Who Can Use Google Analytics

Who uses Google analytics? The answer to that is simple. Anyone who has a website can use it. You can be an executive at a major corporation, or a sole proprietor. You can also be a marketer, content provider, or developer. There’s no sense in having a website without visitors. Google Analytics helps you understand where visitors are coming from (website urls), how they found your website (direct traffic, search engines, or referrals). You’ll also learn what keyword phrases they used.

Why Tracking Visitors?

You may be asking why track visitors? Well, look at it this way. If you worked hard on your site to get it to look really good and you spend hours creating your product, then you uploaded everything, you would want your product to sell, right? How can you tell if anyone is actually showing up? By tracking your visitors, you can tell how many go to certain pages, and how long they stay on those pages. By reviewing these stats, you can tell what pages are working and which are not. This way you can make adjustments to the pages that show low visitor count or high bounce rate.

How Do I Use Analytics?

What you do is create a free account with Google Analytics and fill in information about your website. Let them know the URL. Google provides you with a piece of code that you place on each page that you want tracked. That code will help Google keep track of visitors to those pages. Google indexes your site and reports back the pages you have and how many people actually hit those pages. Analytics will track any website, whether it is a blog, RSS feed, or a content management system (Joomla, WordPress, or Druple). If you are new to HTML or web page design, you may want to hire someone to put the code in every web page for you, as you will need to understand some HTML coding. This is to help you recognize the location of where the code will go.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you get high ranking in search results, if you use the information to your advantage. Why not. It’s free.

This checklist covers onpage SEO rules.

1. If possible, label the url for the page so that it includes the primary keyword phrase (examples: yourdomain.com/primary-keyword-phrase/ or yourdomain.com/primary-keyword-phrase.html)

2. Include the keyword in the “meta title” information for the page. Also, include a secondary keyword phrase in the meta title. (For example: Primary Keyword Phrase | Secondary Phrase) Note: Google recommends that you don’t exceed 60-80 characters for the title. Always put the primary keyword phrase first. If the target audience for our website is local, then consider adding the phone number, city or other regional reference. Just stay within the 60-80 character limits.

3. Use the “meta description” tag and include your primary keyword phrase and one or more secondary terms. Note: Make your “meta description” irresistible so that people want to click on the link to find out more information. Optional – Add “meta keywords” to your page. If you do, include all your targeted terms and maybe a couple of others. I’d try to stay to five or six terms max per page… don’t overdo it!

4. Use your primary phrase inside of the actual onpage content that is read by visitors. It’s best if it is used (a) Towards the top of the page and encased in an h1 tag (b) Used a time or two more in the actual content and again near the bottom of the page (maybe as an anchor text link if possible)

5. Make your onpage content read well (don’t just keyword stuff the page thinking that’s going to help) and don’t forget to include a call to action to the most important action for your reader. I realize that’s not really an SEO thing, but it’s important none the less. People may not be ready to buy, but if you get them on your email list you can keep in touch with them. Build a relationship with them so that one day, when they are ready, they will buy from you.

6. Keep each page as “light” as possible regarding its file size and the time it takes to load the page. More and more, search engines are taking page load times into account when indexing pages.

7. Keep your pages attractive… easy to read… and easy to navigate. You want your visitors to stay on your site for as long as possible. Search engines can track your “visit duration” and also how many pages a visitor looked at before leaving. The longer someone is on your site, the better your SEO AND the more likely the visitor will contact you!

8. Add a sitemap.xml file to your site. While this is not mandatory, this can help search engine spiders crawl your content. This is very important if you have a lot of pages on your website. Don’t have a clue how to do this? No problem. If your site is a static html site, you can generate your sitemap here (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/). If you are using WordPress then I’d recommend using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

User-friendly navigation – The menu navigation should be simple and easy to understand. Ensure that there is a systematic hierarchy of text links on your website. Your home page must be easily accessible on each page. Place links that would smoothly take your visitors from one page to another without any complication.

Content will always be king – Your content is the basic foundation of your website. A website with informative content never fails to end up becoming popular in the long run. Aside from having numerous visitors obtaining useful data from your site, optimized content will also rank well in various search engine results. Update your content on a regular basis to ensure the information is always fresh and current. It would also be helpful to check for spelling and grammar errors on your website copy text.

Test for usability – Be sure to test your website using different browsers. What works with Internet Explorer may not do fine with Mozilla or Safari. To guarantee a more professional appearance of your site, test your web pages using every available browser used online.

Less is actually more – Go easy with distracting flash animation or huge files that take a while to load. Music and videos are fine, as long as they are not auto-played because they can cause pages to load slower. In some circumstances, they can also crash the user’s browser. Just refer to Google’s website and you’ll understand that less bytes mean quicker loading of web pages.

See to it that there are no broken links and blank pages – Nothing is ever more frustrating for visitors than encountering the “Page cannot be displayed” message on their computer monitor.

Design consistency – There is a fine line between a well-designed site and an overly decorated site. The look and feel should be consistent all throughout by choosing the same design theme. Be sure it is simple yet interesting.

Encourage interaction – An interactive website is always good, especially for business sites, wherein you want to gain more customers. Put an email link somewhere highly visible. You can also have links to sign-up for newsletters, or fill out online forms, etc. Consider live chat support, support downloads, product specification sheets, etc.

Spread the word – What’s the use of a great site if you’ll keep it to yourself? Promote it and let people know about your website through advertising, direct mail, online marketing, referrals, and other marketing efforts.

Keep in mind these fundamental pointers above to accomplish a great website. Now, if you want to avoid the hassles, it’s always a smart decision to hire a professional website designer.