Previously in Organic Keywords: The First Step In Search Engine Optimization, I covered how to use Google Analytics to choose the organic keyword phrases to focus on first in your optimization efforts: those keywords already contributing to the business goals. We then looked at how to use Google analytics to help "map" those keywords to existing pages on the site for optimization. In this article, I’ll continue on to the next step and show you how I prioritize the keywords by evaluating the difficulty of reaching top results. Check Keyword Rankings The next step I take before beginnin [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content

When I first started using Google Analytics, my "goal" was to not run away screaming. The intense amount of information, seemingly disconnected, made understanding what I needed so overwhelming. In my last article,we talked about the basic reports you should watch as a beginner. This week, we’re going to work on how to make Google Analytics work for you via Goal setup and configuration. The first thing you need to do after login is find where to setup goals, which is not where you see the goal results. In reality, most of the setup in Google Analytics happens behind the sprocket in th [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Google Analytics is divided in five main categories: Visitors Advertising Traffic Sources Content Conversions In this post, I want to talk about the Content category. I will not discuss all  the reports available, but the ones I use most frequently. If you click on Content it will expand to the sections below:   Overview The overview gives a quick overall view of your content. You can see metrics such as pageviews, unique pageviews, avg. time on page and bounce rate. By using the date range option on the top right corner, you can select your date range and also ea [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

If you read my previous Link Week entry, Why Canonicalization Matters From A Linking Perspective, you know that canonicalization - the process of selecting and using one specific URL for each page on your website for indexing in search - is vitally important for consolidating potential link juice. This is because search engines index URLs to get content, so when multiple versions of URLs point to the same content, that content’s Page Rank is diluted across those URLs. Today, I want to advance that concept a bit more. Let’s look at how the external world of the Web views your business. I [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: Links | Link Week | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing

The first login to a Google Analytics account can be daunting. There are so many things to see, and so many different ways to tweak data, that deciding which are the most important metrics to watch can be an insurmountable decision. Ultimately, in my opinion, you are the only one who can decide what metrics and reports are important to your business. Some websites don't collect money but do send traffic to other sites, or collect subscriptions or email sign-ups as a form of conversion. Some do collect money, but it's just a small portion of their business; the phone call may really be co [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

SEO consultants like me usually get called in at an advanced stage of website development. Design elements are already in place, graphics created, page structure determined, even selling and lead generation processes finalized before the owner or manager invites us over to "slap SEO on" to their creation! Is that because to many of our prospective clients, SEO is a purely technical issue unconnected to marketing? Personally, I don't think that's correct. At all. True, there is a technological side to any SEO plan. But the strategy setting and business analysis components that draw upo [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO

One of the most important hurdles to tackle before analyzing data is collecting clean and correct data. There are many ways to make your data more accurate; tagging is one of them. Although the correct tagging of your campaigns seems something basic, I still see a lot of companies and websites that aren’t tagging at all or do it in a wrong way. In this article, I will explain the major tagging issues and how to tag correctly. Campaign Tagging Problems The most important issue with tagging your campaigns is the involvement of many different colleagues and partners. With the implementa [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Setting up Analytics accounts has evolved beyond installing "generated" scripts on pages and calling it a day. What started with the advent of software that told us how many "hits" we got a day has evolved into a sophisticated decision assistance engine, and keeping up on the new and cutting edge offers full time employment for many people across the world. As part of our website designs, many of us feature various graphic "buttons" or images on our site that either link to interior pages, booking paths, or even lead users off-site. We embed video, or have image links to our social media [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Data is a fickle friend. It is only as reliable as the setup you have and the effort you put into understanding the numbers. There are so many variables that can kill your data, and fixing the things that are broken is always a process of elimination. I can tell you that most skewed data is generally caused by two things 1) incorrectly installed scripts, or 2) the site owners themselves. You and your coworkers and employees are the one that visits your site most often. Your marketing team and webmaster are probably a close second and third. Do those visits really represent honest traffic [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Not only is it important to make sure your tabs are interactive, but you need to give users reasons to keep going back for more. Facebook-only content and contests help drive users back to your tabs time and time again. What’s even better, these techniques can also help drive new users to your Page. The second piece of this two part series gives you some advice on how to do just that. Creating Facebook-only Content Reward your fans for liking your Page by offering them something they can’t get anywhere else. Coupons and special discount codes are often the first ideas that come to mind, [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Social | How To | How To: Facebook | How To: Social Media Marketing | Search & Social

Effective article marketing is not about submitting articles to article submission sites. Effective article marketing is about writing quality articles that are useful or interesting to your market, using some on your own website and getting some published on other related websites. Previously in A Step By Step Guide To Effective Online Article Marketing, I covered the first step in effective article marketing; writing quality, useful articles for your own website. I also talked about how to find article ideas and how to get articles written if you don’t have the time or can’t write. [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO

Fact: Google spoils us when it comes to free tools to optimize our search campaigns. Over the past few years, they’ve released a ton of really useful products that allow us to mine for keywords, auto-bid our campaigns, test ad copy and more. It’s true that Google doesn’t strike gold every time it releases something new into the wild (Google Radio Ads, anyone?) but when it comes to tools for optimizing your AdWords campaigns, they normally get things pretty dead-on. Here are three of my favorite AdWords tools for retailers, along with some hints and tips on how to leverage them for [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: PPC | Search & Analytics

For a long time, I thought utilizing a strong Landing Page Optimization program was only available to large companies with large budgets. The software to create landing pages on the fly by keyword is pricey, and the learning curve is significant. If you have the time, budget and manpower to utilize a design team and software that builds a landing page for every paid, organic, social and email marketing keyword or blast you send -- Awesome! The reality is, most of us do have time and budget limitations. Getting permission to spend thousands on software isn't likely, but that doesn't mean [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: PPC | Search Marketing: Landing Pages

Online article marketing can effectively improve organic search results in a number of ways: Improve visibility for your target keyword phrases Obtain traffic for additional (long tail) keyword searches Assist in building awareness and reputation Increase targeted traffic from other quality related websites Helps attract more incoming links to your site Helps make your website more unique and useful Google’s Panda update showed once again, that it’s important to have high quality, unique content. We recently evaluated a large ecommerce website that was stung by the Panda [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO

Since "how much would it take me to get started?" is a common question that potential clients ask me, I thought I'd expand a bit on my original answer to Debra Mastaler's forum questions. I love the idea of only having $100 to get started because many times, having less money means you have to get more creative. So, since I've spent my theoretical $100 already (in the post above), everything else I'd advise is free. So far we've set up social media accounts, used a few free tools in order to find more Twitter followers, analyze our Twitter work, and keep abreast of all of our online ment [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: Links | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

Forget the 1-800 numbers, the info@ email addresses, and don’t bother hooking up that fax machine anymore. Facebook business pages are an essential customer and business/brand communication tool that are beginning to replace traditional mediums of customer service and communication between brands and businesses. The ability to keep an audience engaged, updated, and responded to so consistently and easily is a tool that many are, and if not they should be, taking advantage of. However, using the page is one task, but monitoring that use and the users is quite another and can be a bit ov [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Facebook | How To | How To: Facebook | Search & Analytics

I heard the other day that if someone "Likes" your Facebook business page, they’re over 90% likely to never look at it again. Wow.  90% is a lot! We could assume that’s exaggerated by ½, but 45% is still a lot. When a website’s conversion rate is a fraction of its actual traffic – a significant loss of engagement is rough, let’s hope you didn’t pay a ton of money to get all of those Likes. This statistic, combined with the disturbing trends in today’s Facebook business strategies worries me – it really worries me. I’m disturbed by the complete lack of understanding wi [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Social | How To: Facebook | Search Marketing Toolbox

In the world of SEO, there are big updates like Panda, Mayday, Vincent, Florida, but there are also smaller internal issues that can creep up on you leading to traffic and revenue loss. The ability to identify and prevent self inflicted nicks and cuts along the way is key to a successful SEO program for online retailers. When dealing with large, product-driven sites, automation and templates, things are bound to fray and break over time. Getting alerted and identifying the issue is half the battle. Dashboards are a great way of staying on top of internal issues, as well as competitor and [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Search & Retail

As companies spread their media mix, and expand their activities to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social channels, it is essential to try and integrate numbers as much as possible. And this integration should not only be on the marketing message and design, but also on its tracking. It is important to have a centralized marketing measurement tool that can provide us with the ROI of each of the channels. I have previously discussed Google Analytics integrations with Webmaster Tools, with Website Optimizer, and with Feedburner at Search Engine Land. In this post, I will discu [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Once your website starts getting at least some traffic from organic search queries, you can help increase conversions (inquiries, signups, purchases, phone calls etc) by investigating what happens once people reach your website from the search results. You can use Google Analytics to choose what keywords to focus on and to check the entrance pages (landing pages) for issues hurting conversions. How To Choose Which Organic Keywords To Focus On Most websites have hundreds or thousands of keywords bringing visitors to their website so it’s ideal to have an easy way to select which keywords [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO