Its only been a few days since my first posting on this blog and already the first visitors have arrived. Google Analytics has captured the first four visits to www.angelsadvocate.net. No blog should be without Google Analytics or a similiar web analytics solution. Many basic analytics applications are free and fairly easy to implement. The rush of watching visits from all corners of the globe on your website is worth the extra effort alone. Of course, it would be a shame not to delve into the wealth of marketing information placed at your disposal. Implementing Google Analytics tags on this Wordpress blog proved to be child’s play, thanks to Wilfred van der Deijl’s Ultimate Google Analytics plugin.

Tracking performance on this blog should prove enlightening. Aside from writing passable prose, submitting a sitemap to the search engines, and doing a fair amount of linking to internal posts and other blogs with related content, I don’t intend to do much in the way of so-called search engine optimization. In other words, the blog will have to stand on its own, without the advantage (or perhaps disadvantage) of submissions to blog aggregators, link lists to related sites, comment postings linked to this blog, pings notifications across the blogosphere, analyses of keywords, and whatever else is in vogue with my fellow bloggers. I have an instinctive feeling — completely unsubstantiated by any form of real research — that these measures are of limited usefulness with search engine positioning anyway. Having said that, I reserve the right to change my opinion should someone manage to convince me that doing such things can actually have a reasonable return on investment.

In the meantime, it appears that I have a budding fan club in the Far East. I’m not sure what compelled residents of Karatsu and neighboring cities in Japan to visit my posting on ski pistes and sunshine, however, they do appear to be the only inhabitants on Earth who are currently interested in my writings.