Google Analytics is an important tool to discover how people are finding your website – and once they are there, how long they are staying and which pages they are looking at.

What Information Will I Get?

Looking at the Google Analytics dashboard will give you a graph of visits to your website over time (by day, week or month).  You can choose which reports to display on your dashboard.  You can also set up reports to be delivered to you by email.  Use Google Analytics to see which pages were viewed, how long people spent on the page and whether they left the site from that page without clicking on another page (bounce rate).  Identify which websites people came to the page from and how many repeat visitors you had.

It is generally better to look at trends rather than individual visits.  Using the information from Google Analytics you can identify trends – for example, which pages are ‘sticky’ (keeping visitor interest), which pages encourage visitors to explore other areas of the site and which pages are generally entry / exit pages.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site without visiting any other page except the page on which they arrived at the site (the landing page).  A high bounce rate can indicate that the landing page is not relevant to the visitor, but it is important to put this into context.  A high bounce rate on your ‘contact page’ may simply mean that the visitor has obtained the information that they need.  In general, it is a good idea to keep an eye on bounce rate, in conjunction with the number of new versus returning visitors and the content of the pages that have a high bounce rate.

Do you use Google Analytics to see who is visiting your website, what they are clicking on and how long they are staying?

Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google that is aimed primarily at marketers (or small business owners perhaps) as opposed to web designers.  Using Google Analytics I can see, for example:

• How people found my website (directly, using search engines, from Twitter, from LinkedIn or from other sites).
• Which pages were most popular and how long people stayed on the site.
• Which keywords were used in search engines to find me – and how often.
• Most visits this month were the day after an introduction to Twitter training course that I gave.

This is all valuable information to monitor your marketing, your Search Engine optimisation and your visibility.  You may also get ideas on changes that you might need to make to your content or site navigation.  At a more advanced level you can set targets, track your Google Adwords, benchmark against similar industries/websites and monitor your geographical reach by city.

How Do I Start with Google Analytics?

• You need to sign up with Google.
• You need to sign up with Google Analytics.  You will be given code that needs to be put into the bottom of your home page.  You may want to ask your webdesigner to do this.  It will probably take about 24 hours before the changes are displayed in Google Analytics.
• You will only be able to use the benchmarking capabilities if you agree to share data with others.  Google states that they keep data confidential.
• Now login to Google Analytics.
• Choose your website which is listed and click View report to view the dashboard

How accurate is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics tracks users by storing cookies on their computer.  If a visitor deletes their cookies frequently they will be treated as a new visitor each time they view your site.  Some people do block all cookies.  These visits will not be tracked.  Google Analytics can track visits from mobile browsers if the mobile browser can run Java.

Google documents is a free Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form and data storage service offered by Google.  There is also a paid version, Google Premier, which can work out cheaper than using Microsoft products.

Why Would a Business use Google Documents?
Apart from the obvious advantage of being free, the main difference between Google Documents and other applications (Microsoft, Open Office, etc) is that it is web based and supports collaboration.  Using Microsoft Office, if you wanted to work on a spreadsheet with a colleague or partner who is in a separate office, you would need to make a change and then email the document.  Using Google Documents you can both see the spreadsheet using the internet (via computer or mobile phone) and changes can be made and seen in real time.

How Easy Is It To Use?
The Google Documents interface is intuitive to use at a standard level of use, but complex functionality needs additional effort.  In the word processor, tables, bullets, and text works in a similar way to other tools.  Images are less flexible.  The spreadsheet has a comprehensive set of functions and graphing tools but pivot tables are more complex.  The presentation tool can create basic slides but struggles with master slides, transitions, animations etc.  Add-ins are available to extend the more basic functionality – but these come at a cost in terms of time to learn.  In all of the applications, changes that are made are stored automatically and regularly.  It is useful to be able to view a history of changes to each document.

Who uses Google Documents?
There are a number of large and small businesses who have moved all their applications over to Google to reduce costs by using the Premier version that is only $50 per user, per year.  This offers more storage space per account, phone support, email retention. Google Apps now has 50 million users (1 million are paid users).  This is small compared to Microsoft, but the numbers are increasing.

Sounds great …. but?
To use Google documents extensively, users have to learn a new interface and will need to get used to sharing documents rather than emailing them.  Any old documents will need to be migrated – not as easy as it might sound.  There are potential security issues inherent with any documents that are stored on the internet rather than your own server, but Google is working to overcome these.  There are reports of the support being forum focused rather than being able to talk your problems through with somebody.  Google are working to improve their application software with the aim of competing directly with Microsoft.

Summary
Personally, I plan to stick with Microsoft products at the moment – they do have a cost associated with them, but their ease of use, extensive functionality and interoperability suits me at the moment.  However, whenever I want to collaborate with other people on a presentation, document or spreadsheet, I will use Google Documentss.  Collaboration tends to need fairly simple functionality and the advantage of being able to update in real time is enormous.  What do you think?

Where do you use all those keywords in your site?

Human Content of Your Website

You need to make sure that the content or text on your website accurately reflects your keywords and will keep your customer engaged.  By this time you should have identified a number of keywords per page – you need to use these keywords in a number of places within the page:

Headings and Subheadings – most important keywords as headings, lesser keywords as subheadings – use bold where appropriate

Body Text – Use your keywords and phrases throughout the text but be careful – keywords should take up less than 20% of the overall body text and remember that if the text doesn’t read well, your visitor will lose interest.

Links – Use your keywords in your links to other pages both on your website and to other websites.

Invisible Content of Your Website

There are a number of parts of your website that are only used by the search engines.  These are known as Meta Tags – it is important to make sure that your website designer has included your keywords in these tags.  Each page should have appropriate tags.

Title Tag – Google recommends that each page has a useful and descriptive page title.  Including keywords should increase the likelihood that it is included within the results.

Description Tag – This is often used when Google displays the search results.  It should contain your keywords and it must be interesting and appealing to encourage your visitor to click on the link.

Keywords Tag – Google have stated that the Google search engine currently disregards the Keyword Meta Tags.  It may be a good idea to continue to use it though as Google is not the only search engine and it is a good place to keep all the keywords for the page.

Alt Tag – Since search engines are not able to use pictures, it makes sense to label the pictures so that search engines and text to speech readers can read them.  Putting keywords into your labelling – where it makes sense should help with SEO.

Links       

It is a good idea to have links with other appropriate, relevant websites.  Sites with good inbound and outbound links should get a higher ranking from Google.  Sites are given a page ranking from Google depending how valuable Google determines the site to be.  Links to / from your site from sites with high page rankings will give your site more credit.  I would never advocate linking with other sites just for the sake of linking – but it is worth having a section with relevant links.  When you create links on your site to other pages on your site, make sure your keywords are included within the link name.  For example, Don’t use “click here” to download more information about my twitter training”.  How about “Twitter Training will save you time and ensure you use twitter effectively”.  The underline (and colour) will indicate that there is more information.

Have fun improving  your SEO!

 Get your Website Found!

 Have you ever wondered how the results of Google are selected from all the websites that are available out there?  There are a number of factors that Google takes into account when deciding on where your page fits in the results.  The process of ensuring that your website exploits these factors to give you the best possible results is known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.  There are a number of people who sell SEO services.   Many of these people offer a brilliant service and our aim is not intended to teach you how to do their job.  We want to give you some of the terminology and processes that you need to go through with your SEO consultant, so that you can talk their ‘language’.  It should be noted here that the algorithms used by Google and other search engines have not been published and change regularly so these suggestions are just a starting point.

 Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

If you want your website to be found, you need to understand what your customers will be typing into Google to find you.  The first thing you should do is think about all the keywords or phrases that are applicable to your service(s) and each page of your website (if your site already exists)

Remember you need to think about your customers – consider how expert at searching they will be: will they know to put phrases in quotes, how to use Boolean AND /OR terminology or use clearly defined terms?

Methods to help you find your keywords include:

1. Look at the statistics of your current site if you have access to them – we will be exploring how to use Google Analytics during the coming months.
2. Brainstorm with friends and colleagues – I find the juices flow better over a glass of wine or two!
3. Look at your competitors sites.  If you access your competitors site, from the menu click View > Source or View Page Source.  Using Find (Ctrl F), look for the word ‘Keywords” you should see a list of keywords.  This won’t work for all sites as some will be coded differently, but it is worth a try.
4. Don’t forget to ask your customers what keywords they would use to find you.

Now you have a long list of keywords, you need to refine it slightly to make sure that the keywords you use are not being used by loads of people so that there is too much competition.  Your SEO consultant may well be able to suggest a tool, but Google’s Keyword Tracker is free and a good place to start.

Google Keyword Tracker

Enter your keywords into the Google Keyword Tracker (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to identify how regularly keywords are used in search terms and how many websites are returned.  It is based upon paid searches (as part of Google Adwords) but should give you a good idea which keywords to focus on.  Global monthly search volume is given as well as advertiser competition.  You have a choice to allow Google to suggest synonyms for your keywords which may produce words that you haven’t thought of.  You can also get the Google Keyword Tracker to analyse what keywords you are currently using on your website – an enlightening exercise. 

Once you have a shorter list of your keywords – don’t forget that not only should you be using them in your website, but you should also be using them in your social media content.  Google Search now includes Twitter postings in its results – make sure some of your Twitter postings include your keywords.

URL or Website Address

You probably have chosen your website address based on your company name and I’m not suggesting that you change this.  Do think about the url of each page though and how you can use your keywords.  I’m in the process of rethinking the structure of my own website.  Currently all my courses are on my course booking page with a url of www.concisetraining.net/course-booking – not too many keywords in that.  I’m going to split my courses into separate pages with a url of perhaps www.concisetraining.net/office2003training – which is hitting my keywords somewhat better and should be featured higher up in Google’s results.

Hope this helps you to understand more about how SEO works.