Cog SEO Blog - Search Engine Optimization: Why Blogger?

I get asked this question quite a bit, so here we go. "Melanie, why did you choose a Blogger Blog for this?". Honestly, in the beginning it was a VERY simple answer, I was positively new to blogging, I like the platform, and it is easy as pie to SEO. This of course hardly ever fails to beg the next logical question, "Why, don't you self host or move it now?". That's a little more complicated to answer, but in fact I have considered it.

When you self host a Blogger blog, you lose a lot of the great built in perks that I grown so lazy and attached to. Like widgets built in to my panel, many installed hacks, the cool new Blogger templates, and some less important platform features. In essence, some "bells and whistles", I have grown to appreciate. So, IF I ever move this blog it will most likely a manual move to a different platform. (an SEO friendly one!)

When I set this blog up, I had a thought that perhaps being a member of a thriving community such a Blogger would in fact be beneficial to the SEO and promotion of the blog. Well, in fact it is. You notice the top of this blog still bears the "Blogger Bar"...Sure I could remove it, but why would I not feed this huge community and benefit from it as well? OK, I know...You want proof. This blog's Blogger.com referral traffic is running 7.92% of total referral traffic, and has been steady throughout it's life. Even in the beginning, Blogger provided this blog with it's "meat and potatoes" traffic while it grew stronger. So you say that's not a lot, but consider this....These visitors have the lowest bounce in my top 4 referral sources (excluding direct), and are the highest quality visitors to my blog....Statistically speaking. (see below) It is not always about the quantity, so much as the quality.

(All blog statistics are for the last 30 days)

Google / Organic - 21.19% of total referral traffic. Time on site 2:40. Pages viewed 2.04. Bounce 71.28%. 65.74% new visits.
Sphinn - 17.38% of total referral traffic. Time on site 1:16. Pages viewed 1.34. Bounce 77.22%. 81.43% new visits.
Blogger - 7.92% of total referral traffic. Time on site 5:27. Pages viewed 2.86. Bounce 55.56%. 18.52% new visits.
Digg - 7.4% of total referral traffic. Time on site :35. Pages viewed 1.21. Bounce 89.11%. 80.20% new visits.

These statistics are taken from Analytics, and the numbers are out of 82 current (ha ha) referrers for the past 30 days. I will say this about the bounce....I don't buy it. I realize the bounce for this blog is high, but I suspect as many before me have said...Analytics reports this metric incorrectly. However, that is not the point here. If you take the above statistics and apply them to 1000 visitors, then Blogger traffic tops Google traffic with visitors viewing 2860 pages in 90.83 hours (per 1000 visitors)...Compared to Google with 2040 pages in 44.4 hours (per 1000 visitors). Which is 28.7% more pages viewed and 51.1% more time spent on site. To me, this boils down to more quality from the visits...More opportunity to attract links, more opportunity for conversions, and certainly more opportunity for the blog's reach to be extended in many other ways as well. (and NO, my posting page url is not a url from this blog, it resolves to Blogger.com)

Yes, as you can see above....Recently Yahoo hates me! I know there is the curiosity factor, so I will help you all out with that. I have only myself to compete against. Stumble traffic is 3.81% (not including other stumbler's urls). Live organic is 1.47%. Technorati is .81%. Del.icio.us is .37%. Yahoo organic is a sore ass .29%. Ask.com is not even on the radar...This blog is in fact partially indexed, but refuses to rank for any relevant terms....I will not waste any more time with Ask.com. You might find this humorous, that Ask.com in all their infinite wisdom has chosen to rank me for "habits that piss me off" #1 result. The serp (search engine result page) listing is referring to this post, regarding blog habits that irritate me. I would think they could find some better queries for this site. Some of my other sites are in fact fully indexed and ranking in top positions for their terms on Ask and seeing such small traffic from them compared to Google, Yahoo, and MSN / Live....That it is hardly worth the effort. Too many kids and tasks to waste time for little or no return.