The first question comes from yesterday’s post on search engines. Chris asks:

But webmaster, your stats seem to indicate that 99.7% of our traffic comes from a search engine. Aren’t there some visitors that just come here because they know about us already? Or, what about someone like me that has a page in the www.bus.wisc.edu domain set as their homepage, so I visit like a bajillion (also a math thing) times per day? Is this an example of the skewed statistics that [insert partisan talk show host] keeps warning me about?

Excellent question. I’ll try to clarify.

The percentages given are for people who are referred from search engines only. We had about 350,000 page views in October. Of those page views, we received about 16,000 referrals from search engines.

The point about internal traffic is a valid one. There are many computers within Grainger Hall that have their browsers default to a specific page on the School of Business site. Any time someone fires up a browser, it counts as a page view. Perhaps this is a policy we should look at. On one hand, we don’t want extra pageviews. On the other, we don’t want to discount valid internal traffic.

Today’s second question comes from John regarding blog post frequency:

While I see compelling reasons for professionals and faculty to blog, could you provide some more information on the posting frequency and quality expectations of most blog readers?

My answer to this is going to be a bit of a cop-out. I did what many users do and asked the great technical guru, Google, “What is the recommended blog posting frequency?”

The initial answer was a bit surprizing: Blog Posting Frequency Doesn’t Matter Anymore. I wouldn’t have guessed that.

Then I found some contrarian commentary in a post on ProBlogger, that addresses the intent and goals for the blog as an bellwether of how frequently you should post.

My personal feeling, in the context of the university, is that if you choose to blog, you should choose a frequency and stick to it. I have blogs that I read that update several times a day and some that update biweekly. The key is that they’re consistent and I know when to check back.

Sorry about that.

Because of this, I plan to make my next collection of posts on the topic of search engine basics. We’ll start at the beginning, a very good place to start: What search engines are important?

Taking a peek at the statistics for October 2006, the search engines that drive traffic to www.bus.wisc.edu break down as follows:

Google: ~88%
Yahoo!: ~9%
MSN: ~2%
AOL: ~.4%
Ask Jeeves: ~0.3%

For this reason, we’ll focus mainly on Google for optimization. It should be noted, however, that these results are skewed since we use Google’s public service search for our internal site search.

Here’s your homework: go to google.com/toolbar and install the Google toolbar (if you haven’t already). Visit some pages and make note of the green bar titled “PageRank.”

Hover over the bar with your mouse, it should pop a little yellow box that reads something like: “PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of this page (X/10).

This is a logarithmic scale that Google uses to assign importance to pages. (Sidenote: the Richter scale that’s used to measure earthquakes is also logarithmic, so the difference between a 2 and a 3 is much less than the difference between an 8 and a 9…it’s a math thing). Check the page rank of big sites like cnn.com, yahoo.com, etc. How do they compare to the page rank of your site?

Wouldn’t it be nice to get a hunk of that PageRank? We’ll talk about that another time.

While there are plenty of those sorts of blogs, there are plenty of reasons to blog in the corporate world. Heck, you’re reading one right now! In Why business blogs are important, you can read all about the reasons to blog.

Some of the reasons include knowledge transfer among employees (best practices and the like), to develop stronger customer relationships (with, oh I don’t know, alumni and prospective students), and to attract the best employees (hey, these folks are experts, I want to work for them!).

It’s a good read. Another good read is The Artful Manager, a blog by the Bolz Center’s own Andrew Taylor. If you were wondering, “what kind of blog should I have?” then you should read Andrew’s blog and see a master at work.

The Web is becoming more participatory and users seem to be very willing to contribute. From the article:

“[The Web is] shifting now to user-generated content; it shows people engaging with the Internet in a number of different ways in their lives,” said John Horrigan

Even more salient for the higher ed market:

“Online content comes more often from younger people”

So there you have it folks, younger people (probably college-aged) are ready, willing and expecting to interact with your Web site. This goes beyond clicks and navigation. They want to ask a question and get an answer. They want to say “great job” or “fix this.”

Take a look at your Web site, is it easy for your customers to interact with your site? Is it easy to scan for information? Can visitors easily contact you? Do you reply? Do you have a blog? Do you monitor your blog? The Web is the single largest piece of your communications mix and often the first touchstone for your brand, make sure you leave a good impression.