Basic web traffic information

Page views is the most accurate data as it is based on analysis of your webservers, rather than cookie based tracking that other analytics packages provide. Total number of visits on its own is not a good indicator of effectiveness - image a store getting loads of people through the door but nobody buying anything.

Average logon time and new versus returning visitors

A more useful indicator of effectiveness is average logon time. This tells you on average how long a visitor stayed on your site. If you have interesting and engaging content, then it is more likely that visitors will hang around longer. It is also likely that they will return - so the split between new and returning visitors is also important.

Exit pages

Most analytics packages also show you exists per page. The higher the exit, the worse the page is at keeping the customer attention. High exit rates (also known as bounce rates) from your homepage are particularly important to spot, as most of your traffic will pass via your homepage.

Referrals and keywords

Next you will need to look at where your traffic is coming from. Referrals show you the website and webpage that is driving traffic to you site. This will show you how effective your marketing activities are, how much traffic comes from directories versus search engines, and split your search engine traffic into paid and free (organic).

Next you need to dig deeper into the data to look at the individual keywords that are driving traffic. At this point SEO techniques are required to optimise your site for specific keywords to appear higher in Google rankings.

Top search ranking factors

• Add keywords in title tag and metatags
• Add keywords within the body text of the page and in headers
• Add keywords in links within your site and from other sites (anchor text)
• Inbound links from within topical copy, on topical pages (not stand-alone links)
• Be linked from sites with high PageRank
• Age of the site

Submit your site to Google

Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which you can create a .txt or .xml sitemap and sumbit it to Google. This is by far the most effective way to submit your site and get indexed by Google. By submitting a sitemap, Google will be able to find all your pages. The webmaster tool will also show you how many of the pages that have been submitted have been indexed by Google. Alternatively, you can simply type “Submit website” into Google and you will be presented with a page to add you url to Google.

Submit your site to Yahoo and DMOZ

Two major directories, Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) require manual submissions which are reviewed by human editors. These submissions can be made for free, but will take a very long time, sometimes months. Yahoo also offers a paid-for service which is very worth while and guarantees you site will be crawled.

Keeping content fresh

You could keep content fresh for seo by either making small amendments to existing content, or you could add more pages and articles. You could talk about industry news, or any new product launch, or snippets of information you just picked up from other sources. The important thing is to keep adding content regularly.

Duplicate content

When you add content you need to beware that search engines do not like duplicate content. You cannot simply add content to your site by copying it from somewhere else. First of all you are in break of copyright law, and secondly this will not help your search engine ranking.

Search engines always store the original source of content, and attribute worth to this. Any copy is either ignored or does not add any value to your site. If you add articles from other sources usually you need to provide a backlink, which is actually worse for your site and dilutes your PageRank.

Add content through a blog

Blogs are a great way to add content to your site. The important think is to have a good content management system that is seo friendly, so that you can manage the title, headers, metatags and url structure. There is no point in starting a new blog and then to stop updating it after a few weeks. Both your visitors and search engines will not like this.

Some sites provide online FAQs. These are great ways to start interacting with your potential customers, and at the same time to add fresh content to your site.

Improve website results

Google Analytics helps you understand your customers, what keywords they use to reach your site, their behaviour on your website, traffic sources. This information can then be used to improve the keyword bidding strategy, make your marketing campaigns more effective, convert visitors to sales, test different headers and content. Google Analytics can use small business owners, publishers and major companies.

Key benefits of Google Analytics

The Google Analytics website clearly indicates the top benefits of the tool:

• Free
• Sophisticated Analytics
• Easy to use
• Scalable for any site size
• Integrated with Adwords
• Track all campaigns
• Safe
• Data Integrity
• Access Google Website Optimizer

Web Analytics Setup service

The Google analytics set up service will include:

Code set up
Google has recently changes the code to enable capture of variables

Verification of site ownership

Site evaluation
In addition to your copy, we’ll check forms, links to other sites, pdf download forms, tracking within your secure area.

Tracking by product and source
The set up will enable you to track from search engine all the way down to individual product

Google Adwords tracking
Our Google web analytics setup will include let you track PPC campaigns to sales. You will then be able to measure return on investment of your marketing campaigns.

Page tag check
We’ll check all your tags have been properly coded - some content management systems are not set up correctly and not all pages have the right tags

Best practice web analytics setup
We’ll can set up additional tracking like sales funnels, goals set up, segmentation. These tools come with your Google Analytics tracking tool, but need some minor configuration to make them work for you.

Never used web analytics before

Before you start you may think web analytics are very complicated, you need a lot of time to install on your site and need to like numbers. Hopefully these tutorials will help you set up and use your analytics package, otherwise you can always contact us without obligation to understand what expert website analysis services we provide. We can get you up and running in less than 1 week.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is by far the best value for money analytics tool. Not only it is absolutely free, but it is also linked to Google Adsense and Google Adwords campaign to provide you a true end-to-end sales reporting tool. Using the Google Analytics tool you can:

• Track the source of your traffic (search engine, a referrer or a directory)
• Understand what keywords visitors are using to come to your site
• Track performance over time, monitor changes in customer behaviour
• Measure the sales conversion funnel, from basket to payment confirmation
• Understand the geography of where your visitors are coming from
• See what pages are generating most of your Google Adsense revenue
• Measure how effective your Google Adwords campaign is

Interpreting data from your analytics tool

The data tells you the what, the true value is try to understand the why and make changes to your site to improve performance. This will lead to continual incremental improvements in performance and sales. By understanding which campaigns are working best, you will be able to spend your marketing budget more effectively. By understanding where your customers are coming from, you will be able to tweak the content to make your site more relevant to your audience, and therefore generate more sales.

The first step it to define what your website is about, what goals you re tyring to achieve and who your target audience is. Analytics will provide your with a number of key performance indicators to measure how successful you are at achieving your goals. The data will then show you if the changes you are making create a positive or negative impact on your performance.

Testing website analytics

It’s all down to test and learn. Try different copy, put it live, then measure if it made any difference. If the result increased conversion, then test something else on top of this. Thought continuous testing you will be able to make significant improvements to your performance. If your test wasn’t successful, then change it back quickly and try another change.

Google Analytics also provides Google Optimizer, a tool that lets you test multiple version of copy, images, text all at once, and tell you which is the most successful.

Our Website Traffic Analysis Services

As part of our expert website analysis services, we provide comprehensive reporting on visitor behaviour, including source analysis, trend analysis, entry and exit pages, campaign performance, keyword reporting, breakdown of most popular pages and heat maps to show what links are being clicked on. Our website traffic analysis service will help you increase traffic to your site and convert this into sales.

Contact us to benefit from our website traffic analysis services.

a) Search engine submission

Search engines will not index your site if they are unaware of the site in the first place. You will need to submit your main site URL to the web search engines.

b) Inbound links from other sites

Search engines give great importance to inbound links. The keywords used in the inbound links are also critical. It takes a significant amount of time to create manual quality links from industry-related websites. Avoid registering with link farms.

c) Directory submission

Submission to directories will increase you ranking. Some pay-for directories may still have some impact on your ranking, although search engines are starting to reduce the importance of paid-for links

Main directories are:
• Open Directory (DMOZ) – free, managed by volunteers and takes a long time to be added (months)
• Yahoo Business Directory - $299 yearly. Costly but worth while

d) Industry sites

Add your site to your industry directory, to trade association sites (even if you have to pay for the link), partner sites. There is little worth in premium listings from these directories, unless your target customers visit the site regularly.

e) Reciprocal links

One-way links are much more important than reciprocal links, as these reduce the PR of your site. If you decide to have reciprocal links, add them to a remote page on your site, try to link to sites with similar content and always seek reciprocal links from site with a PR higher than yours – the quality of links counts more than the total number of links. Remember, it’s the page PR that counts, not the homepage PR.

f) Get links from articles

Write articles in your area of expertise, and add links back to your site.

g) Do online PR

Send press releases to online PR agencies, like PR Web.

h) Begin a business blog

Begin a blog, get people in your industry linking to you. Make this information available via RSS feeds.

i) Forums and blogs

Post comments on forums and blogs, with links back to your site. Usually your signature is the link back to your site.

j) Offline promotion.

Add your URL to stationary, brochures, email signatures, press ads, classified ads, trade magazines, event and exhibition material

k) Paid for traffic

Research banner advertising, pay per click (PPC) search marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, use shopping comparison sites / auction sites

Title optimisation

The page title is the description that can be found at the top left of the page. The title shows the company name and the name of the page, which include the keyword. This is best practise. The title could be further optimised to include the section the user is in. The title is important not only for search engines, but also because this appears as the title of the search results.

Meta Description and Meta Keywords optimisation

The metatags (meta description and meta keywords) are invisible to the user, hidden in the code of the page. It is important that both include keywords that match the keywords in the title, the heading, the inbound links and the copy of the page to give search engines a clear indication of what the page is about.

Heading optimisation

Each page must have one page heading, and this must be coded using the H1 tag. There must only be one H1 tag, but there can be multiple H2 and H3 tags. H2 and H3 tags are not required.

Page text optimisation

Keyword order: keywords at the top of the page are given more importance
• Number of words: optimum number of words per page is 250-300
• Keyword density: keywords should be repeated – 7% is optimum. More is spam.
• Font: use bold and italics to give prominence to keywords
• Keyword proximity

Sitemaps

You need to create 2 sitemaps:

1. The first one is an html sitemap to add to your site, with a list of all your pages.
2. The second one is a .txt or .xml page. There are automated tools to create sitemaps, but I prefer manual sitemaps to ensure you list all the additional database driven pages created via URL rewrites. You will need to submit your sitemap to the various search engines. To Google via the Webmaster interface; to Yahoo, Ask and MSN via sitemap submission tools.

Google Robots

Create a robots.txt file to tell Google which pages of your site to access, and which ones not to. If you have one already, make sure you haven’t excluded whole sections by mistake.

URL structure

Your URL should include your keywords. You will need to look:

• Domain name optimisation
• URL optimisation
• File name optimisation

If you have a database-driven website, then you should use mod-rewrite as a way to replace dynamic urls (eg www.domain.com/db.php?a=cat1) with a static page (eg www.domain.com/search-engine-optimisation.php). The file length should not be more than 3 keywords long.

Use of images

All images need to have a keyword-rich ALT tag. The size of the images needs to be small to make them easier to download.

Navigation and links

Internal links need to include keywords. Don’t use “click here”, you need to tell Google what is should find on the next page. Do not use javascript or frames. Minimise the number of external links, as this will reduce your overall PageRank.