply doing a site search for that keyword. A little htaccess rewrite magic is making the result look like it's a static category page.

"Fine and well" you're thinking, "big deal." Well, here's what's cool. There are 225 entries on the QuakerRanter blog. Google's just gone through and indexed the site and is now claiming it contains 1300 pages. Each tag is being indexed as its own page. Every time I mention any interesting term, it becomes a page that Google indexes and delivers to its searchers.

Which brings us to today's cool piece from the access logs. In December of 2004 a rather innocent post on Quaker Ranter became the center of a mini-whirlwind on the political blogs when it mentioned that I had gotten a call from a CBS News publicist interested in Nonviolence.org. All political blogs get publicity calls from news and opinion think tanks trying to suggest (or plant) stories but no one's supposed to talk about it. I only mentioned it because it was so unusual. One of the blogs denouncing the liberal conspiracy my post revealed was the somewhat slimy Little Green Footballs. After a few weeks the denunciations died down.

But this morning, someone looked up littlegreenfootballs in Google and came to my site. Because of my automatic keyword generator, tags, and static-loooking links, I'm now the number two entry, on two three-year old posts, now relocated to a days old quakerranter.org. Cool.

This mixing and matching of content and rich manipulation of data is sometimes lumped together in the cool bu zzphrase folksonomy. Note that none of what I've done is a tricking of Google. Every tag is really going to a page with that content. These are "natural" and "organic" search results in the lingo of SEO. I'm just presenting my information in multiple formats that appeal that the widest array of audiences.

For what it's worth, I don't think I deserve #2 status for "littlegreenfootballs" and I don't think Google will keep it there for long. It's a bit odd that they have elevated that particular term so high and no others tags seem so stratospheric.

Positive Results:

As of February 2007, Google indexes 3,540 pages on QuakerRanter.org, a blog of only 239 posts. In December 2006 30% of my Google visits were to one of the "tags" page. Reconfiguring the blog in this kind of tag-intensive way has more than doubled search engines visits, again in a very natural and organic way. Adding tags has simply made what I've written more accessible to search engines. Very cool.

Negative Ramifications:

Shortly after installing this new system, my servers started periodically crashing (about once/week). The problem would be multiple MT-Search processes overloading the memory.

My guess is that a search engine spider came along and started indexing all of the tags. Each link initiated a search query in Movable Type. The built-in search for Movable Type is just not able to handle this volume of traffic.

I installed Fast Search to solve the problem (tip of the hat to Al-Muhajabah). It took awhile: Fast Search required a MySQL upgrade at my host. After that I needed to install these plugin fixes. Then it was fine-tuning the htaccess files. It was been more work than I initially expected and the tag results now forward to a funny URL that Google doesn't love as much.