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Hi this one's tricky Your result most probably didn't show up in Google Analytics (GA) because the 301 is performed by your server BEFORE the GA tracking code is displayed. What I'd do for starters (very basic concept):

1. Create a HTML page on your "redirection URL" www.domain.com/ad1 that has the tracking code properly embedded (check with GA)

2. Have the page say something like "Taking you to your desired page" and have a meta refresh on that page. As you don't want that page to appear in SERPs I'd set that page to noindex aswell. This way using meta refresh doesn't matter

3. Make sure you have a link to the proper page on your redirection page, just in case the meta refresh isn't performed

4. Tada, that's it your page should show up in GA

If I come up with another solution this afternoon I'll add a post...

Totally agree with EGOL. Here's my 2 cents to that: Simply ASK your customers, what they want you to write about Start a mini-survey and let your customers openly discuss your content. Ask them if there's something particular that they don't like about your content. Also ask them on how often you should write something. Sometimes you'd be amazed to hear that your customers either want more or less from you.If users get what they want when they want it, they are more probable to retweet it

Even though that may not sound very new to you, it is most often neglected when creating content.

As for the traffic: Most people don't manually enter a URL in their browser's adress bar anymore. They usually use Google to find / identify sites of interest. IMHO only a very small minority (tech geeks like me, etc. ) still use their adress bar. Whenever I talk to someone and mention the adress bar they think I was talking about the Google search bar on google.com. So you'd be only losing a small proportion of traffic. I remember that years ago when a company got a new domain they registered it in like 300 different kinds of spelling.. Still: Less than 2 % of total traffic was coming through those sites, as they were never properly advertised nor used. Here in Germany even Google has a problem with that. There's a guy, who owns gmail.de and sent a court order to Googleplex that they may not use gmail.com for German users but that they have to run their service via google.com/mail . I don't suspect Google Mail has gotten a lot les popular by that

Hi, just today Rand Fishkin released another Whiteboard Friday, which almost exactly tackles that topic. Okay the Whiteboard Friday is on Googles PageRank, but he almost certainly explains an awful lot on Seomoz' own ranking parameters and also tackles the question what a good domain authority and bad page authority meand. Definitely worth watching

http://itunes.apple.com/ch/podcast/whiteboard-friday/id411307102 (2011-08-12 PageRank.mov)

Sorry for the itunes link, but the podcast hasn't appeared on seomoz.org yet (sure it will a bit later..)

PS: In a nutshell: High domain authority is much more important, than high page authority. A good domain can give you much more "link juice" than a good article. Or as Rand says it in the vid: A link from an article on CNN with a low PageRank / page authority? Go grab that stuff! It is on CNN!!!! Hope that helped

I think that linking out with followed links is generally a good idea So, No you shouldn't.

Here's something from a previous SEOMOZ Whiteboard Friday, that you should maybe read / watch on that topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/33

For REALLY large sites: M$ Visio. For smaller to intermediate sites I use a mindmapping tool all the time. My favourite ones are:

• Mindmanager Pro
• XMind (free / OpenSource)
• iThoughtsHD (on my iPad, actually my favourite)

If I am not working digitally (which is kinda luring out those interesting ideas in the back of your head) I usually go with a large pile of paper. I write each menu item on its own sheet and lay them out across the floor, walking around those items and constantly improving the order of those. If you really want to get a good overview on what you are doing, this is the best method. Later capture your work with a digital camera and transfer it to a digital tool mentioned above Have fun!

One method: Install JMeter on a remote machine in a VERY remote location and perform regular performance tests with it. Downside to this method: Values may not be exact as JMeter is not a browser but a site testing tool, so values may differ significantly from your browser experience. http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

Another method: Webservices such as yottaa.com. They offer performance testing and monitoring. I think they also might be using a JMeter implementation, at least it sounds like it www.yottaa.com This may be the easiest solution, and I'd definitely give it a spin, but maybe you shouldn't rely on their data as your only source.

Third method: Build your own testing tool based on Googles PageSpeed SDK. http://code.google.com/p/page-speed/ That would be my favourite, but you need someone with coding experience

Sure, these were all rather advanced options (except for yottaa.com) but if you want to have reliable data you should take your time and use a proper tool.