One of the things SEO specialists often talk about is the power of long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are the search terms with 3 or more words that don’t have high search volume. The shorter keywords have higher search volume but in aggregate, the long tail keywords provide the bulk of a site’s search traffic.

For example, you can have a Europe travel site that ranks well for europe travel but the majority of your traffic will come from terms like:

• europe travel deals
• europe travel guide
• europe travel packages
• europe travel books
• cheap europe travel

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When I set up my first Web site in 1995, Web counters were the big thing. Virtually every site had one of those (rather pointless) rolling counters at the bottom that tracked how many “hits” the page got. We were, at that point, obsessed with the idea that our pages were being read and could care less by who. The whole idea of international publishing was still new and exciting.

Later counters became more evolved, the term “hits” became meaningless and we focused on “visitors” or “users”. A variety of new trackers, most with their own buttons, began to pop up. Those slowly replaced the hit counter as the new metric to watch.

However, as the millennium rolled over and the first tech bubble burst, we saw even more advanced metrics rise out of the ashes. Attention became the most valuable thing to track, especially in an AJAX Web where page views and visitors would be almost meaningless. It was no longer a matter of just how many people visited, but how long they stayed and what they did.

Now we’ve moved forward again, this time it’s “engagement that we’re looking at. Services such as PostRank allow you to track comments, tweets and links to your site as part of your “Engagement Score”, combining that info with your other, more traditional data.

But with so many metrics to track. There’s a legitimate question about what stats are the most important for a blogger to track. The answer is simple: All of them and none of them. read more

Happy Monday, folks! We’re going to start this week with some plugin news. First, Dan Wolfgang has released an update to Better File Uploader that takes advantage of the new Entry Asset Manager in Movable Type 4.3. Better File Uploader is exactly what it says it is — a file uploader for MT that provides more features and a better UI than the built-in one. Get it and see for yourself.

Also this week, Okayama has created a new Google Analytics plugin. This one pulls your data into your blog stats in your dashboard. This sounds very convenient for doing a quick check of your Google Analytics data.

Our last plugin for this week comes from, Byrne Reese. Have you ever wanted to analyze the data MT gathers about your users? Or generate a list of users you could use for a mailing? User Export can do those things. It will export all the data about selected users, including their custom data.

Finally, Beau Smith wrote a tutorial that shows how to use configuration directives — including ones you create yourself — to determine whether comments in your templates get written. This is a clever approach, and I can see it being useful for a variety of task.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

In the United States, today is Memorial Day, a holiday in honor the veterans who fought for our country over the course of our history. It is a holiday for most and a chance to spend at least some of the day reflecting.

As such, many will not be blogging today, but that does not mean it is always a full day off. Most, myself included, will be spending at least some time working on our sites, just not necessarily writing new content for it.

If that describes you, here are five things that you can do, other than actual blogging, to help your site and keep it going strong. Best of all, these are all, for the most part, short-term tasks you can pick up and drop off between other activities on a holiday.

Here’s 5 suggestions on how to spend your blogging holiday if you plan to spend at least a little bit of in front of your computer. read more

A survey on 10,000 of the “top websites on the Internet” (according to Alexa) done by Pingdom reveals that a whopping 40% of the Google Analytics users still use the old tracking code, known as urchin.js. This script still works, but it might not in the near future.

“The information we are getting from Google is that urchin.js will be decommissioned sometime this summer,” says Julien Coquet from LBi, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.

When we asked Julien what will happen once urchin.js is decommissioned, his guess was that it will eventually start returning a 404 error (file not found) and therefore stop registering traffic.

There’s really no reason to use the old urchin.js script, the new one (known as ga.js if I’m not mistaken) is faster and has more features. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you really should check what version you’re using, and update the code if it is pointing to a file called urchin.js.