Google Analytics and SEO for your website
Google Analytics helps you understand a user’s experience on your website. By using this information, you can make changes to your website that will help your website rank higher in search engines and thereby help you gain more qualified website traffic. Google Analytics not only gives you information about the number of visitors to your website, but it also gives a lot of useful information about your website including: individual spends on the website, pages visited in the website, where a person left your website, bounce rate, and much more.
Google Analytics and how it helps with SEO
The question here is how does Google Analytics help with my SEO? Here are some of the ways in which Google analytics can help your SEO campaign:
- Visits: This is the most basic of all of the information you are given. Visits tells you how many visitors to your website you had in a one month period. You can then compare this with past months to see if your traffic is increasing. You will be able to identify trends and if there are seasonal spikes to your website. In turn, this will help you refine your marketing efforts to coincide with period when visitors to your site are the mximum.
- Top referring keywords: This lists the relevant keywords that brought visitors to your website. Based on this information, you can see where your website ranks for these keywords. In turn, you can make changes that will help your website rank higher for the keyword. The end result is that you can tweak your SEO campaign to rank higher for keywords that are bringing visitors to your website. Many times, you will find that there are keywords people are using, that you have not optimized for.
- Referrers: This is another important metric as it gives you an insight about the source of the traffic to your website. If a website is referring visitors to your site, then it tells you the kind of websites you should be present on, which sites the visitors to your site are likely to visit and this can help you refine your link building strategy.
- Click Path: This helps to judge how user friendly your site design is, how people navigate your site and where they are most likely to exit your site. This helps you refine your website navigation and maximize conversions on your website.
- Bounce Rate: This shows how many visitors left your website and which pages they left the site from. This helps you analyze what could be causing people to leave your site and you can accordingly modify the content of your site.
There’s a lot more useful information and data that web analytics provides. The items listed above are the very basic. A proper tracking of your website traffic can provide you with a wealth of information that you can use to refine your SEO campaign and attract more traffic to your website.
Let’s see how Google Analytics helps you track the above details of your website. Google Analytics is a free solution from Google and it can provide you with data that helps you refine your SEO campaigns and attract more traffic. Here’s an example:
In the above image, you can see the details that Google analytics provides about a particular website. You can find that it mentions about number of visits, bounce rates, pageviews, etc. This is a top level view. You can explore details of each of the above metrics, decide refinements to your SEO campaigns and track the impact of the changes you make.
If you do not know the impact of your efforts, it becomes next to impossible to know if your efforts are working. Analyzing the information available through Google Analytics, you can take informed decisions and make changes to your SEO campaigns to drive more website traffic.
About the Author
Chip Curle is the owner of Charles Curle Design, a North Georgia web designer that develops and manages web sites and drives companies to the top of internet search engines through search engine optimization. His work has earned Chip 14 ADDY (American Advertising Federation) awards including 8 Gold, 4 Silver, and 2 Best of Show.
Why Search Engine Optimization is a Great Investment For Any Company
How much money do you pay to have a sales person sell your services or products? How many hours does that sales person work each day/week/month? Did you know that your website is a sales person that works for you 24/7? Having an optimized website is the single most powerful marketing tool that every company should be aware of and implement into their business.
Here are 5 reasons why SEO should be implemented into your marketing strategy before your competition beats you out.
Absence of risk
Search engine optimization is free of any risk. In many cases, paid advertising (banner ads, pay-per-click) is subject to click fraud risk. There are people that that use software to click on their competitors ads, which cost you money each time it is clicked. Google AdWords has protection against this, but it isn’t 100%. Nothing can stop a competitor from clicking your link a few times, costing you money.
Reliability
Banner ads and pay-per-click campaigns work great until the marketing budget for these campaigns depletes for the month. When this happens, your website is no longer listed and customers can’t find you anymore. SEO obtains an organic listing and your company’s website will always be found by your customers. Consumers are more likely to purchase from a site ranked high in the search engine results rather than from a pay-per-click ad.
Brand Awareness
A website that is ranked high means that more people will see the name of your company and become familiar with it and it’s products or services, even if they haven’t made a purchase. Consumers recognize businesses ranked in the top 3 in search engine results compared to those appearing in banner ads. With so many people using pop-up blockers and banner blockers, many people don’t even see the banner ads that are being displayed.
Targeted Traffic
SEO brings those paying customers to you. When a consumer is looking for a specific product or service and you rank high, they will enter the key words/phrases that they are looking for. When they find your site, they are a target lead and more likely to purchase from you. How much money do you spend on sales people getting you targeted leads and sales?
Affordability
In comparison to banner ads and pay-per-click advertising, SEO is a much more affordable service. With banner ads and pay-per-click, you set a budget and when that budget is met, the ads are gone. This could happen a week into your campaign. This means you would go three weeks before your ads appear again. With SEO, your website will stay listed on the search engines and won’t drop off.
As you should be able to see, search engine optimization is vital to your business. If you have a website and people can’t find it when entering keywords of the products or services that you sell, then why did you pay all of that money to have the website built? Remember, your website is a sales person that works day and night and has a global territory. Can you afford to pay your sales person to work day and night?
What is Search Engine Optimization and Why Do I Need It?
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and do I need it?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of analyzing and enhancing your website to help potential customers find it on Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. In today’s competitive environment, proper SEO is critical to the success of any business website. It can help you gain visibility, get your site found, and increase traffic to your website.
What is a search engine?
A search engine is a website that people use to search the Internet for products, services and information. The three primary search engines are Google, Yahoo!, and Bing which account for nearly 90% of all Internet search traffic. Other search engines include Ask.com, Lycos, AOL and AltaVista.
What is search engine optimization?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of analyzing and enhancing your website so that it’s easier for potential customers to find your site from a search engine.
Do I need SEO?
YES, and here’s why:
You may have a great website, but if nobody sees it, your business is not going to be successful.
SEO can help you tap into the vast market of potential customers who are out there right now searching on Google and other search engines.
Proper SEO can help you gain a competitive advantage by helping your site get seen before your competitors’.
What’s involved in optimizing my site for search engines?
Although it may sound complicated, optimizing your site is a fairly straightforward process. Anyone can do it – it doesn’t take any special technical skill or knowledge – it just takes a little time and some dedication to improving your business. Keep in mind, though, that even the most serious SEO efforts can take several weeks to take effect. If you are committed and willing to manage your website’s SEO on an on-going basis, you will likely see your results increase steadily over time. As a general rule, the more dedicated and persistent you are with site optimization, the better your results will be.
What are keywords?
Keywords are terms that people use to search the web. For instance, if someone wanted search on Google for a doctor in the Atlanta area, they might enter “Atlanta Doctor” in the search field – these would be the keywords for that particular search. A critical part of the SEO process is deciding which keywords are the most valuable for your business. Obviously a doctor in Atlanta would want to optimize their site for “Atlanta Doctor”. If the same doctor also specialized in pediatrics, they would want to optimize their site to perform well for the keywords “pediatric specialist”, and so on. The keywords you choose and how well your site is optimized for those keywords can make all difference in getting qualified traffic to your site.
What are search engine rankings?
Your site’s “ranking” is where your site appears in a list of search results returned by a search engine. The higher your ranking (position #1 is the highest ranking) the more visibility you’ll get and the more traffic you are likely to bring to your site.
What are meta-tags?
Meta-tags are part of your website’s HTML code that search engines use to help rank your site. The three primary meta-tags are the title tag, header tag and keyword tag. An important part of SEO is to optimize these tags so that search engines can more easily evaluate your site and rank you higher in search results.
What are site links and why are they important?
When search engines evaluate your site for rankings, an important factor is how you use links on your site, as well as how many other websites link to your site.
What’s a search engine spider?
A spider is an automatic indexing tool – or robot – used by search engines. Spiders continually “crawl” the web evaluating websites for content, html tags, etc. With proper SEO in place, your site can be more easily and completely indexed by spiders, which can help improve rankings.
What is search engine submission?
Submitting your site to a search engine is a way to help your site get indexed and ranked – so that your listing will appear in that engine’s search results.
Google Alerts
You have a great business with a great reputation. Wouldn’t you like to know when something about you or your company has been found on the internet? This is where Google Alerts come in. There are millions of web pages being added to the Google database daily. With all of the new web pages, blog posts, etc, there is new information coming in every second of the day. When you subscribe to Google Alerts for a keyword or keyword phrase Google will send you an email informing you when the Google bot has found something based on your keyword or keyword phrase.
What can you use Google Alerts for? You can keep track of your company and seeing what people are saying about you or y our product. If someone puts your link on their website, you will be notified. You can keep track of your competition by tracking their keywords. If they put out new content, you will be notified. This allows you to keep up with your competition and allows you to plan accordingly.
Here are 4 quick ways to use Google Alerts.
Note that you’ll need to have a Google login to use the service.
For each Alert, you’ll need to decide the following:
- The syntax / content of the search This is simply the Google search query that you’d insert in the search box (i.e., “my topic” or “my name” or simply: words without quotes) To get more accurate results, you will want to utilize some of the Advanced Search options (+, -, “”, or, not) or Search Operators (link:, site:) to narrow down the search. For example, if you wanted a search on digital camera but wanted to make sure it returned results only when they were talking about a nikon you might insert: digital camera +nikon.
- How often the alert should be sent (as-it-happens, once a day, once a week). Google will send notifications only when it actually finds new material in the top 20 (web) / 10 (news) results, so you won’t be getting messages unless there’s something to report. For a topic that you want to keep an eye on but it’s not urgent, you might select “once a week” or if you wanted to be notified quickly, “as it happens”.
- How you’d like to receive the alerts (email or via RSS feed) For each alert you create, a separate email will be sent depending on how often you’ve chosen to receive it. You can also subscribe to the alert via RSS feed in Google Reader instead of email.
- Type of information to search This tells Google which information to include in its search (News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive, Video, Groups) You can decide to search only blogs, or just news, or videos, depending on your needs.
Here are some suggestions for some Google Alerts to set up if you’re just getting started:
- Do a “vanity search” for your name, nickname and/or your blog’s name to find out when your name or your blog is mentioned by someone else. This can be helpful especially if someone mentions your blog or name but doesn’t link to you (like example below).
- Syntax: “first last” or first last or nickname
- Create a Google Alert for each of the following: your name (first and last), your blog’s name (not URL), your “handle” or nickname if it’s unique, and your Twitter username. If you have a common name, make sure you put your entire name in quotes.
- Track incoming links to your site Insert your blogís URL to track any links from other sites to your site.
- Syntax: link:www.yourdomain.com
- For all links to your site, insert your URL at the highest level where you have content. If you want to track incoming links to a particular post, you can enter in the exact post’s URL. Note: since Google recently started indexing blogrolls people have displayed on their sites, sometimes you’ll get alerts when someone who lists you in their blogroll posts a new blog post. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re linked in the post’s content, and I suspect that Google will try to repair this soon.
- Keep your eye on your favorite topics Possibly my favorite type of alert as it’s like a personal news service that is not restricted in any way. You can let your imagination run wild with it. I find it a great way to do research on a topic as well as see articles/posts that are talking about a subject that interests me.
- Syntax: keywords that interest you or “specific keywords” or word notthisword or spelling OR another-spelling OR another
- I find these alerts are best refined over time as you can use the Advanced Search options (+, -, “”, or, not)or Search Operators (link:, site:) to narrow and refine the search to get exactly what you want.
- Get notified of spam links inserted in your site – This last alert is a little different from the rest, because it uses the site: operator to look for links inside your own site.
Syntax: site:www.yourdomain.com viagra OR cialis OR otherspamword
About the Author
Chip Curle is the owner of Charles Curle Design, a Cumming, GA web designer that develops and manages web sites and drives companies to the top of internet search engines through search engine optimization and search engine marketing. His work has earned Chip 14 ADDY (American Advertising Federation) awards including 8 Gold, 4 Silver, and 2 Best of Show.
The ultimate Twitter resource page
I have compiled one of the longest twitter resource page that you will ever see. Whatever you wanted to know about Twitter can be found here.
Click here for the ultimate Twitter resource guide
5 Benefits of Google Analytics For Your Website
Google Analytics is a free tool that can be used to track information about the way visitors to your website interact and navigate through it. You can use Google Analytics to track the performance of your keywords, adwords campaigns and get a visual output of your ROI when selling products. Google Analytics will open up a world of information that you probably didn’t know about the visitors to your website.
Here are 5 benefits of using Google Analytics on your website:
1. It is free. Even though it is free, it offers the same, and even more functionality than some of the tracking tools that you must pay for.
2. Discover how visitors to your website found you. You will be able to see what keywords visitors are using to find your website, what search engines they used and the number of times those search terms were used. You will also see what other websites referred visitors to you. This is important if you are doing link trading.
3. Identify which pages and links your visitors click the most. You will be able to see which pages and links are the most popular and you can measure whether your search engine optimization campaign is sending traffic to the correct pages.
4. Visitor segmentation. You have the ability to know how many new visitors that your keywords brings you from the search engines. You can segment your results by new/returning visitors, geography and referral sources.
5. Fine tune your website. With the Google Analytic report, you will be able to fine tune your website as you will see what pages are working and which ones are not. By editing the copy on the pages that aren’t performing well, you will be able to help those pages convert better bringing in more quality potential customers.
About the Author
Chip Curle is the owner of Charles Curle Design, a North Georgia web designer that develops and manages web sites and drives companies to the top of internet search engines through search engine optimization and search engine marketing. His work has earned Chip 14 ADDY (American Advertising Federation) awards including 8 Gold, 4 Silver, and 2 Best of Show.
Get listed in Google Local Listings in 3 easy steps
If you have ever done a search in Google you may have noticed that there is a map and listing for local providers that shows up before the google results. Is your company listed here? If not, follow the 3 easy steps below to get listed.
Step 1: Enter in your Business Details
Visit the Google Local Business Center and log in. If you haven’t registered with Google before, go ahead and do so, and once you complete the registration, log in.
Once you are in, you will be prompted to enter in your Business Name, Address, Phone Number, Email address, website url, a description of your company and up to 5 categories that your business falls under.
Step 2: Verify Your Listing
Once you have entered in all of your information, you will need to verify that this is your company. You can do this 2 ways.
1) Phone Verification. You enter in your phone number, Google calls you immediately with a PIN number
2) Mail Verification: Google sends you a postcard with your PIN number.
I would recommend the phone call as calls you immediately. The mail verification can take up to 6 weeks to arrive.
Step 3: Confirm Verification Code
Once you receive your verification code, you will click the button that says verify pin. Enter the number that was given to you and your site will be listed in a few days.
Getting listed is very easy and very beneficial. Once you get listed, then you need to optimize your website so that you can get listed at the top of the local directory page.
About the Author
Chip Curle is the owner of Charles Curle Design, a North Georgia web designer that develops and manages web sites and drives companies to the top of internet search engines through search engine optimization and search engine marketing. His work has earned Chip 14 ADDY (American Advertising Federation) awards including 8 Gold, 4 Silver, and 2 Best of Show.
Why Optimize a Website?
When you build a website for your company, you are wanting to increase the traffic to the website and turn the visitors into potential customers. Everything you do while working on the website has a direct relation with the number of visitors your website will attract. Just putting in information is not the only thing that will attract the visitors, you will need to go a step further. If you optimize your website for the search engines, you will bring in more qualified traffic to your website.
There is a common myth about the website optimization process in the minds of people. It says that this process is beneficial only for those websites that are not popular with the people and have less in-flowing traffic. But the statement is incorrect because the process of optimization works to transform your website and make you earn greater revenue. This is the best way to publicize your website to more number of people and making it more search engine friendly. When you optimize your website, it will rank higher on the search engines and the visitors will be able to find it easily.
Website optimization is using the proper keywords, and relative content. It’s also about making your title tag contain keywords and the proper usage of the meta tags. When you do this properly, you will get more visitors, they will get better information from your website and will recommend it to others.
When you have an optimized website, you have more chances of turning the visitors into prospective customers. With the number of visitors, the authority of your website would also rise. It would eventually become a better paying source for you. This is why more people are opting for website optimization. It is good to understand the benefits of the process and make the best use of it.
About the Author
Chip Curle is the owner of Charles Curle Design, a North Georgia web design company that develops and manages web sites and drives companies to the top of internet search engines through search engine optimization and search engine marketing. His work has earned Chip 14 ADDY (American Advertising Federation) awards including 8 Gold, 4 Silver, and 2 Best of Show.
The importance of a website
In today’s business world, it is imperative that your business have a website. Nearly every household has internet access, with many having more than one computer. The internet allows people to view companies around the world, not just your hometown. If you have a product or service to sell, you are able to sell it to anyone, anywhere.
Your website is open 24/7 and can be more effective than any other form of advertising. If done correctly, you will have a better return on investment. Your website needs to be professionally designed and be able to transmit your company’s message in a few seconds. It needs to have enough content that can let the user know what you do and what you sell.
Having a website is not to be ‘hip’ any longer. Not having a website is very damaging. Compare it to going to a Business 400 networking event without business cards. In today’s world, people study businesses more and research more on the product/service that they are wanting to buy. If you don’t have a website, you probably just lost a sale.
A website is able to be updated at any time. If you made an error posting a price, you can fix that in a few seconds. How long, and expensive, would it be to have to replace 1,000 brochures that contain the same error? Websites allow you to put endless amounts of information on it. With print and television advertising, you are very limited as to what information you can put out. With the web, you can have as much information about your products and services as you desire.
Now that you have a website, how do you get people to get to it? The best way is through search engine optimization. Being able to get listed high in the search engines will allow more people to find your business. You don’t want to have a great website hidden on page 12 of a google search for your product. You want to be on page 1. Most people quit searching after page 2 of the results. Can you afford to not have a high listing? Other forms of promoting your website online are paid advertising through search engines, links from other sites, and banner advertising.
When deciding to build your website, you need to fully understand that it’s another tool to use to bring in business. If done correctly, it will bring in a lot of business. Your website is your identity, so make sure you have one.
About the Author
Chip Curle is the owner of Charles Curle Design, an Atlanta web design company that develops and manages web sites and drives companies to the top of internet search engines through search engine optimization. His work has earned Chip 14 ADDY (American Advertising Federation) awards including 8 Gold, 4 Silver, and 2 Best of Show.
The importance of your About Us page on your website
The About Us page on your website is one of the most important pages and is often overlooked or has the wrong information contained on it. Many people put the what/where/how/why/when details on this page instead of the home page where it is needed to make a quick impression.
About Us pages are used differently, depending on the requirements of a site. For a blog, the About page should be about the purpose of the blog, or the details of the blog owner, why the blog exists, how long it’s been online and what the blog is about.
For an ecommerce website, the About Us page can help meet credibility requirements. Most About Us pages are very boring to read, and people often ignore them, and companies know this and often ignore this page. If you want to stand out from the others, find a unique way to talk about your company or self. Introduce your staff, share your mission statement, talk about community events and what organizations you belong to.
The About Us page is a great place to toot your own horn. List accomplishments and awards as this helps build trust and credibility. When you network, send people to your website so that they can learn more about you. They even might buy your product/service while there.
An About page that is presented with honesty and true facts can bring you closer to getting those new customers. In today’s age, people research companies more by reading their website. Why not utilize your website to reach it’s full potential.
About the Author
Chip Curle is the owner of Charles Curle Design, an Atlanta web design company that develops and manages web sites and drives companies to the top of internet search engines through search engine optimization. His work has earned Chip 14 ADDY (American Advertising Federation) awards including 8 Gold, 4 Silver, and 2 Best of Show.
