Reasons To Use Google Analytics

What is Google Analytics?


Analytics is Google's very own visitor tracking utility, allowing webmasters to keep tabs on traffic to their site, including visitor numbers, traffic sources, visitor behaviour & trends, times spent on the site and a host of other information gathered via two pieces of JavaScript embedded in the source-code.Unlike other free visitor trackers, which insist on displaying annoying and often amateurish badges or buttons when they are being used, Google Analytics simply runs quietly in the background, gathering the necessary information without any visible signs of its presence.

What makes Google Analytics special though?

Although Analytics boasts all the features and statistical data to be expected from a top-class keyword analysis and statistics tracker, it also features a number of additional tools which put it ahead of most of the pack where ease-of-use and depth-of-information is concerned.

1. The Map Overlay

Essentially, this feature brings up a map of the world, highlighting the countries a site's visitors stem from. Clicking on a country produces a close-up view, along with a geographical breakdown according to the region and/or city from which visitors accessed the site. This tool in itself is invaluable for all those webmasters with geo-specific sites, concentrating on a particular catchment area.

2. The Site Overlay

This is conceivably Google Analytics' single most important feature from a webmaster's or online business owner's perspective, as it provides a hands-on view of visitor behaviour. When clicked, 'Site Overlay' opens the tracked web site in a new window and, after a moment's loading time, overlays each link on the screen with a bar, containing information about clicks to the target page and goal values reached [more about goal values in a moment]. Since it allows the webmaster or site owner to navigate his or her site and see exactly how visitors flow through it, it is difficult to imagine a more effective tool than this as far as raising a site's conversion rates is concerned.

3. Goals and Funnels

Unless the site being tracked is an information site which does not rely on generating sales or enquiries, conversion rates are as important as sheer visitor numbers. The 'Goals & Funnels' feature allows users to set up specific goals for their site, such as tracking a visitor to the 'Thank you for your enquiry' page for instance. It also allows the user to set up specific monetary values for each goal, and thus track the site's financial performance and profitability during any given period of time. The term 'Funnels' refers to the specific path a visitor takes to reach the goal's target page. Since most web sites sell a number of different product ranges or feature a number of ways to enquire, all of which lead to a single 'Thank You' page, the funnel allows for the tracking of each individual path with a minimum of fuss.

4. Graphical Representations

A great many visitor trackers out there will present the collected information in a certain way, be it a list, graph, pie chart, flow-chart or whatever. Whilst all these methods of presentation are of course valid, it is nevertheless a fact that most users are different, and a pie-chart is not necessarily ideal for those users preferring to work with graphs or vice versa. Google Analytics, however, allows users to choose between views on many of its reports. Although this may seem like a relatively minor point, it nevertheless makes things easier, as it allows the user to work with the view he or she is most comfortable with.

The Link Theft Detection Warning

Identify Link Theft

This trick is what webmasters call the link theft. But not all lost links should be thrown out to link theft. There are cases when your websites link is lost in a particular page because of online accidents. It is a fact, however, that most cases of lost links or not beneficial links are due to link theft. So in all ways, learn how to avoid link theft. Here are some tips to identify whether or not a particular website is a link thief and what to do to avoid it:

Request For Your Links URL Location

Before you link to a particular site requesting link from your website, ask them first about your links URL location. You have to do this because some websites forget (or intentionally forget) to give your website a link back if you have already given them a link to their website.

Link Robbers Can Deceive

Check whether your link on a particular web page is spiderable or not. This is because some websites trick you into believing your link is already live but in fact its not working right. You can do this by clicking on View Source Code of the page that carries your websites link. Check whether your link follows the standard text link. The standard text link is created using this format:

a href=http://www.yourdomainname.com/ target=_blank>Anchor Text

Some format like the one below is not spiderable by the search engines.

onclick="javascript:newWindow('http://www.yourdomain.com.)>Anchor Text

* Check If The Link Will Redirect

How can you check whether your link will just redirect to the same website when clicked? Try pointing your mouses cursor on your link and check the text that appears on the status bar of your web browser. What should appear on the status bar is the url of your website on this format:

http://www.yoursite.com

Format like the one below means the link will redirect to the same website:

http://www.sitedomain.com/page.html

* Dynamically Generated Link Pages

Avoid linking on a dynamically generated link page. How will you identify a dynamically generated link page? If it looks like this, then its a dynamically generated link page. The search engines wont be able to read pages like this.

http://www.domainname.com/links/index.php?&brbf=aw

There are a number of thieves online. Dont be one of them and dont be a victim of any of them. Guard the benefits of your links by following these tips and ensure a fair internet linking game!

Source....

Online PR and SEO for Business-to-Business

Why Online PR is Important?

As SEO becomes increasingly more competitive, business-to-business (B2B) companies can gain significant competitive advantage and amplify SEO campaign results through disciplined and consistent use of online PR. But, for many B2B companies, online PR has not yet become part of their everyday marketing vernacular. Larger companies and PR agencies are even sometimes reluctant to venture outside of their traditional comfort zones into the lesser known world of online PR. Those companies that fail to implement online PR strategies as part of their search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns are missing out on an increasingly popular and effective way to gain market visibility and motivate website visitors.

Building Blocks of an Effective Online PR Campaign

There are various components to online PR that, when combined, form an effective campaign. The nice thing about online PR is that you don’t have to implement all of the components at once to start seeing results. You can get started just by implementing these three basic components: thought, leadership, articles.

Educational content is an essential tool for lead generation, and thought leadership articles are the perfect vehicle for disseminating this content. In fact, these articles are so versatile that you can use them for a variety of purposes: i.e. for driving traffic to your site and generating visibility for your company; for establishing yourself as the “go to” resource in your field; and for providing fuel for journalists seeking information on the subject in which you’re an expert.

The key is to make certain your content has relevance. Too often, I see companies just throw an article together so they’ll have some content to optimize. This is a big mistake! When you’re developing and writing these articles, ask yourself if an editor or a publisher would be interested in publishing the article. If not, save yourself the trouble. Take time to write an “expert” article that will educate others.

Once you’ve written an article, be sure to publish it to your website to be optimized by the search engines, and then distribute it to relevant websites that accept articles on your topic.

Optimized Press Releases

Optimized press releases make a savvy addition to your SEM campaign. Through optimized press releases, you can boost both your search engine visibility and your sales leads. In fact, a well optimized, keyword-rich press release can get you in the top ten results in Yahoo! News, Google News and other news websites across the Internet. Getting your press release onto news websites does three important things for your business:

· Reaches millions of Internet users directly.
· Creates quality inbound links to your website.
· Raises the search engine visibility of your website.

Once you’ve written a press release optimized for search engines, get it out to the search engines and your potential readers by publishing it on your website and submitting it to an online press release distribution service, which makes it available to millions of readers and to the search engines that spider these sites in search of fresh content.
White Papers

When a carefully crafted white paper lands in front of the right audience, it’s an extremely effective lead generation and marketing tool, particularly early in the buying cycle. Because white papers typically educate readers on a company’s value proposition in a soft-sell manner, they can quickly become viral documents that spread across an organization.

A common mistake that many companies make is investing the time and effort in a white paper but not optimizing it for search engines. One effective strategy is to include an optimized summary page that outlines the content of your paper and the problems it solves, and then use an internal linking strategy to link to your white paper’s summary page.

Online PR Strategies for Success

The following strategies are absolutely necessary to effectively fuel your SEM campaign and create online PR success:

* Measure the reach and impact of every online PR asset you create by embedding hyperlinks back to your site.
* Use tracking parameters and analytic tools to track visitors to your site; and more importantly, track what they do when they get to your site. For example, are they leaving after a few seconds? Are they clicking through to view other pages? Are they downloading your white papers and articles? Are they making a purchase?
* Recycle your content. Leverage your hard work and re-purpose your articles and use them over again, in longer and shorter versions, for a variety of media, such as e-newsletters, audio podcasts, teleseminars, blogs, website content and more.
* To help gain momentum and get in a routine of developing content, implement a 90-day plan during which you write and submit three thought leadership articles, two optimized press releases, and one case study or position paper. Using this formula, you should be able to get your program off the ground and see some quantifiable results.

Source...

10 Blogging Mistakes Bloggers Should Avoid

Do you make these mistakes with your blog?

Background Music - This is one of the most complained about features on a website or blog. Don't put music files on your blog that run in the background. Give the visitor the option to turn the music off.

Screen Size Width - Design your site for all screen resolution. When designing your blog be sure to test it out in various screen sizes. Avoid making the assumption that all your visitors are viewing at the same screen resolution. Horizontal scrolling is one of those usability nightmares. There is nothing worse than having to scroll horizontally on a page just to read the content.

No Alt Attribute - Provide the alt description text with the images you post on your blog whenever possible. Spider bots cannot read images.

Disabling Right Click - Don't disable right click on your blog. No Right Click can very easily be bypassed and most internet uses know how to bypass it. Disabling right click does not prevent your images from being stolen. Determined visitors will either disable JavaScript on their browser or retrieve the file from a search engine cache or the source code of your blog.

Blog does not display the same in all browsers - View your blog in many different browsers. Browershots.org is a free service that generates screenshots of your blog on a wide number of browsers. Enter your web address and click "Make Screenshots." It takes about 30-40 min.

Too Much Advertising - Adding a massive amount of advertisements on your blog is a huge mistake. There is nothing wrong with a few appropriately places ads, but don't let it become over bearing. Limit the ads to no more than two or three.

Too Much on a blog - Some bloggers believe they need to have all the bells and whistles. Keep it simple. Too much on a page can slow down the loading time. The same can be said for large images. When someone attempts to load the page, it will take an excessively long time to load. I have been driven away from many blogs that took a long time to load or froze my computer.

Using Copywritten images without permission - This one can get you in a heat of trouble. Obtain permission before using an image. Copyright infringement is the unauthorized use of someone else's copyrighted material. Giving credit does not mean that you are not infringing on copyright or does it mean that you have permission to use that person's work. If you intend to use someone's copyrighted work on your blog be it a photo, cartoon or article, you must obtain the author's written permission.

Hotlinking to images - Don't hotlink to images. Hotlinking is when you link to an image on someone else's server instead of saving the image to your computer and uploading it to your blog. When you link to an image directly, you are using up that websites bandwidth. This does not cost you anything, but it does cost the website that you're stealing the bandwidth from.

Non descriptive Posting Titles - When creating titles for your post be sure to make them descriptive. Use keywords in your post titles. The post title is vital for search engine optimization. Consider the words that a potential reader will be using to search in Google to find the information you're posting about. Use the Overture Keyword Popularity Tool to access the WordTracker database and see what terms are being searched for.

Source....

Top 10 Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking

1. If you are using a shared host, ask your host for a dedicated IP address for your site. This means that no one on the net shares this IP with your site. It is yours and yours alone. Many shared servers have tons of related sites on them. Having your own IP separates you from those sites.

2. Make sure your site validates as a search engine friendly site. The best site to use for this purpose is The World Wide Web Consortium. Their markup validation service will tell you if your site conforms to W3C standards and whether or not the search engines can read your site. If your site has errors, these may stop the bots from properly indexing your site.

3. Make sure you have a contact page with an address and telephone number and a form of some sort so people can contact you. Don't list your email on the site unless you want spammers to send you tons of junk mail. Make sure the form you use on the site uses captcha (challenge-response system). Have a Privacy Policy Page and Terms of Services page and ensure that they have at least 300 words of text each. Most sites have these pages, but I strongly recommend you not copy. Find examples, but use your own words and include keywords related to your site. Make the pages personal to the reader.

4. Every page on your site should have at least 300 words or more. Don't write a 2 paragraph page that has little to no real information. Provide details and give examples.

5. Create a FAQ or Tutorial page on your site. Make each subject link to its own page and focus each page on 1 or 2 keywords. As a start, try to add 10 of these types of pages to your site. You can come up with ideas for FAQ's or Tutorials by reviewing your industry and trying to determine what people might not understand about it and the kinds of questions they might ask. Then post the questions and the answers. This is an easy way to add great content to your site and to help potential clients feel secure about your service.

6. Add a blog to your site. Have your blog designed to match your site so that as it draws traffic your readers know this is your main site of business. This will add value to your site, plus improve your search engine rankings. Create categories and write frequently about your industry to keep your readers interested and your content fresh.

7. Create Link Bait using your blog. There are very few services that offer this on a professional level and it can be very complex. I suggest leaving this service to the professionals because it requires time and knowledge and can be difficult and frustrating to do. The idea is to add unique and detailed content about your industry which creates enough buzz through various channels to motivate others to refer and link back to your blog. This can be a huge asset to your business because many writers love to provide plugs to quality content.

8. Post to Directory sites that have good inner page rank, especially on the page where your site will be listed. Use unique anchor text for each posting. Again, this may be one of those tasks best left to professionals because, if done correctly, your site's search engine ranking can be dramatically improved and, if done incorrectly, can be a waste of time, effort and money.

9. Text Link Brokering is another creative and effective way to build more anchor text back links. Find related and quality ranked sites that will list your site in text format. Generally, this requires a one time, monthly or yearly fee.

10. If you have a product or service to sell, offer affiliate incentives. Post these incentives on affiliate forums and elsewhere to generate interest in getting others to promote your service for you. Be sure you have a solid affiliate back end in place to provide your affiliates with dependable stats and access. Then, have people write reviews on your program's tracking and payout reliability to generate additional buzz.

Source.....

Principles For SEO Success

Here are "5 Principles for SEO Success".

1. Become an Expert. This is similar to Rand's "Start with a Unique Niche". I am simply adding the caveat that uniqueness is not enough. You also need to show that you are an expert. Perhaps the optimum thing is to "Become an Expert in a Hot, but Under-Served Area".Becoming an expert is truly at the heart of all good SEO. Without this in your pocket, I don't think you can get out of the gate at all.

In publishing a web site, being an expert is equally critical. If you don't build a web site that shows off your company's expertise in some compelling way, you will never get authoritative links to it. Lack of expertise is what leads people into spammy SEO. When you have a real expertise, and you market it effectively, people will give you links at no charge.

2. Share your Expertise Freely. Being an expert is a site, but as soon as you share that expertise effectively, you become a magnet, and many doors open for you. People will want to get to close to you to learn what they can from you. Andy's notion of writing articles to become a thought leader, and speaking at conferences are excellent examples of doing just this.Quick tip to the novice at speaking at conferences. Don't go there and make your presentation a sales pitch. Share your expertise freely. Educate your audience about some issue that they care about. This results in a lot of good will for your business, and links.

3. Be Social. In addition to the basics of sharing your expertise, get out there and meet and learn the players in your space. Make comments in their blogs. Add value to the dialogue on their sites. When appropriate, get into e-mail and phone dialogues with them. Be judicious about this - their time is precious.Go to conferences and introduce yourself. You will be amazed at how one face to face meeting changes the trust level in a relationship. No matter how electronic our world gets, there is something really valuable about seeing someone's face, sharing a beer, or even having just a quick conversation face to face.

4. Be Creative. Here is where I bring in Andy's "Stand Out from the Crowd". Being creative enables your products and services to stand out. But creativity relates to other aspects of the business too. If your promotional strategy is novel and creative, you are more likely to get noticed.One example of this is the idea of being an early adopter of a new thing out there, and being the first, or one of the first, to apply it to your business. For example, people who were early adopters in using vidcasting as part of their business probably did very well. Not because of the direct promotional benefits, but because early adopters are ferocious linkers.

5. Be Opportunistic. When opportunity comes knocking, be ready to jump. If your business is small, you have the luxury of being flexible. Make this one of your advantages. This can even take the form of developing a wholly new expertise, simple to leverage a new opportunity.I am not talking about turning your business model upside down here, but the potential of adding a new component to what you are doing. Opportunities take many forms.

A strong influencer in the space may post something about a need they have. If so, serve it. You may find out that a company has a sudden need due to a loss of key people. If so, find out to help them.

There are may such opportunities happening on a regular basis. Just be on the lookout, and scoop them up when they come (yes, a reasonableness check does apply!).

This is really a pretty good blueprint for getting a business out of the gate. Rand and Andy offer their own perspectives and make many other great points, so their posts are worth a read too. Bottom line is that the SEO world continues to abound with opportunities. This is true whether you are building an SEO firm, or publishing a web site. Go get 'em.

Source...