Tag Archives: WordPress

Analytics Part 2: Taking a Closer Look

This week, we learned all about how to optimize our blogs for every website’s best friend and greatest enemy: Google. So I decided to look closer at Spilling the Royaltea’s analytics to see who is visiting my site. Then, I did the same to my search engine optimization or SEO to try to figure out how to grow my audience and rank higher on Google searches. (For an explanation of the random underlines, read further):

Diving into Analytics

This week, I did a deep dive into Google Analytics for my website, and looked at who’s been looking at Spilling the Royaltea. Here’s what I found in terms of website traffic:

Screenshot of Google Analytics for Spilling the Royaltea (all relevant information is stated in the text of the blog)

Since Spilling the Royaltea’s inception, there have been exactly 100 new users and 745 page views! The number of users has stayed pretty consistent over time, with the occasional peak of 5 users a day. While it’s good to know that I haven’t been losing viewers, it would be nice to see this increase sometime soon. Hopefully, by improving my SEO in the coming weeks, I’ll see an improvement shortly.

Unfortunately, since I just recently enabled the option to view demographics, I am unable to see data on this section of my website analytics. Seeing my audience’s demographics would be extremely useful when ensuring I’m catering my data to the right people. For example, I am currently assuming that my audience consists mostly of young people, so I’m using quite a bit of Gen Z jargon in my content posts. But if mostly older people are looking at my blog, I’d have a little bit of a problem, since they might not understand the nuances of the language I’m using. When this part of Google Analytics updates, I’ll be sure to use it to help decide my content.

Implementing Effective SEO

Hollingsworth really drives home the importance of implementing SEO in businesses (and I guess Spilling the Royaltea could be considered one?) to help increase visitors to websites. For example, it builds trust and credibility. By creating an accessible, effective user experience that can be easily found on Google, people feel more comfortable going to my site for information. I’ll also get a larger audience by building this sense of trust and credibility. It even helps me with my knowledge of the web because I need to stay updated about who’s doing what to improve their SEO.

And in this week’s lecture, we learned exactly how we might go about improving our SEO, so I tried out a few of these tactics this week. Firstly, we learned about implementing effective keywords. These keywords are what searchers enter into Google, so I need to make sure I’m implementing enough of these to improve my ranking on Google searches. So for this process post, with the help of ChatGPT, I entered the prompt: Generate keywords for a blog post related to analytics and SEO, and here’s what it gave me:

Screenshot of keywords for my blog post about analytics and SEO generated by ChatGPT

And while I couldn’t include every single one of these keywords in my posts, I tried my best to organically include as many as I could (or slightly varied versions of them), the first occurrence of which I underlined throughout my post.

We also learned about including strategic headers. Although I thought I was already doing this pretty well, I learned about a few things I could do to further improve. For example, I should be using actionable headers, which I did for this post: I included the verbs “dive,” “implement,” and “create” to add some dimension and interest. I also included keywords in my headers, like “analytics” and “SEO.”

The final thing I want to do is work on the branding of my site. So far, although my website is consistent in its theme, nothing in terms of branding really makes it stand out and become memorable for visitors. I think that part of creating this “memorability” is making a logo. Coming soon…

Creating my Digital Garden?

But what about creating a digital garden just for me? In my previous process post about analytics, I spoke of maintaining my site as a digital garden instead of monetizing it and trying to grow my audience. Because of this, I concluded that I wouldn’t worry too much about gaining readers, just because I wanted to make it a space for just me and my own thoughts.

However, after learning about analytics and SEO this week, I realized that I’m already doing a bunch of the things I need to do to increase my audience like summarizing my article in the subheaders and writing high quality information. And after all, I realized that making a few improvements to potentially invite more people into my blog requires a few simple changes that don’t take away from the intimacy of my blog like I previously feared. So at the end of the day, having a big audience to share my interests with sounds like a pretty great thing to me.

References:

Basu, T. (2020, September 5). Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/

Hollingsworth, S. (2018, April 13). 12 reasons why your business absolutely needs SEO. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close

Normann, S. (2023, March 21). Data and SEO [PowerPoint slides]. POSIEL. https://posiel.com/lecture-files/

Wong, O. (2023, March 19). Digital footprints, analytics, and monetization. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/process-posts/digital-footprints-analytics-and-monetization/

Photo:

The Fridge Agency. (n.d.). [SEO] [Stock Illustration]. https://thefridgeagency.com/blog/understanding-power-seo/

Digital Footprints, Analytics, and Monetization

Digital footprints, digital trails, and digital breadcrumbs – the data trails we leave behind us when we use technology are something many of us have been warned about our whole lives.

I Know A Lot About This

Like my previous post on digital literacy, I’ve learned quite a bit about digital footprints, especially as a Communication major. In one of my classes, I even produced a 10-minute documentary on the effects of digital footprints on future employment opportunities. But in that documentary, I emphasized individual actions and the implications of “cancel culture,” and how to mitigate the impacts of digital footprints on young people’s futures.

But on Pod Academy’s podcast, they explain that digital footprints don’t just encompass people’s individual actions and choices made on the internet. A lot of information is spread unintentionally when using any sort of technology with a chip in it. For example, when I use my phone, it’s constantly communicating with cell towers and the internet too. That means that my phone’s always giving apps information about me and my environment.   

And as an avid technology user, this is a little worrisome. I don’t exactly want my phone tracking me and giving all these apps tons of information at all times. But also, I’ve sort of gotten to a point where I don’t care. Like many others expressed on Pod Academy, the creation of our digital trails has been so ubiquitous that people simply don’t worry about it anymore.

Google Analytics

The information collected from our digital trails or footprints is often used to improve outreach and grow audiences. For example, for my own blog, I installed Google Analytics, which allows me to track people’s browsing habits on my website.

As of March 18, 2023, within the past 28 days, I’ve had 35 users visit my site. I can also see information about my most popular pages and top content, and how visitors experience my site such as how long pages take to load (which 9.4s, considered poor… oops). This information should help me build an audience and engage them effectively. However, to be completely honest, although I have been checking my Google Analytics from time to time out of curiosity, I haven’t been using it to help improve my site for my audience.

Screenshot of "traffic" for Google Analytics on Spilling the Royaltea, showing that there have 35 users in the past 28 days.
The “traffic” section in Google Analytics for Spilling the Royaltea

I think that a big reason why I haven’t been doing so is because my site is turning out to be more like a digital garden than a blog. Digital gardens, according to Basu, are spaces that do not focus on growing audiences and having huge viewerships. Instead, they focus on personal growth, which is exactly what Spilling the Royaltea has been about. As my blog has developed, although I do have a target audience in mind, I’m not too worried about growing my audience, getting famous and rich, or any of that kind of stuff.

For now, I’m using my analytics simply as a way to satisfy my curiosity about who’s looking at my blog. I’m really enjoying my blogging process and especially like the lack of pressure to gain huge audiences, so I think that’s what I’ll be doing for the time being.

To Monetize or Not To Monetize?

So, all of this leads to the question of whether I should monetize my site. With the whole concept of digital gardens in mind and the idea of creating a space for me and my thoughts, I don’t foresee monetizing Spilling the Royaltea anytime in the near future.

Based on my own experience with monetized sites, I felt like ads make websites feel distant, incohesive, or even disturbing, since many of the ads from Google Adsense are often inappropriate. I want my blog to be as inviting and welcoming to users as possible and I want it to retain its intimate, personal feel. I don’t want users to believe I’m “using them” by exploiting their information and digital trails to extract money from them. With my own apprehensions about advertising and data collection in mind, I don’t want to create a space where others feel the same kinds of fears.

I also want my blog to reflect me and my thoughts only and with a third party who imposes their ads or has input on what kinds of content I post, it takes away from the intimacy of my blog. For me, the content I post is what matters, and I want users to focus on this too.

So although Spilling the Royaltea is simply a passion project (…or a school project) without any financial gain, I’m very satisfied with how the experience has been so far. It’s the joy of blogging that matters, not how much money I can get from it.

References:

Basu, T. (2020, September 5). Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/

Pod Academy. (2016, May 3). Digital breadcrumbs: The data trail we leave behind us. http://podacademy.org/podcasts/digital-breadcrumbs-our-data-trail/

Wong, O. (2023, March 14). All About Digital Literacy. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/process-posts/all-about-digital-literacy/

Photo:

Lean Plum. (2019). [Monetization] [Stock Illustration]. https://www.leanplum.com/blog/free-app-monetization-methods/

Playing with AI

The past couple of years have been huge for the advancement of AI. With ChatGPT, DALL·E and so much more, AI is entering the creative realm, which is scaring some and exciting others. It’s bringing up countless questions about copyright, ethical use, threats to employment, and more. So this week, I gave some of these a try.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT, as described by OpenAI, provides detailed responses to prompts written by a human. The model was trained using “Reinforcement Learning,” which involved creating a reward model that continually ranked the AI responses.

In relation to my blog, an effective way I could use ChatGPT is to help create post ideas or outlines. Sometimes, I get a hit with a case of writer’s block when trying to come up with my content posts, so ChatGPT would work perfectly when I’m in situations like these. This wouldn’t constitute plagiarism because it’s just helping me lay out my content, but I would still be 100% transparent when I use it to help me with my work.

To test out ChatGPT, I prompted the model with the following: What are blog post ideas about Prince Harry and Meghan? (which would fit within my “The Chronicles of Prince Harry and Meghan” section). This is what the model generated:

Screenshot of Ideas for a blog post about Prince Harry and Meghan, generated by Chat GPT
Ideas for a blog post about Prince Harry and Meghan, generated by ChatGPT

Dall·E

Dall·E can generate complex images based on a description provided by a user. It generates these images and art pieces entirely from scratch, and in its latest version, Dall·E2, the model generates “more realistic and accurate images with 4x greater resolution.”

Dall·E would be particularly useful for my blog when creating “featured images” for my process posts. Often, my process posts talk about abstract concepts like “digital gardens” or “digital literacy,” which require decorative featured images. These are often symbolic and come in the form of stock illustrations.

However, instead of using images from the internet, I think it would be cool to generate my own art pieces using Dall·E2 to represent my more abstract process posts. For example, my featured image for this process post was generated using the description “artificial intelligence in blogging.” I also used the prompt “digital garden” to see what I could’ve used for that post, and here’s what Dall·E2 came up with:

Image generated by Dall-E with the prompt "digital garden". Screens with green "plants" coming out of them, with a blue background
Image generated by Dall·E with the prompt “digital garden”

Ethical Use

The advent of these new AI technologies also brings many ethical questions to the forefront. For example, how can it be implemented in education without consisting of plagiarism? Or, what are the limitations of these technologies? Or even, who owns the rights to these images or words?

And based on the essay I wrote this week on the exact same topic, I learned that the use of these technologies depends on a close analysis of academic integrity guidelines. For example, professors should set boundaries on the use of ChatGPT, limiting it to idea and outline generation (and should ensure the student states where and how they use the technology). They should not use it to write entire essays because this would be considered dishonest work. Some of the limitations of the models include the biases they might contain because of the data they were trained on, which is why TAs and professors should take care of the marking.

Copyright and Ownership

In terms of copyright and ownership, there isn’t much out there to date concerning ownership of the art pieces Dall·E creates or the essays ChatGPT can write. So far, the opinions on this issue are pretty conflicting and confusing. Some say that in the example of Dall·E, the people who own the model should be the ones who own the images and art pieces that come from it. But others say that Dall·E images should be thought of like images from a camera. The people who created the cameras don’t own the copyright to the images people take using them, so shouldn’t the same principle be applied here?

So, the question of ownership and copyright remains wide open. As AI technologies like Dall·E and ChatGPT become more prevalent in our everyday lives, policies and laws surrounding these technologies are a priority. However, for now, a lot is still up in the air.

Will copyright be attached to the images I created in this post anytime soon? If so, are they mine? Or are they someone else’s?

References:

Goldman, S. (2022, August 16). Who owns DALL-E images? Legal AI experts weigh in. VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/ai/who-owns-dall-e-images-legal-ai-experts-weigh-in/

OpenAI. (2022, November 22). Introducing ChatGPT. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt#OpenAI

Wang, J. J. (2021, January 5). DALL·E: Creating images from text. OpenAI. https://openai.com/research/dall-e

Search Engine Optimization

In this week’s lecture, we’ve learned about search engine optimization and how it can help bring audiences to your website. Although talking about this concept this week, utilizing SEO to attract an audience had been always around to configure on Word Press. Moreover, utilizing the tags option to allow my website to show up at the top of Google searches is now one of my key goals in order to expand my website to a larger audience.

Before this week’s lecture, I didn’t realize the importance of using tags. I only added a few tags just for completion as I thought it was a requirement for the class. However, this is not true and can help my website to further grow.

As Genshin Impact is a popular game, I do not see that any of my posts show up in the search results. For example, if I try to search for a build for the character “Raiden Shogun” you will see multiple websites that are not mine but all with similar content. In fact, it does not show up even if I type “raiden shogun abysmal guide”. When searching for my website it only shows up at the bottom on the second search page. Discouraging, but this means that my website has a lot of room for improvement to reach out to a bigger audience.

An interesting result I got from one of my searches was when I searched for “absymal guides raiden” on Google. Instead of seeing my website show up in the search result, I found that the Posiel site was in the result.

search result on google of "absymal guides raiden"

This search result makes me wonder why my website does not show up first before Posiel. However, I will work towards changing this result so that I can have my website show up before Posiel.

With all things considered, having my website show up as one of the top search results on Google is something I’d want to achieve. However, considering the popularity of the game, I do understand that there will be a challenge. Nonetheless, it will not prevent me from working towards this goal.