Well initial results from my site stats looked amazing, traffic up 4 to 5 times, but then I started to dig.
First, I looked at the referrer report; I noticed a lot of traffic from PC World and very little from the various press release distribution sites. This was not enough of an increase to explain the overall increase in visits. Total referred traffic up approx. 25%. The majority of the increase was from direct traffic.
So, I investigated the referring page from PC World. It turns out; they had put a link (blogs.pcworld.com/tipsandtweaks) to the free e-mail encoder on my site along with a favorable review. Yet that link only delivered a handful of the visitors. So I kept digging and checked my most popular pages.
My most popular page of the day was a page that doesn't exist on my site and was generating a 404 error (page not found). Had I made a mistake in my press release and pointed to a non-existent page. No, that was not it. Remember, there were no referrers to this page, all the traffic was direct traffic. So where was it coming from? Perhaps a new bot/spider that I'm not scrubbing from my log files. Yes that was it.
My site was and still is getting pounded by the AvantGo spider. AvantGo is a proxy utility for the Palm and Windows CE that helps sync users handhelds with the latest news etc. So my guess, AvantGo had picked up the press release from one of the many distribution points and was following all the links. Now since, AvantGo only supports HTML 3.1 (at least from my investigations) and no java script, and my site is built in XHTML, the poor little spider is having problems and getting confused by my web analytics java script tracking utility.
So it's back to monitoring it, and trying how to get AvantGo to stop calling a page that doesn't exist. I'm well aware that the benefits of press release are not just traffic to a web site, but it is an indicator of people's interest in the subject matter etc. At a minimum, the inbound links from the press release across all the sites it appears on should give me a boast in link popularity and that should help increase my overall ranking in the SERPs.
4 comments:
Hi Alan,
First of all, congratulations on having a PR6 web site. Nice work. I found your site while searching Google News with various quieries seeing where my own recent press release showed up.
I saw a 100% increase in traffic to my web site for two days after I launched my press release about webtrends and Typo3.
It seems online PR is still a good tool for driving traffic. What are your thoughts on the value of links generated by online press releases?
Keith
Agito Internet Marketing
Keith,
I always encourage my clients to issue on-line press releases. I don't always go by how much traffic they generated. The traffic a press release generates is a factor of the topic of the press releases and the size of the audience.
So a press release that annouces a new on-line free service with a large audience is more likely to significantly increase traffic then a press release (like mine) that is simply a corporate announcement.
Corporate announcements have a benefit of getting your name out there for a specific subject in case a reporter, or someone else is searching on the subject. It's a great way to get interviewed by a leading publication etc.
As to my sites, PR6 as I tell people during my SEO traning workshops, my average page rank went down 3-5 positions for a variety of different phrases I target. So PR on its own is nothing, but good SEO content and a good PR does help.
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