The Year In Review: 2006 Stats

After seeing SEOmoz release their stats a little over a week ago, I was inspired to do the same. Hopefully it’s not too far into the new year to make a review of last year seem out of place. If you missed Rand’s post have a look at SEOmoz’s 2006 Stats in Review.

Everything here comes from awstats, not because I think it’s the best analytics package, but simply because it’s the only package I’ve had installed all year.

Most Popular Blog Posts

2 Column CSS Layout – 2520
Interview With Guest Blogger Yuri Filimonov – 1292
Simple Navigation Bar With CSS And (x)HTML – 1234
3 Column CSS Layout – 1219
Simple Menus With (x)HTML Lists And CSS – 1076
SEO Basics Tutorial – 846
Creating Sitemaps In WordPress – 750
How Important Is Proper Grammar And Word Usage To Effective Communication? – 721
Google Advanced Search Operators – 650
Centering With CSS: Web Pages And Block Level Elements – 594
Tips For Getting Backlinks – 581
Link Baiting As Part Of An Effective Link Building Campaign – 495
Creating Shapes With CSS Borders – 492
The Goal Of SEO – 471
Can You Get Rich With AdSense? – 464

I won’t make any claims that the above posts are my best, but they were the posts that received the most views over the course of the year. I wrote the majority of them in first half the year giving them more time to to be viewed, though three of these posts were written as recently as October.

Unique Visitors / Visits

January – 403 / 741
February – 503 / 1016
March – 705 / 1400
April – 1140 / 2456
May – 1375 / 3027
June – 1689 / 4011
July – 1605 / 4131
August – 1339 / 4592
September – 1206 / 4084
October – 2819 / 6764
November – 5318 / 11261
December – 5559 / 12643

The totals for the year are 23,688 uniques and 56,126 visits. The numbers aren’t as impressive as SEOmoz’s stats, but I take encouragement in the growth from the beginning of the year. Uniques are up 1300% and visits 1700%. If that same growth were to continue through the next year, then December 2007 stats would be 71,886 / 215,716. And 2007 as a whole could see 306,236 uniques and 957,626 visits. Wish me luck.

Referrer Domains

The above numbers are only for traffic that arrived at the site through links from another domain. Direct traffic and search traffic far outweighed referrer traffic. One thing that stands out to me from the above is I spent an awful lot of time on forums during the year as a third of the sites above are forums where I regularly post.

It’s also clear that allowing the blog’s content to travel and be republished on the iEntry network, which includes WebProNews, accounted for a good deal of traffic, especially when you consider it only began a couple months back. How about a shout for social media optimization.

Search Engine Traffic

Google – 8446
Google (Images) – 224
Yahoo – 149
MSN – 106
Unknown search engines – 52
AOL – 43
AltaVista – 24
Ask Jeeves – 15
Dogpile – 6
AllTheWeb – 5
Netscape – 4
DMOZ – 3
Yandex – 3
Earth Link – 2
Excite – 2

You’d think I’d be happy with all the Google traffic, but I would prefer the search traffic to be a little more mixed among the engines. Though I don’t think it likely, a few algorithm changes at Google and just about all my search traffic would be gone. Going against the norm Google has been driving traffic since early in the year and the other engines have only recently begun to send searchers. I think Technorati accounts for most if not all of the unknown search engines

Search Phrases

2 column css layout – 41
google_hints – 39
2 column css – 29
ilq extension toolbar – 25
fantastico auto installer – 23
2 columns css – 22
proper word usage – 19
online business blog – 18
site wide duplicate content analyzer – 18
compare neomail horde squirrelmail – 18
css shapes – 18
how to get backlinks – 17
domain apps – 17
css navigation bar – 16
centering web pages – 16

6057 keyphrases were used to find me this year. Given how quickly the above lists drops off in the number of searches for each phrase it’s easy to understand that most of the 6057 were unique long tail phrases. It’s a good lesson for new sites to learn about keyphrases and it should be noted that I did little to optimize the site for most of those 6000+ phrases

Keywords

css – 2639
column – 1023
layout – 789
div – 587
navigation – 475
menu – 430
bar – 421
html – 400
simple – 361
grammar – 333
columns – 312
web – 311
proper – 285
google – 272
adsense – 263
seo – 263

I removed a few stop words like ‘a’ and ‘the’ and ‘to’ from the above list since they don’t really add much value. It’s easy to see looking at the list of top keywords why the most viewed posts were most viewed. I am happy that the top keywords are generally webmaster and seo related words. It does make me feel like I belong. Keep in mind the site wasn’t found for these keywords in isolation. They’re all part of longer phrases.

Unfortunately I don’t have information about subscribers, but I will next year as I signed up for FeedBurner earlier when I started putting together this post. Shame on me for not having done so sooner.

Thanks to everyone who became any of the statistics above. Hopefully you’ll also be part of the stats for 2007.

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