State of the Websites

Report for FGC Cen­tral Com­mit­tee, Octo­ber 2004
By Mar­tin Kel­ley, webmaster

It’s impor­tant to start off with a lit­tle edi­to­r­i­al about why we need reports like this. We put up a web­site and we know peo­ple use it. Why both­er spend­ing time col­lect­ing data?

The inter­net is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly vague and pre­cise. We can say defin­i­tive­ly that the FGC web­site received 114,097 “unique vis­i­tors” in the past fis­cal year. But how many peo­ple does that rep­re­sent? Is that a high num­ber or low num­ber? How did these users react when they came to the site. Did they think to them­selves “whoops, not what I want” and leave, or did they go “wow, what’s this FGC?, hey this is great.” LESSON: We need data to know if the site is being used well.

Every­one who reads this report is by def­i­n­i­tion an insid­er. None of us are able to step into the shoes of an unknowl­edge­able seek­er. In my study of usage pat­terns, I have found that the dif­fer­ences in web­site use between Quak­er insid­ers and seek­ers is so great that they might as well be look­ing at dif­fer­ent web­sites, if not dif­fer­ent media alto­geth­er (see How Insid­ers and Seek­ers Use the Quak­er Net.

Because of this gap we can­not design the site based on whims or per­son­al pref­er­ences. It is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how new­com­ers might nav­i­gate the site. We can only con­sid­er the design of the site after we’ve exam­ined in usage, both in detail (actu­al users mov­ing through the site) and in aggre­gate (pages and links vis­it­ed over peri­ods of time). See also: How to mea­sure the peace move­ment. LESSON: We can only effec­tive­ly design the site if we incor­po­rate sophis­ti­cat­ed and detailed data about how the site is being used.

Part 2, Googlization

By far the most sig­nif­i­cant change in our web­sites over the past year has been the “googliza­tion” of Quaker­books and Quak­erfind­er, both of which now have over four times the vis­i­tors they were get­ting last year.

The Google Prob­lem: Both Quaker­books and Quak­erfind­er have had great con­tent from their start. The for­mer lists the entire inven­to­ry of FGC’s book­store, along with book descrip­tions and read­er com­men­tary. The lat­ter has our list of meet­ings – address­es, wor­ship times, and con­tact infor­ma­tion. But on both sites the bulk of the con­tent was locked up in data­bas­es. Before users could ben­e­fit from the sites, they had to find them. This lim­it­ed much of the use to peo­ple who already know about FGC and our resources. Because inter­net search engines can’t search web­site data­bas­es (a prob­lem known as the hid­den or deep web), they could index only a lim­it­ed num­ber of pages on these sites and they made refer­rals on only the most gener­ic search phras­es (e.g., “quak­er book­store” “quak­er meet­ing directory”).

We made var­i­ous changes to both sites (tech­ni­cal details below) that have made them search­able by Google and the oth­er search engines, which now return our sites for very spe­cif­ic search queries, e.g., “Quak­ers in con­flict Ingle” and “Quak­ers Poughkeepsie”.

A Wider, More Inclu­sive Audi­ence: What’s great is that this has giv­en us not just a big­ger audi­ence, but our tar­get audi­ence. Most of these vis­i­tors don’t know enough about how Friends are orga­nized to even know where to look for infor­ma­tion. With Quak­erfind­er and Quaker­books, we’re now be vis­i­ble on their terms.

We’re giv­ing them the basic infor­ma­tion they’re seek­ing and we’re doing it when they are active­ly seek­ing it. This last point is impor­tant. I spend a lot of time watch­ing how peo­ple use web­sites. If you email some­one out of the blue with a link to a web­site, they might fol­low it but only half-heartedly. They might be doing five oth­er things at the same time and they rarely stay to full use the web­site’s resources. When some­one comes to a site via a search engine they’re much more like­ly to look around: this is the vis­it that they are ini­ti­at­ing because they have some­thing spe­cif­ic they’re try­ing to find.

Hav­ing a “googli­fied” Quak­erfind­er means we’re actu­al­ly reach­ing peo­ple who are ready to try out a Quak­er meet­ing and we’re giv­ing them that most basic infor­ma­tion that’s often hard to find. With a search­able Quaker­books we’re sell­ing books to peo­ple who might not even have thought about Quak­ers as a pos­si­ble spir­i­tu­al path. I sus­pect that both sites are doing more out­reach about Quak­erism than any of us expect.

Update, 11/29/04: I recent­ly met some­one who came to Friends after read­ing the Quak­er entry in Wikipedia. He had gone through the list of reli­gious denom­i­na­tions in the U.S. till he found one that spoke to his con­di­tion. In the past month FGC has got­ten 57 vis­i­tors from Wikipedia.

The Fixes

In the offi­cial com­mit­tee report I tried to steer clear of too many tech­ni­cal details since I want­ed peo­ple to read it. So I’ll expand on them here on the web­site version.

Unique Domains: I don’t think it real­ly helped to give Quak​erfind​er​.org and Quaker​books​.org their own domains, at least ini­tial­ly. In last year’s report I not­ed that most of the traf­fic to those sites came from the main FGCQuak​er​.org site and that the sep­a­rate domains weren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful. Now the sites do have their own sort of iden­ti­ty, thanks to the “googliza­tion,” which was a dif­fer­ent process for the two sites.

Quaker​books​.org: Vis­i­tors to the Quaker​books​.org site are giv­en ses­sion IDs to allow us to fol­low along with them as they make their selec­tions. Since some users don’t allow cook­ies, this ID some­times appears in the URL (it appears as some­thing like “?sessionid=1514” append­ed to the end of the address). Google real­ly hates ses­sion IDs because its auto­mat­ed soft­ware does­n’t know if the dif­fer­ent URLs are dif­fer­ent pages (to be indexed sep­a­rate­ly) or mere­ly dif­fer­ent ses­sions look­ing at the same page. So Googles just ignores any­thing that looks like this. The eas­i­est fix is to have the soft­ware look to see if the vis­i­tor is Google and take of the ses­sion IDs (Google is okay with this workaround; I also used this method to allow them to index my Non​vi​o​lence​.org dis­cus­sion board.)

Quak­erfind­er: On Quak​erfind​er​.org, the prob­lem was that vis­i­tors had to type in a zip code to get to any of the con­tent. Google’s not that inter­ac­tive and only fol­lows links. Until recent­ly, it thought there was only three pages to the site. To fix this we set up an alter­na­tive way to nav­i­gate the site: from the home­page you can now fol­low a link to lists of Quak­er Meet­ings by state. The zip code lookup is so much more con­ve­nient that we don’t sus­pect many live peo­ple will look up by state, but Google will and because of this it now lists 808 pages on the site. Now Google acts as a alter­nate lookup ser­vice, one that does­n’t depend on peo­ple find­ing our site beforehand.

Part 3, Comparing the Sites

Visitors

The basic mea­sure used to mea­sure web­site traf­fic is that of the “unique vis­i­tor,” which counts user ses­sions. Here are this year’s com­par­isons to last year’s. Num­bers rep­re­sent the month­ly aver­age “unique vis­i­tors” to each of our three websites.

     Site        FY 03/04 total  FY 02/03 total  Increase
     FGCQuaker.org    114,097         82,747           38%
     Quakerfinder.org  48,084         23,964          100%
     Quakerbooks.org   69,924         19,332          262%

The last two sites have tru­ly remark­able jumps. The num­bers are a lit­tle mis­lead­ing, how­ev­er, as the increase in traf­fic has­n’t been grad­ual but sud­den and climb­ing. Com­pare the last full month (Sep­tem­ber 2004) with the same month the pre­vi­ous year and all three sites have high­er jumps.

     Site             Sept 04         Sept 03         Increase
     FGCQuaker.org    9459            8254             15%
     Quakerfinder.org 8782            1997            340%
     Quakerbooks.org  7498            1611            366%

While the inter­net grows in use every year, the increas­es on Quak­erfind­er and Quaker­books rep­re­sent a quan­tum leap over that incre­men­tal increase. They rep­re­sent “search engine opti­miza­tion” of those sites, or what we all refer to the “googliza­tion” of the sites.

Links:

One way of mea­sur­ing the vis­i­bil­i­ty of a web­site is to count how many oth­er web­pages link to it. Here are

     Site              October 2004    October 2003    Increase
     FGCQuaker.org     496             396              25%
     Quakerfinder.org  196              46             326%
     Quakerbooks.org   151              96              57%

For com­par­i­son: Quak​er​.org is up to 11,900 links, Phi­la. Year­ly Meet­ing is 248, Pendle​Hill​.org is 420, FCNL.org is 10,200, Non​vi​o​lence​.org is 20,900 and AFSC.org is 21,800. See Mis­cel­la­neous & Notes at end to see how num­bers were obtained. See How Can We Mea­sure the State of the Peace Move­ment? for more on this method of measurement.

Part 4, The FGCQuak​er​.org Site

Visitors

Use of FGCQuak​er​.org con­tin­ues to grow at a good clip. We have a 38% increase this fis­cal year com­pared with last’s. The site received over 114,000 unique vis­i­tors from Octo­ber 1, 2003 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2004.

To the right is the chart show­ing unique vis­i­tors by month for the past three years:

Referrers: Where did visitors come from?

In Sep­tem­ber 2004, there were 9459 “unique vis­its” to the FGCQuak​er​.org site, still our most-visited site. Here’s where they came from.

1021 from Quak​erfind​er​.org. One sur­prise this year is the jump in Quakerfinder-referred vis­its. This is due of course to the phe­nom­e­nal vis­i­bil­i­ty of that site. In a recent one-month peri­od, FGCQuak­er received 983 vis­its from Quak­erfind­er links, two-thirds of which came from the “googlized” Quak­erfind­er pages. About one in ten vis­i­tors are now com­ing to FGCQuak­er through Quak­erfind­er. Up 288% from last year.

842 from Google. We get a lot of Google traf­fic because we have a lot of con­tent on our site: dozens of pam­phlets, years worth of FGConnec­tions, large parts of the old Fos­ter­ing Vital Friends Meet­ings resource binder. Vis­i­tors via search engines often don’t know FGC exists but they want to know about our pro­grams and work. Because FGC does such great work (and because we pub­li­cize it online!), many of our resources answer ques­tions peo­ple have. I think this is great outreach.

Here’s an exam­ple. This Spring I noticed that we were get­ting vis­its on fair­ly gener­ic search­es for racism. Here’s a list of search inquiries that brought peo­ple to the CMR pages on FGC:

“end­ing racism”
“racial­ly diverse communities”
“quak­er racial diversity”
“diver­si­ty in friends”
“eth­nic diversity”
“respon­si­bil­i­ties to racism”
“pas­toral care racism”
“activ­i­ties for end­ing racism”
“tes­ti­monies racial unity”

This is a fas­ci­nat­ing list pre­cise­ly because these are gener­ic search­es. Peo­ple aren’t look­ing for “Quak­ers end­ing racism,” they’re look­ing for any­one “end­ing racism” and Google is bring­ing them to us (we’re num­ber 6 on that search term). This is sur­pris­ing: I would think the much big­ger denom­i­na­tions would all have com­mit­tees end­ing racism that would come up high­er just because of their larg­er insti­tu­tion­al clout. That we are so high sug­gests that this work is not as com­mon as I we might hope and that Friends might have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play a role in larg­er faith dialogues.

When peo­ple use search engines, they get results from all over the FGC web­site. Search­es might pull up some four-year arti­cle on FGConnec­tions, or one of the “Friends And…” pam­phlets that we’ve put online. Google up 12% from last year. There were about 83 more vis­its from region­al Google sites.

434 from Quak​er​.org. Most of these peo­ple are com­ing direct­ly from the Quak​er​.org home­page to the FGCQuak​er​.org home­page. I esti­mate that about 60% of these vis­i­tors leave the FGC site with­out click­ing on any links. They’re prob­a­bly just super­fi­cial­ly curi­ous about us, but not enough to look around the site. Up 39% from last year.

253 from oth­er search engines: 118 from Yahoo (118), MSN (74), AOL (42), Ask (19).

81 from Beliefnet. Beliefnet has a pop­u­lar “Belief-o-Matic” quiz that will mag­i­cal­ly tell you what reli­gious faith you should join. It’s rigged in such a way that a lot of peo­ple unex­pect­ed­ly come up as Quak­er. The qui zthen directs peo­ple to an infor­ma­tion page on Friends, which includes some links to FGC. Most of the Beliefnet vis­i­tors are com­ing from that infor­ma­tion page direct­ly to the FGC home­page. Up 200% from last year.

69 from UVa’s Reli­gious Move­ments site. This is a pret­ty good descrip­tion of Quakerism

60 from Quaker­books. Our own book­store web­site attracts a lot of new peo­ple who aren’t part of the estab­lished Quak­er net­works and many of them first learn of FGC this way.

53 from Reli­gious Tol­er­ance. A pop­u­lar web­site from a Cana­di­an Uni­tar­i­an that pro­files religions..

52 from Quak​er​In​fo​.org. This is the Philadel­phia Quak­er Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter, a joint project of a num­ber of Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing FGC.

Where did people go?

Top Des­ti­na­tions in Sep­tem­ber 04:
* To the home­page: 2396;
* Library’s “Wel­come to Quak­erism” pages: 463;
* A&O “Resources for Meet­ings”: 320 (promi­nent­ly linked from Quakerfinder);
* Gath­er­ing pages: 309;
* “Silent Wor­ship Quak­er Val­ues” tract on the Library section;
* Gath­er­ing’s pic­tures from last year: 149;
* Reli­gious Ed: 149;
* FGConnec­tions arti­cles: 129;
* Ideas for First Day School”: 127;
* Advance­ment & Out­reach home­page: 124;
* Young Quakes: 118;
* Pub­li­ca­tions: 100;
* Devel­op­ment 97.

These are pret­ty typ­i­cal num­bers. The only sig­nif­i­cant vari­a­tion over the year comes in Spring, when traf­fic to the Gath­er­ing pages goes up. In May 2004, 961 peo­ple vis­it­ed the Gath­er­ing home­page, and 355 vis­it­ed the work­shop listings.

Forget the Aggregates: How Do People Use the Site?

So far I’ve looked at tallied-up num­bers: how many peo­ple vis­it­ed, how many pages were looked at. The prob­lem with this sort of sta­tis­tic is that it does­n’t give us a feel for how indi­vid­u­als are actu­al­ly using the site. Look­ing at usage explodes the pre­con­cep­tions that many of us “Insid­er Quak­ers” might bring to the web.

The first les­son: most peo­ple don’t come into our site via the FGC home­page. Even more shock­ing: close to half nev­er even see the homepage!

This blew me away when I first real­ized it. We spend so much time design­ing the home­page and won­der­ing how we’re going to direct seek­ers from it but a lot of this work is in vain.

Of that 45% or so that enter the site via the FGC home­page, most of them leave the site imme­di­ate­ly with­out fol­low­ing any link whatsoever.

Let’s splice this anoth­er way: 70% of the peo­ple who hit our site (wher­ev­er they enter) don’t look at any page oth­er than that first one. They don’t click on any­thing but the back button.

What are some of the lessons on this: one is that con­tent is all impor­tant. Those major­i­ty of vis­i­tors who bypass the home­page to para­chute direct­ly inside the site are com­ing for spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion. Many of them don’t know any­thing about FGC and most of them don’t care to learn about FGC the orga­ni­za­tion. They’re look­ing for some spe­cif­ic piece of infor­ma­tion on Quak­ers (“paint­ing of Penn­syl­va­nia Abo­li­tion­ist Soci­ety Quak­ers” and “Quak­ers prison reform”), or on reli­gious edu­ca­tion in gen­er­al (“reli­gious meet­ing”), or on how church­es are deal­ing with racism (“racial diver­si­ty” and “do blacks wor­ship with only blacks”). These are all search phras­es that have brought vis­i­tors to FGCQuak​er​.org. So it’s great that we have our pam­phlets online and FGConnec­tions and RE mate­ri­als and A&O brochures.

There are hun­dreds of pages on our site, most of which we prob­a­bly for­get are there, but Google knows them and will dis­play them up when the query is right.

Anoth­er les­son is that we should­n’t rely on our home­page to help vis­i­tors nav­i­gate. We should­n’t even wor­ry much about using how its design will work for both insid­ers and seek­ers: most of the seek­ers nev­er even go there. Most of the peo­ple com­ing to the FGC home­page are look­ing for FGC the orga­ni­za­tion.

Com­mit­tee Page Case Study: One com­mit­tee, Advance­ment & Out­reach, is con­sid­er­ing redesign­ing their com­mit­tee page. In prepa­ra­tion I’ve looked at the usage and I think it makes a good case study. The A&O com­mit­tee gets the most vis­i­ble link on the FGC Home­page (top left, it gets this posi­tion because the com­mit­tee list is alpha­bet­i­cal). Despite this promi­nence, almost no vis­i­tors actu­al­ly fol­low this link. Only 1.5% of vis­i­tors to the FGCQuak​er​.org site ever get to the A&O home­page and even at that it’s the most vis­it­ed com­mit­tee page on our site!

Most of the vis­i­tors that did get to the A&O page
left with­out click­ing on any­thing. It is safe to say that most of those
vis­i­tors did­n’t thor­ough­ly read through the page. The most-followed
link is the first one, for the “Inreach/Outreach” review. In the one-month peri­od I exam­ined only 9 peo­ple fol­lowed this link! This does­n’t mean A&O mate­r­i­al isn’t used: Quak­erfind­er is very suc­cess­ful and the pam­phlet “Resources for Local meet­ings” is pop­u­lar. And over 300 peo­ple in this month came to some part of the A&O site. Com­mit­tee pages are use­ful for the rel­a­tive trick­le of Quak­er insid­ers who vis­it the page, but we should focus more on the con­tent com­mit­tees are producing.

The les­son is clear: vis­i­tors are pri­mar­i­ly look­ing for 1) good use­ful con­tent from the “Quak­er Library” resources and 2) prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion about the Gath­er­ing. Pages about com­mit­tees and inter­nal FGC work­ings are not well used. We need to con­tin­ue the focus on prac­ti­cal resources. We also have to accept that peo­ple will not be look­ing at what we think they should be look­ing at. Through these vis­its we will slow­ly build up FGC’s rep­u­ta­tion but many peo­ple only dim­ly know what they’re look­ing at.

What I didn’t say in the report

In my offi­cial FGC report, I only hint­ed at the dif­fer­ences between insti­tu­tion­al web­sites and focused online new media sites.

One sur­pris­ing find that did­n’t make it into the report is that the three most-viewed pages on my own Quak­er Ranter site were seen by more peo­ple than all but the two most-viewed FGC pages. The most viewed pages on FGCQuak­er are the home­page and the Wel­come to Quak­erism page. Three of the pages on “Quak­er Ranter” are seen by more peo­ple than any oth­er page on the FGC web­site. FGC’s Reli­gious Edu­ca­tion and Advance­ment and Out­reach and Pub­li­ca­tions pages all are more obscure than my home­page or my “resources on plain dress” directory.

Insti­tu­tion­al web­sites by their very nature have too many con­flict­ing audi­ences and too timid a voice to act as much more than a ref­er­ence resource. The Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence web­site is prob­a­bly more friend­ly to seek­ers than most oth­er insti­tu­tion­al web­sites out there but even it gets a lot of peo­ple hit­ting the “back” but­ton as soon as they hit the homepage.

Reli­gious seek­ers are look­ing for indi­vid­ual voic­es with some­thing to say and I sus­pect new media seek­er web­sites will only become more impor­tant as time goes on. I sus­pect this will come as a sur­prise to insti­tu­tion­al insid­ers as it hap­pens. Sort of relat­ed­ly, see my Peace and Twenty-Somethings for some of the gen­er­a­tional aspects of this shift. My Books and Media sec­tion col­lects sim­i­lar sorts of essays.

One more piece in this: the FGC web­sites did­n’t get a lot of blog traf­fic. If all I were was the web­mas­ter of Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, I’d assume that all this blog talk in the media was hype. But as the “Quak­er Ranter” I know that a pop­u­lar blog and/or per­son­al site can get a lot of read­ers. The les­son here is that there’s lit­tle cross-over. Blogs seem to send lit­tle traf­fic to insti­tu­tion­al web­sites and vice ver­sa (actu­al­ly insti­tu­tion­al web­sites can’t real­ly send peo­ple to blog­gers for a vari­ety of rea­sons). I’ve had a num­ber of peo­ple read my blog and declare they’ll be com­ing to the next FGC Gath­er­ing so I know per­son­al blogs can help raise orga­ni­za­tion pro­files but that inter­est does­n’t man­i­fest itself as an immediately-followed link. I sus­pect the com­mu­ni­ty being formed by the blogs is far more impor­tant than the raw num­ber of refer­ral links.

Part 5, Quaker​books​.org and Quak​erfind​er​.org

Quaker​books​.org

The first of our two sites to be “googli­fied” was Quaker​books​.org. I had long hoped to have our book list­ings show up on the search engines, espe­cial­ly since we car­ry a lot of hard-to-find ones. I had opened up the dis­cus­sion board of my peace site to Google and been hap­py with the results.

Back in ear­ly 2003 we installed new soft­ware by Steve Beuret to pow­er the book­store web­site, one that would allow easy trans­fer of infor­ma­tion between the web­site and our inven­to­ry pro­gram. The web­site could now list whether a book was in stock, and orders would go direct­ly into the sys­tem (no more retyp­ing them!). Once the new sys­tem was run­ning smooth­ly, I emailed Steve about opti­miz­ing it for Google. There were two parts to this: hav­ing the books show up (Steve) and link­ing them in such a way that Google would index them prop­er­ly (me). It took awhile to get ito all work­ing but on Decem­ber 17, 2003 Google came through and indexed the site.

The most vis­it­ed pages are the intro­duc­to­ry ones:

• Wel­come to Quakerism
• Becom­ing a Member
• Basics for Everyone

The search phras­es that are bring­ing in vis­i­tors used to be gener­ic (“quak­er book­store”) they now are very spe­cif­ic. Sep­tem­ber’s list is typical:

• crash by jer­ry spinnelli
• Andrew Goldswor­thy
• cel­e­bra­tion of discipline
• the mis­fits by james howe
• rufus jones

I knew we’d show up high in the Google rank­ings for obscure books but I’ve been pleased that we’re right up there with Ama­zon and Barnes and Noble even with main­stream books.

Our online best sell­ers are pretty

• Ground­ed in God: Care And Nur­ture In Friends Meetings
• Friends for 350 Years
• The Quak­er Way
• Philadel­phia Faith and Practice
• Lis­ten­ing Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty Vol­ume 1
• Silence and Witness
• The Jour­nal of George Fox

The book­store inven­to­ry soft­ware is not very good at pulling mar­ket­ing sta­tis­tics. While it’s very good at telling us what books have sold and what books need to be reordered, it won’t tal­ly up things by type of sale (phone vs. web vs. mail-order). The book­store report should include more infor­ma­tion on actu­al web sales.

Anec­do­tal­ly it appears as if about half our web orders are new cus­tomers. Many of them are from geo­graph­ic areas which are not tra­di­tion­al­ly Quak­er. A&O has pro­duced a fly­er which goes into orders for new customers.

Quak​erfind​er​.org

After we saw how suc­cess­ful the “googliza­tion” of Quaker­books was, I thought we should try it for Quak­erfind­er. It took a lit­tle sea­son­ing to get every­one on A&O to sign off on the project but I am delight­ed to say they saw their way clear. The result has been noth­ing sort of amaz­ing. Use of the site has grown by 340%. But the actu­al num­bers are even more impor­tant: by my best esti­mate, over 6000 a month are using Quak­erfind­er who would not have even found the resource if we had­n’t made it search engine friend­ly. That’s 72,000 peo­ple a year – twice FGC’s mem­ber­ship, and these are the EXTRA peo­ple com­ing. Alto­geth­er at our cur­rent rate, this site is being used by over 100,000 unique vis­i­tors. Even if only one in ten of them make it to a Meet­ing, that’s a lot of people.

In last year’s report I point­ed out that most of Quak­erfind­er’s traf­fic was com­ing from the FGC site. At that point, it did­n’t look­ing like giv­ing the loca­tion look-up util­i­ty it’s own domain name was pay­ing off in any tan­gi­ble way. Now it’s clear­ly worth it. Just the extra 600 or so vis­i­tors Quak­erfind­er is throw­ing to FGCQUaker​.org site makes it worth it! Horray!

Twen­ty Times the Google-Linked Vis­its: I com­pared two typ­i­cal months, one before and the oth­er after the “search engine opti­miza­tion.” In May 2004 Quak­erfind­er received 241 vis­i­tors from Google search­es (foot­note 1). In Sep­tem­ber, it received 3813 vis­i­tors – that’s over twen­ty times the vis­its. Over­all vis­its almost tripled, from 2292 to 6037, with 60% of those extra vis­i­tors direct­ly attrib­uted to the Google bounce. The chart to the left shows dai­ly Google-referred vis­its since the mid­dle of March.

More Than Just Google: Oth­er search engines were affect­ed too: all togeth­er search engine vis­its went from from 311 in May to 4134 in Sep­tem­ber. For those inter­est­ed, the top five search engines for Quak­erfind­er traf­fic are:

• Google​.com 83%
• AOL: 5%
• Google Cana­da: 3%
• Yahoo: 1%
• Com­cast: 0.8%

As you can see, Google far over­whelms every­one else, which is why we often just call this “the googliza­tion” of Quakerfinder!

Part 6, Miscellaneous and Notes

Miscellaneous

Mail­ing Lists

Late in the fis­cal year, we pur­chased bulk email soft­ware. No, we’re not going to try to sell Via­gra or a new home mort­gage. This pro­gram will help us get infor­ma­tion out to our book­store cus­tomers and com­mit­tee lists. Our occa­sion­al book­store emails (“Book Mus­ings from Lucy”) have been very well received, with only a tiny frac­tion of recip­i­ents ask­ing to be tak­en off the list.

Web Host Changes

A big project, though not very excit­ing, is that we’re chang­ing our web host­ing com­pa­ny. FGCQuak​er​.org is with the new com­pa­ny (OLM) and Quak​erfind​er​.org and Quaker​books​.org will be mov­ing short­ly. The new com­pa­ny orga­nizes our accounts bet­ter and we hope that their ser­vice is bet­ter. (We’d rec­om­mend avoid­ing Data Realm also known as Serve​.com.)

Notes

Pro­grams I Use to Col­lect Stats:

• For over­all num­bers, I used a extremely-common pro­gram called Webal­iz­er, which gives use­ful month­ly summaries.
• For details I used a pro­gram called AXS Vis­i­tor Track­ing Pro­gram, which lets me watch indi­vid­ual users as they nav­i­gate the site. With AXS I can also get details on where vis­i­tors to spe­cif­ic pages come from.
• I have a list of key words which I watch on Google; every few weeks
  I record where our sites stand on those phras­es and watch how
  nav­i­ga­tion­al changes I make affect our Google rankings.
• I also use Google to see what oth­er web­sites are link­ing to us. I
  look at what they link to (often not our home­page) and how many sites
  there are linking.
• I also fol­low links using more spe­cif­ic search engines such as Tech­no­rati, which index­es blogs (“web blogs” or per­son­al diary-like sites).

Mea­sur­ing Links:

I use Altavis­ta’s search engine to mea­sure how many links a site has. For good rea­sons, Google does­n’t list obscure web­sites and also counts how a site’s links back to itself. Here’s a sam­ple Altavista query:

Unique Vis­i­tors:

The most stan­dard mea­sure of web­site usage, here is a def­i­n­i­tion: “A real vis­i­tor to a web site. Web servers record the IP address­es of each vis­i­tor, and this is used to deter­mine the num­ber of real peo­ple who have vis­it­ed a web site. If for exam­ple, some­one vis­its twen­ty pages with­in a web site, the serv­er will count only one unique vis­i­tor (because the page access­es are all asso­ci­at­ed with the same IP address) but twen­ty page accesses.”