Well… it’s that time again. Here are my stats for February. February was a short month and it flew by fast as I had a lot on the go online as well as off line.

Visitors

I had 7,482 (7,236) unique visitors from 92 (94) countries, the top five being USA, UK, Canada, Philippines, Australia. They viewed 14,633 (15,528) pages over 10,668 (10,415) visits at an average of 1.37 (1.49) per visitor and a 78.66% (72.17%) Bounce rate. There were 68.81% (68.58%) new visitors since January.

Traffic Sources

Direct Sources - 12.86% (1372). (8.12% (846))
Search Engine - 5.08% (542). (2.71% (282))
Referring Sites - 82.06% (8,754). (89.17% (9,287))

So once again referral traffic is the tops.

Direct Traffic: This month I had 1372, almost double that of January.

Search Engines: The Search engine traffic is starting to come in now with 513 (274) from Google and 23 (7) from Yahoo.

EntreCard: I had 3,818 (3,252) card droppers and 913 (1,309) visitors that came by way of clicking on my ads. My ad queue has been constantly full all month despite the rise in my ad price of around 410-560 (330-390).

StumbleUpon: 6 (19) of my posts were Stumbled resulting in 1,783 (2,379) visits. I noticed that a couple of the posts were "slow boilers" in that for 2-3 weeks I got anything from 5-25 stumbles a day and then they would errupt into a day or two of around 200-400 stumbles. One of them is still active and building again!

BloggingZoom: A huge decrease at 28 (112) as I submitted only 3 (7) posts to give a total of 39 (36). This month I have to start submitting more posts there.

Blogcatalog: This month I continued to find friends, this resulted in 206 (178) friends. However there was a slight decrease of visits 84 (119).

Referring sites: I did not have a lot of time for commenting this month, despite this I had more visits from less sites - 831 (578) visits from another 161 (163) sites. This really shows me the cumulative effect of leaving comments. The top three being:

• ahkong.net at 147 (82)
• Personal Finance Management Guide at 23
• Karlonia.com at 16

Top Posts

1. Traffic Attitude Offer - 1,674 (1,393)
2. How To Create A WordPress Theme - Part 2 - 960
3. How To Create A WordPress Theme - Part 3 - 750
4. What Color Would You Like? - 656
5. Why Don’t You Get Flocked? - 287

The "Traffic Attitude" post surprises me, it’s a short little post, not a lot of content yet it consistently gets a lot of visits every month!

OnSite Comments

At the beginning of the month I had 505 comments, I now have 632 on this blog. This is quite a drop, but to be expected as there were about half the number of posts.

Backlinks

This month back-links have skyrocketed depending on where you look. Google Webmaster shows 14,387 (6,913), while on xinureturns it shows 230 (197) at Google, 3,680 (3,270) at Altavista and 3,240 (3,180) at Alltheweb.

Rankings

Google PR - 3 (0)
Technorati - rank 27,955 (41,092) authority 204 (150)
Alexa - 63,014 (77,813)
Compete - 78,764 (103,721)

There was another Google update. This time around I got a PR3 All other rankings have again risen, not by as much in the past but at least they are going in the right direction.

RSS subscriptions

This has increased to a wobble of 110-128 (105-112) plus 24 (16) email subs.

Browsers

FireFox - 82.66% (82.86%)
MSIE - 14.00% (14.82%)
Opera - 1.56% (0.84%)
Safari - 1.40% (1.17%)
Mozilla - 0.24% (0.25%)

Not much change here.

Operating Systems

Windows - 90.08% (89.74%)
Macs - 7.73% (7.67%)
Linux - 2.11% (2.49%)

A slight increase for Windows this month

Resolutions

With the increase in visitors the range of screen resolutions decreased to 44 (50). Most are still over 1024×768 but I had 213 (204) at 800×600 2.00% (1.96%) and over 61% at resolutions greater than 1024×768.

ScratchBack

This month three slots were bought up, better than last month (zero), I may run a promo this month.

Review

As I said at the start, February was a busy month for me and I didn’t devote as much time as I wanted to the blog. This resulted in only 12 additional posts (target was 14+) and less comments made on other’s blogs. Despite this, I got 250 more visitors than in January. I think this is partly due to the cumulative effect of past comments, my SEO work and the ongoing series about creating a WordPress theme.

January Actions

Posting: It’s already the 3rd and this is my first post of the month as my other activities are now winding down! I should be able to do 15+ posts this month, but I’m not so worried about quantity, I want to branch away from the "geeky" type posts. Maybe do a couple of linkbait types for digg and SU.

SEO: This has been very successfull so far in terms of useful keywords/phrases ranking on the 1st page at Google. This month I want to add to my keyword list.

Guest posting: Due to the time constraints I did not guest post anywhere in February. If anyone wants to guest post here or would like me to guest post at their blog, leave a comment here or email me.

Blog Changes

Bounce rate has now increased to 78.66% overall. In an attempt to bring this down I have added the Related Posts plugin. This tied in with a more diverse range of post topics should get visitors looking at other posts.

I have also gotten rid of the social plugin and replaced it with larger icons for Digg, SU and kept the BloggingZoom one. I think that this allows the visitor to focus more on the bookmarking once they reach the end of the post.

I have added the Top Commentators plugin and may run a promo/competition this month. But, at the end of each month, I shall give the top five a link-back to the post of their choice.

EntreCard: My ad price is currently 470-550. I didn’t really want it to go this high but to remain visible you have to keep up. A couple of blogs have hit the 600 mark and there are now a number of 500ish blogs. To remain on the popular page you must have a price of 450ec or more and rising.

So with this constant race to get as high a price as possible going on. I don’t know if it is worth staying to put in all that work to maintain visibility and then disappoint the advertisers. I shall see how it goes this month while I work on other traffic streams.

Finally, I think that this will be my last Stats report as such. Stats show that visitors have fallen from 291 in December to 131 February, I wonder, how many this one will get? I may try one more next month, but with a different presentation.