Photo by Dan Kamminga.

Today I want to share with you a great tool called the Web Page Analyzer: Free Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis

This awesome tool will tell you how long it will take people to download based on the their connection (e.g. Dial-up, T1, etc.).

I ran a test for my page 30 Days to More Traffic and it returned a multi-page speed report.

Here is a screenshot of the first page:

Looking at my Google Analytics account I see what the connection speed of my visitors is:

From this I can see that Dialup users account for about 3% of my visitors so I am not going to worry about how long it takes them to download my page. They’re probably used to slow downloads anyway.

Most of my visitors are on DSL or Cable and that’s what I will optimize for.

One last thing I should mention is that if you are concerned about how long your site takes for people to download then you ought to use this tool to find out what the download times are for the top 5 sites in your niche.

Try not to have your site be bigger than the top 5 sites in your niche.

Give this tool a whirl:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

It’s one thing to put up a website on the vast Internet. It’s another thing to know how many visitors you get, how long they stay, what pages they visit, etc.

Every successful website owner needs the ability to track visitors’ actions.

There are many services out there that are free. Some tell you only how many pages have been visited while others give you in depth statistics on your visitors.

For years I used a free service called CQ Counter:
http://www.cqcounter.com

About 2 years ago I switched to Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free service that provides in depth statistics. Some of the things it can tell you are:

• How many total pages were visited and how many unique visitors you had for a given time period.
• How many visitors you had from different countries/states/cities.
• How many pages does an average user visit
• How many of your visitors are new visitors versus returning visitors
• What pages have the highest bounce rates (A bounce is where a visitor leaves after viewing 1 page on your site)

Installing Google Analytics on website is simple. They provide you with a little JavaScript snippet and you paste that on your website pages.
Google Analytics offers numerous graphs on every imaginable aspect of visitors’ surfing patterns on your website.

Read more about Google Analytics:
http://www.google.com/analytics/feature_benefits.html

I have a website that has a list of 7,000 baby names sorted by name, origin, & gender.

The site is:
http://SearchBabyNamesOnline.com

When I first started the site I had no idea people what kinds of baby names people were looking for so I listed the 90 Origins (Afghani to Latin to Yiddish) in alphabetical order and just assumed people would scan the list and find what the were looking for.

I also assumed the baby name origins were searched for in roughly the same proportions (e.g. the number people looking for Irish names is about the same number of people looking for Afghani names and any other name origin).

Well, I looked at my Google Analytics and boy was I was wrong!

It turned out that 10 origins (out of the 90 total) got 80% of the visits! (Interestingly enough Zipf’s Law actually describes this kind of disproportional relationship.)

Most surprising was that among the top was Hindi baby names, something I never would have guessed.

So I switched things around and put the 10 most visited origins on the top of the list of origins, with the other not so popular 80 origins below.

The result: I noticed a small increase in the number of pages each visitor looks at before leaving.

It would appear that by making popular things more accessible and easier to find people stayed longer at the site. This was confirmed when I saw an increase in my AdSense earnings.

The moral of the story is that there is no substitute for testing and looking at what your website visitors are actually doing on your site. Tools like Google Analytics are invaluable for figuring out how visitors interact (or fail to interact) with your site.

Good night and good luck,
Nick