Learn how your visitors interact with your website! What times of day is your site the busiest? How long does the average visitor stay? What pages are they looking at most often? How many international visitors do you have? What is bringing visitors to your website?

Answers to these important questions will help you understand how your website is used, and enhance your ministry to the people who are reading your site. Traffic Facts has always been available to help you analyze your site--but now it's even more affordable! As part of our 2008 price cuts, we've been able to reduce the cost of this tool by 33%.

Purchase Traffic Facts today for as little as $1.99/month! This is not a limited time offer, but a long-term change in our pricing. I hope that this tool will help you enhance your online ministry, as you understand more about the people who are visiting your website.

Labels: 2008 price cuts, prices, Traffic Facts

posted by PastorJon @ 1:59 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

This is the third article in our series on promoting your church website. You really should take time to read the first and second articles before you continue. This article will be a bit more technical than the first two...but vitally important for you to consider as you prepare your site for submission to the major search engines.

One of your first steps in making your site visible to the waiting world is the use of META tags. While META tags cannot guarantee you a good listing on a search engine, they certainly can help. Please make sure that you put good META tags in your site before you start submitting your URL to search engines.

There are two primary META tags that are important for you to put on your site. META tags are often indexed by robots and spiders that visit your page in order to identify the content of your site, and the keywords that most effectively describe your site. I would suggest that you put META tags on every page within your site. Below, are some good tips you can use to help make your site more likely to get a good search engine result.

TITLE - Using the TITLE tag, make sure you give your page a good title. It doesn't hurt if your title is descriptive, and contains a few keywords that would describe your site. The TITLE tags should be the first tags in the HEAD section of your page.

META DESCRIPTION - Using the "description" META tag provides an accurate description of your site for the search engine to display in its results page. Write one or two sentences that are descriptive, compelling, and utilize your important keywords. All META tags should be placed after the TITLE tags, but before the /HEAD tag.

META KEYWORDS - In this tag, you'll want to include a number of keywords that someone might use to perform a search. You might also want to consider variations and common misspellings. Also, you should try to use a few of these keywords in your TITLE, H!, any ALT attributes, as well as within the main body of your document. All of these things could help your rating with the search engine.

Beware of "search engine spamming." This practice simply uses keywords repetitively within the document, and while you might fool a search engine or two, you might also lose your listing with them.

There are other META tags you can use (name="copyright"; "author"; "generator"; etc.); however description and keywords are the most important ones to help you with search engine listing.

A special note for users of Microsoft FrontPage: You can edit META tags either by using the "HTML" tab, or by right clicking on the page, choosing "page properties..." and then choosing the "custom" tab.

Make sure to go through your site and develop your META tags before you start submitting to search engines. While it is tempting to just start telling people about your site, make sure you do things in the right order.

Lastly, remember that this is equal parts science and art--you'll have to do some experimenting with your tags and see how they affect your listing and your traffic. You might also want to consider using a product like Traffic Facts to help you analyze how well your site is accomplishing its goals.

Labels: design, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic Facts

posted by PastorJon @ 8:16 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Recent changes to our Traffic Facts product make it even easier to stay on top of your website traffic and popularity! Check out some of these new features:

• New! Multiple Account Management makes it easy to review statistics from several different Web sites, all from a single interface!
• New! Real Time Stats means you’ll stay in-the-know with stats that update every 30 minutes.
• New! Conversion Tracking helps you determine if your online marketing efforts are giving you the proper return on investment.

If that wasn't enough, we've also made it easier for those who run multiple websites. You can save 5%, 8%, or 10% when you purchase multiple Traffic Facts accounts for your multiple websites. Learn how your site visitors interact with your website so you can maximize your efforts!

Labels: Sales, Traffic Facts

posted by PastorJon @ 6:37 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

Traffic Facts – now with NEW Control Panel, Real-Time Stats and Conversion Tracking!

The latest version of Traffic Facts includes a more intuitive Control Panel that makes account setup and configuration easier than ever. Be sure to check it out under ‘Other Stuff’ the next time you visit ‘My Account.’

Plus, we’ve just added Real-Time Stats and Conversion Tracking. ‘Real-Time’ means you’ll stay in-the-know with stats that update every 30 minutes. Don’t have Traffic Facts? Act now and get the crucial insight you and your Web site need! Traffic Facts is on sale for $1.49 until the end of April 2007.

Labels: Traffic Facts, what's new

posted by PastorJon @ 8:20 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

About a week ago I posted an article on Site Statistics and Traffic Facts™. Maybe you were interested in upgrading your statistics package, but weren't sure if it would be worth the money. If you're like me, you don't really like spending money on something until you get a chance to try it out and make sure it will do what you want.

Well, I can't quite offer a "try-before-you-buy" promotion, but this will come close. During March and April (2007), you can purchase Traffic Facts™ for only $1.49/month. You'll need to make a 3-month minimum purchase, but I'd like to let you in on a little secret. (shhh...don't tell anyone!)

You can purchase your three-month subscription to Traffic Facts™ at the beginning of the sale period (for only $4.47). Then you can try it out during March and April. If you don't like it, you can let it expire, and you've only spent less than $5. But if you DO like it, then you can renew it for up to 24 months at our low sale price. But be sure to renew it before the end of April, because I don't know when this sale will come around again.

If you have any questions on this promotion, how to make a purchase, how to renew a purchase, or how to cancel a renewal, please don't hesitate to ask! You can ask our professional support department (480)624-2500, or you can send me an email at sales@yourchurchweb.net.

Grace and Peace,

Jonathan Twitchell
YourChurchWeb.net

Labels: Sales, Traffic Facts

posted by PastorJon @ 7:39 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

If you're anything like me, you love to know how far your internet ministry is reaching. I podcast my sermons each week, and barely a day goes by when I don't check to see how many subscribers I have and where the most recent hits were from. I've had downloads from Germany, Indonesia, South Africa, France, the UK, and most recently, the Islamic Nation of Iran. In a nine-month period of time, I've had over 12,000 downloads of sermon audio files.

If you're a stats junky--and you haven't already found the statistics that are included free with every hosting account, let me tell you how to enable and view them.

You'll need to login to the hosting manager (Go to "My Account," login, and then click "Hosting Account List," and open the control panel for the website you want to manage). Near the bottom of your control panel is a button labeled "Configure Web Statistics." Using this tool, you can assign configure the stats reporting software, found at www.yourdomain.com/stats/. Once you configure your statistics, wait 24-48 hours, and you'll be able to see reports on your website. You can find out how many times a specific file has been requested, the commonly used search terms that people used to find your website, and information on where your visitors are coming from.

You might have more complex needs for statistical reporting. Perhaps you want to know what countries your visitors are coming from, or the paths that they are taking through your website. You might want to know how many page views are in an average session, or how often people are getting errors. If these are the sorts of reporting needs you have, you should consider our Traffic Facts™ package as an addon for your website.

Traffic Facts™ produces visual graphs that you can print or convert to Excel. You can export the logfiles so you can analyze them directly. You can even generate automated emails with the reports that you want to see, as often as you want to see them.

Traffic Facts™ is such a powerful program that it would be impossible to outline everything that it does in one blog entry. If you need more power than our standard Site Statistics, I'd encourage you to give Traffic Facts™ a try. You can give it a three month trial for just under $10.

May your website reach all around the world with the love of Jesus!

Grace and Peace,

Jonathan Twitchell

PS. You can check out my sermon podcast on iTunes, or read more about sermon podcasting at www.yourchurchpodcast.net.

Labels: products, stats, Traffic Facts

posted by PastorJon @ 7:36 AM 0 Comments Links to this post