Understanding Analytics

In our last segment: About Search Engine Optimization III, we left off with a discussion about analytics and promised to help you understand what you can do with all this SEO information.

Traffic is what we are looking for when we talk about search engine optimization. But it’s more than just traffic to your website that we need to concern ourselves with; we want our internet marketing campaign to drive QUALIFIED traffic.

Bounces

If you activated Google analytics, you will see a nifty little statistic called “bounce rate.” Basically, a bounce occurs when a visitor to your website lands on a page and then immediately leaves, without viewing anymore content on your site. Obviously, the lower this number is, the better. If 80% of visitors are leaving your site immediately then that means only 20% are sticking around to read/view what you have to offer.

If we are going to be doing all of this tedious, search engine optimization stuff, then we want our visitors to stick around for a bit. If our bounces are high (over 50%), then we need to take a look at a few things:

• What traffic is bouncing the most, what source?
• Which pages have the highest bounce rate?
• What keywords are visitors who bounce using the most?

There are probably other things we can look at as well, but this should give us a pretty good idea where to start.

Traffic Source

In Google analytics, the first page you see is usually an overview of your website traffic. The default time period is for one month, i.e.: number of visitors, etc. for the most current 30 days. In the middle of the page you will see: Visits, Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, Bounce Rate, and % New Visits.

These stats are a high level view of how the site is performing. For our purposes, we want to drill down a little deeper.

Click on Demographics and then on location (top left sidebar).

When you scroll down the page, you can see the country/territory that people are visiting from. Google also gives us number of visits etc., at this level. Don’t concern yourself too much with the foreign bounces, unless you are selling a product or service internationally.

Take a look at the summary bounces for the country in which your site is located. If the bounce rate is less than 40%, you might want to pat yourself on the back and resume the series with our next article: About Search Engine Optimization V.

Ok, so I guess your site is kinda bouncy and you want some answers.

Click on the Country that your site resides in.

Now you see the states, or regions and their specific traffic information. Pay attention here; if your site is optimized for local search, i.e.: ‘Orlando Internet Marketing,’ it might have higher bounce rates in states that aren’t local to that area.

Example:

Connecticut, New York, and California will likely have a much higher incidence of bouncing than Florida, if the site keywords and related internet marketing are optimized as above for ‘Orlando Internet Marketing.’

If we use the example above and we have a lot of bounces in Florida, then we have some work to do, since that is obviously the market that we are targeting, and somehow visitors aren’t finding what they are looking for.

We got more clicking to do:

Click on the state or region.
Now let’s take a look at a ‘Secondary Dimension,’ sounds scary right?
It’s not so bad,
Click on the secondary dimension button just above City.
Click Traffic Sources.
Click Source.

We’ve drilled down even deeper and now we can see bounce statistics, etc. for each source:

• Direct – visitor came to your site via bookmark or typing in your URL in a browser window.
• Google or Google.com – Visitor is either from a search result or paid advertisement with Adwords.
• Website name – This is a direct referral from another website. Note: if you have a high bounce rate for a particular source like this, it might be that the referring site isn’t using good anchor text on the link.

Again, we need to take a look at the bounce rates. Looking at the sources we might begin to see a pattern. If we are getting high bounces on any source other than ‘Direct visitors’ (People who have visited the site before), then we need to find out what they were looking for and why they didn’t find it.

Since we are already here, go back to the secondary dimension button, this time Click ‘Keyword’ under ‘Traffic Sources.’

Amazing isn’t it? We can see exactly how people found us. If the keyword indicated is “(not set),” this just means that it was from either a direct visit or a referral from another website with no keyword used.
So, now what? Well, if you see keywords that don’t make sense for your website, it is likely the cause of bounces.
For example:
Waterfordmedia.com does a lot of search engine optimization for the terms ‘Orlando Internet Marketing’ and ‘Florida SEO Service’; as a result we also rank for other terms like ‘SEO service’. And we will get visitors that bounce using search terms like:
‘SEO Services Portland Oregon’.

Obviously, some of this can’t be helped, and we will just have to live with the bounce, but someone searching for SEO services in a different state probably wants someone local to do their SEO.

There’s more to cover on this topic, but it will need to wait for the next article:

About Search Engine Optimization V – Optimizing Pages and Working with Keywords

Thanks for reading

Orlando Internet Marketing

SEO – What to do First

In our last segment, we ended with a discouraging point. Keywords are vital, but they are not an end-all to good search engine optimization. Without good SEO, a website is banished to the far reaches of the internet where sane men seldom travel. In this segment we will discuss some of the quick actions that you can perform to start getting your website visibility.

Submit your website to Search Engines

You may have already done this; if you haven’t, it’s possible that the omnipresent ‘Googlebot’ and other spiders have found your website anyway. Don’t rely on chance where search engine submission is concerned. You can do all the right things with your website, but if the search engines aren’t indexing it, then the site will remain undiscovered.
Submitting your website to search engines doesn’t have to be hard. First, do a web search for “free search engine submission.” At the time of this writing there were approximately 18,700,000 results in Google. You can wade through the 18 million results and pick one you like; or click on one of the links below to use one of our picks:
http://www.submitexpress.com/free-submission.html
http://freewebsubmission.com/
http://www.1-hit.com/free-search-engine-submit.php

Don’t be surprised if any or all of these sites try to sell you professional SEO services; they need to make money too.
Follow the onscreen instructions to submit your site. Some submissions will require that you verify via email. Make sure you give them a valid email and check it and follow the link to validate your website submission.
That’s it, you have submitted your website, but don’t expect your site to show up immediately. The submission process can take up to weeks before the spiders come crawling.

Set up analytics

Analytics is one of the most important first steps that you can take in your SEO campaign. How will you know how your website is doing without at least checking periodically to see how many people are visiting your website? Analytics tools give you this information and a lot more.
Google analytics is perhaps the quickest way to start tracking and understanding what’s happening on your website. Go here to signup:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

It’s pretty easy to setup your account; the hardest part is putting the tracking code on your website. The tracking code is used to keep track of what pages are visited, how long visits last, where people are coming from, and a whole lot of other stuff too!
Google analytics is not the only tool that you should use to track your SEO campaigns. Nearly all website hosting accounts have some kind of statistics program included. Sometimes you don’t even need to turn them on; they just start gathering information as soon as your website is setup. I can’t tell you exactly where this is located on all hosting companies, but many use a tool called Cpanel.
In Cpanel you can find statistics about a third of the way down the page, in the fourth segment titled ‘Logs’. I like AWSTATS, click on it and then the domain you want to view. Wow! Look at all the information. For now we will concern ourselves with just a few bites, of course feel free to eat the whole thing if you like (analyze away).

Here are a few things you can find:

Unique Visitors – the number of individual IP addresses that visited your website.
Total Visitors – This differs from unique visitors in that a single visitor may have visited many times!
Daily Visitors – The number of visits you have on any given day of the month.
Top 25 visiting countries – That’s right, you’ve gone global.
Robots and spiders – Sounds kind of creepy, but this is where you can see if Google and friends are actually seeing your website.
Keywords – This is the word or phrase that people have used to find your site.
And there’s more, including: keywords used to find your site, top visited urls…etc., etc.

Now that you have these nifty stats and you’re certain your website has the attention of Google et al, you might be wondering what to do with all the information. We will cover that in the next segment, for now it suffices to know that you are actually getting traffic to your website, and that the search engines know you exist.

Read More on Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing

How Do People Find My Website?

By now you have probably figured out that most people aren’t going to go to Google and enter your website name to find you.  So how do you get found? One of the answers to this question is with keywords. Any effort at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) must include proper use of keywords. Your website needs to be indexed by keyword in Google so that it knows where to send visitors who enter your keyword in their search page. After all, if you sell “widgets,” then it won’t do you any good to have people visit who are looking for “thing-a-ma-jigs,” right?

For example:

If you are looking for “SEO services,” you might visit google.com and enter “SEO services” into the search bar. What happens? Millions of results are returned.

You can wade through the pages looking for what you want, or you change your search to be more specific. If you are in Florida, you might change your search to “SEO services in Florida.”

In the scenario above the keyword is “SEO services” (a keyword can be a phrase of many words). If your website is indexed on Google for “SEO services” you will be somewhere in those million results. If your website is also indexed on Google for “SEO services in Florida,” then you would also be found in the narrower, more detailed search, other results were weeded out just by adding “Florida.”

Even when the search is narrowed down to “SEO services in Florida,” there are still a million results! Your website could still be way down the list. It’s not very encouraging is it? Being on page 100,000 or something is probably not going to get you any visitors to your website. In our next article we’ll discuss how to move your web page closer to the front of the line.
Pick your Keywords
The use of keywords on your website is the segment of search engine optimization that is referred to as “on page SEO.” Think about the keywords that people would use to find your website. Make a list of 1-word keywords, 2-word keywords, 3-word keywords, and 4-word keywords. These keywords and phrases should be very specific to your product or service. When you write articles for your website be sure to incorporate your keyword phrases.

This is a vital part of search engine optimization and internet marketing and you cannot ignore its value. However, there are many other things that you can do to move your website to the front of the line in the search engines.

Our next segment will discuss some of the critical first steps that must be done in order to get your website found in the abyss of the World Wide Web. The next article will explain search engine submission and analytic tools.

Read the Next Internet Marketing Article in the Series »

Orlando Internet Marketing

Search engine optimization and SEO services

Professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services are offered by many companies. You may see these services offered as management plans, directory submissions, white or black hat (bad). This may have you wondering what you really need for your website and how to perform your own SEO.

This series will attempt to answer some of these questions by providing relevant articles and resources about SEO services.

A good starting point is usually with the “basics.” Understanding SEO terminology is a must in order to really grasp the more advanced ideas.

Here is an excellent article to get you started: SEO and SEM in plain English. It doesn’t get into doing your own SEO; that’s something we’ll discuss in a bit. Rather, it’s more of a glossary with some easy to understand descriptions of SEO concepts and terms.

After you read the article some of the stuff we write here will probably make a lot more sense. For the benefit of those who are completely new to this we will start with the simple and move to the more complex aspects of search engine optimization. We will cover important topics such as: website statistics, internet marketing SEO, social media, search engine ranking, and more. But first we need to cover the basics.

How do I know where my website is found?

You have a beautiful website that you worked hard or paid lots of money to launch. You might wonder if anyone is actually seeing it. To find out go to alexa.com and enter your url into the ‘site info’ box. You can get lots of useful information: your site’s rank, competition, and back links. Don’t get discouraged if the first time you visit, Alexa doesn’t have any data. Just visit a few times, enter your url and Alexa will get curious about your site and start gathering information about it. (Neat huh?)

You can also go to Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. and input your site name eg: wallyswidgets.com into the search bar and see if your site comes up. Hopefully, it does. If you go through enough pages you are sure to find it. If your website is new and you haven’t done any SEO it may take going through many, many pages.

It might seem like a lot of work finding your website and you might start thinking that if you have trouble finding your own website, how will anyone else. And that’s where SEO or search engine optimization comes in.

 »Continue reading through our articles to find out what SEO is and how to use it.

Orlando Internet Marketing