In the meantime, I’ve worked a few events and gotten them posted to the website.  Back in March, Olinda and I worked the William Paterson Fashion Show. This was a joint venture between HASA and CARIBSA at William Paterson University. It was a great show, and we got a ton of great pictures…

This past weekend, I did a job for a Campus alumni.  Akeem, an ’08 grad, organized a community event to celebrate single mothers in the E.O. area.  I actually managed to dump all of the images onto my computer, edit them, and upload them the same day… quite a feat for me!  Check out the highlights from the 1st Annual Red Carpet Single Mothers Appreciation Day at Watsessing Park.

I’ve got a couple other events from the spring that I want to post as part of our portfolio. When that’s done, I’ll post here with links to the pages.

Every once in a while, I look through my Google Analytics data to find new topics to write about.

1. Log into Google Analytics and choose a site.
2. Click on “Traffic Sources” on the left-hand menu.
3. Click on “Keywords” in the new sub-menu.
4. Browse through the hundreds of phrases that people used to find your site.

Here’s the key. Look for search phrases that are questions about things related to your site, but that you haven’t really answered directly. On my photography site, someone searched for “What is black clipping.” I had mentioned the term black clipping in an unrelated post, but this seemed like a good time to write a post explaining exactly what the term means.

Here’s another example, from the same digital photography site. One keyword that a few people used was “canon compatible zoom lenses.” I previously wrote an article about a collection of canon compatible lenses that I had owned. Apparently this isn’t a topic a lot of people wrote about, because that post ranks #1 in Google for the phrase “canon compatible lenses.” That article didn’t really focus on zoom lenses, though, so this coming week I plan on writing up a list of canon compatible zoom lenses.

And, to make it even more sweet, this is a great opportunity to write up a post with lots of links to Amazon… which has the potential to generate some referral income.

So go check out your Google Analytics data and see what people are searching for. They’re practically asking you questions and just waiting for the answers. Give it to them, and you’ll end up with content that people want and more visitors.

For a short time, it worked out well. Through November 2008, when I first launched this site, to December 2008 I kept up with it. After Christmas break, I started school up again in January 2009, and I just couldn’t keep up… the ironic thing was that I found something that I could write about and attract a whole lot of traffic – Fallout 3. Too bad I’m not younger, or I would just keep playing video games and blogging about them. I think I missed out on that boat when I was an avid gamer 10 years ago…

But, alas, I couldn’t keep playing Fallout 3 enough to write about it, and I didn’t have a lot of steam to write about my other topics either. So, this site and my NaBloPoMo pledge both fell by the wayside.

After starting up Digital Photography How To, I’ve been pretty consistent about posting. There have been some lulls, and I’m not doing as much as I originally thought I would… but I’ve come a long way from July. Recently, I came across a link for NaBloPoMo and I thought I’d try it out again. Maybe this time, I’ll make it through January and actually survive…

As part of NaBloPoMo, you can also create a profile page and mini-blog on their site. As if I needed something else to worry about. But, it is a good place to reflect on the actual process of writing that may not be so relevant for my actual blog.

Now I can understand if this was a WordPress.com blog and they had restricted certain filetypes (or another shared host). But this was my blog, gosh darnedit, and I was gonna upload that file if I wanted to…!

A quick search revealed just the type of WordPress hack that I needed. Read the full explanation of how to modify the allowed upload types in WordPress on Chris Meller’s blog. The gist of the solution is that WordPress uses a function, “upload_mimes” to check what file types are allowed. You can add a filter to hijack that function, add your own filetype, and pass that back to WordPress.

I followed Chris’ directions, added ‘dng’ to the array, and it worked like a charm. Awesome.

The trouble is, not everyone knows that you can easily and freely turn office documents into PDF files. Typically, it’s assumed you need some (expensive) professional software to create PDF files. For example, you could get Adobe Acrobat Pro or Distiller. Not cheap options, and not for the average user.

I was reading the NJEA review that I got in the mail today, and they listed Zamzar as a great resource because, among other things, it can convert documents to pdfs. While this is true, you don’t need an online service like Zamzar. There’s another free option: Open Office.

Within the entire OpenOffice suite, you automatically have the option to save a document as a pdf file. If you create a handout in OpenOffice Writer, you can have a pdf file instantly by hitting the PDF button. If you want to share a presentation, you can open your Impress file and save it as a PDF. It’s built into the OpenOffice suite, in part, because OpenOffice is about using open standards to share information… PDF is an open standard. “.docx” is not.

I still wonder why more schools don’t turn away from expensive, licensed proprietary options when there are perfectly good open source alternatives available. For some students (i.e. graphic design, photography), you’ll want a PC or a Mac that can run the Adobe Creative Suite. For just about everyone else… Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and any number of open source alternatives is a perfect solution. I’d say something like 90% (or more) of students would be perfectly served by a purely open source system.

But, you also want some quality to that traffic. Traffic with a high bounce rate – where people come to your site and immediately leave – isn’t so useful. If you have a high enough search volume, that may be ok. But, it’d be nice if people browsed around your site for a while. Users that read four or five pages in a visit increase your traffic numbers (and, therefore, advertising possibilities) a lot faster than one-off bounce visitors.

Today, I was looking through the Google Analytics report for this site. I haven’t been doing a good job of maintaining it, so the traffic isn’t amazing, but there are still a decent number of daily visitors that read some of my old guides/walkthroughs. When I looked for the pages with the lowest bounce/exit rate, I noticed one page that stood out from all the others: How to Complete the Main Quest Line, Chapter 6: Tranquility Lane.

What you see above is the navigation summary for that single page. On the right hand side, you’ll notice one interesting thing: only 15% of the people that get to this page then leave this site. 85% of them click on a link and stay on the site.

On the left hand side, you’ll notice a second interesting thing: people getting to this page are both entering the site (either from a referral or a search engine) and clicking through from another page on the site. The page is a hook that keeps people on the site – whether they’re fresh from another site or reading through for specific information about this topic.

What Makes This Page So Successful?

So what makes this page so successful at keeping visitors here? Here are two things I see that are beneficial here.

It’s part of a series. The site introduces a topic (a walkthrough for a section of Fallout 3) and then links to various parts of the walkthrough. People can then jump in to the specific point that they need to read about.

Each part of the series links back to it. There are six pages in the walkthrough, and each one contains links to the previous part, the next part, and this table of contents page. The left-hand side of the chart shows pretty definitively that people are reading one of the sub-pages, clicking back to the table of contents, and then clicking through to another sub-page. It’s an example where intuitive navigation is helping users find the content that they want.

So, there’s two components to this. On the one hand, there’s good content. People want this information, and I gave it to them. I wrote the walkthrough a year and a half ago, and people are still searching for and reading it. Two, I designed the pages to have intuitive navigation, and people are using that to stick around on the site.

So, if you want to reduce your bounce rate, start writing up some series of articles that address a big topic or theme. Then link them together with a table of contents, and make sure people can find it. If it’s good, they’ll stick around and click around.

Recently, I found a great plug-in that eliminates this step. I went out and found it because, somehow, I accidentally removed the code from the footer on this website. I don’t remember when or how I did that, but it became apparent when Google Analytics showed that I had 0 traffic for about two weeks.

The plug-in, Google Analyticator, is great for two reasons: it’s entirely automatic and it puts a snapshot of your analytics report in your dashboard.

To set it up, you activate the plug-in and go to the settings section of the dashboard. There, you can log into your Google account and authenticate your WordPress installation so it can access the Google analytics information. The necessary code is automatically inserted, and you don’t have to worry about cutting and pasting anything.

The snapshot of the stats is also cool. It definitely isn’t the full-featured report you get on the Analytics page, but it’ll give you a simple graph of visits and let you know the top performing pages/searches for the past 30 days.

I love the plug-in so much that I’ve installed it on all three of my current sites: this one, Olinda Gibbons Photography, and Digital Photography How To.

If you want to do this, here are a couple tips.

Write a original article about a topic you wrote about on your blog. For example, today I wrote up a quick review of Mozy, an online backup service. I had written about that several times before on my photography site. This allowed me to a) write up an original piece of content and b) naturally link back to my own site in the text of the article.

Use natural links in the article to “deep link” to your content. When I write up the article, I don’t just include a link back to the root page of my site. That’s kind of senseless self promotion, and SEO-wise it’s probably not the best idea. The idea here is to create deep links – links to actual articles that you’ve written. Plus, these links will flow better with the article that you’re writing for AC. Check out my AC article on Mozy to see what I mean.

Link to Your Site’s Root in the Additional Resources. There two kinds of links in the SEO world – “rel=nofollow” and follow links. When a search engine like Google sees the “rel=nofollow” attribute on a link, it discounts that link in calculating page popularity, search engine rankings, and such. The gold standard in SEO is “real” follow links.

When you’re writing an article on AC, you need to understand that links in different places work differently. If you include a link in the article (as per the above tip), it’s a real link, no “rel=nofollow” strings attached. If, however, you link to a site in the additional resources (which appear in the sidebar of your article), they have the “rel=nofollow” attribute. I typically use this area to link to my site as well as one or two others that might have general information about the topic.

The important thing to remember is to write something useful and don’t just link to your site. Read your article over. Does it include some useful information for the reader, even if they don’t follow the links? If yes, you did a good job and your article is acceptable. If not, then you did a lousy job and you should re-write it. Chances are, that kind of junk will not get read and could probably get flagged for removal.

In the admin area, you can create custom thumbnails for your images. An image is supposed to pop up that you can drag a thumbnail over. But for some reason, when I opened up the window to create a thumbnail, the image didn’t appear. The image was coming up blank, like if you link to an image that isn’t there.

The actual image was there on the server, so that wasn’t a problem. I followed the trail a bit and figured out that the image for the thumbnail creation process was created by a script, nggshow.php (part of the Nextgen plugin). The script itself was working. It fetched all the information, put it in an object, and then it was supposed to spit out an image.

The problem was that the final output is supposed to be a jpeg. But, some white space was added at the top of the file, so the output was corrupted. The jpeg was there, but the browser couldn’t render it because of the added white space at the top of the file. I don’t know where exactly that was coming from, but it was added in somewhere in the Nextgen Gallery plugin files.

I tried to go through, eliminate any extra lines outside the php tags, and get rid of the white space. I eliminated one of the two newline characters that was in the output, but I couldn’t find the second. After pulling my hair for a while, I realized that I was working with an older version of Nextgen Gallery (1.5.3). I updated to the most recent (1.5.5), and it worked fine. Doh.

So… simple solution. Upgrade to the latest version of the plugin.

But, a key part of the concept was to include a Nextgen Image Gallery in that excerpt. It’s a photography website, and the point of the blog posts is to show pictures. Seems kind of silly to show a text excerpt without the image gallery, eh? I love the Nextgen gallery because it lets me easily upload pictures to the server, organize them into galleries (i.e. job for clients) and then post them on a WordPress page/post with a single piece of shortcode.

The problem is that this shortcode will, by default, execute in the post (when you call the function the_content()), but it won’t execute in the excerpt (when you call the function the_excerpt()).

I searched around and found a simple solution. Open up (or create) a “functions.php” within the root folder of your theme. Insert these two lines of code…

add_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'shortcode_unautop');
add_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'do_shortcode');

This tells WordPress to execute any shortcodes that it finds when you call the_excerpt(). Just what I was looking for…