Knowing your visitors

Do you track visitors carefully using Bigshot Google Analytics or another similar extension? Paying close attention to where your visitors are coming from and how they find you is one of the most important aspects of driving more traffic to your website as well as targeting your audience more directly. The better you know your visitors and their needs, such as screen resolution and browsers used, the better you can tailor what you offer them and make them active participants or even customers. You can also discover whether or not you really need to build a mobile version of your site based on how many hits you get from mobile devices. We explain how to do this in detail in our Joomla Developer series.

Being visible in Google

Do you build better URLs for great SEO results using an extension like sh404SEF, AceSEF or even just the Joomla Core SEF features? Many of you know that Google regularly changes its methods of how websites show up in search results. This leads to a lot of confusion and frustration, and this confusion often leads to website administrators either giving up and trying nothing or constantly changing everything. The fact is that aside from high quality content on your website, your domain name and your page URLs probably play the biggest part in being found and ranked well in search results. Just because we are running dynamic websites doesn't mean that we can't have friendly URLs that rank well. How are you doing it?

Connecting Socially

Social media is one of the best ways to drive new visitors to your site, and also one of the best ways to engage existing members. Common on many Joomla websites are the Facebook like box, the Twitter feed and embedded YouTube videos. Our YouTube channel, located here, has really helped drive some good traffic and has recently started to pick up steam very nicely. (We'd love it if you subscribed to our channel by the way.)

But social media is only as good as you make it. It can also become one of those modules that you install and forget about, only leaving it to take up valuable real estate on your pages. How are you actually using the social media to drive traffic or improve your users' experience? And again, are you using specific extensions or just sticking to the Joomla core for these features?

Go ahead and leave your comments ... answer one of these questions or answer them all. Looking forward to reading your thoughts and tips.