Archive for March, 2008

Google Analytics Tips

March 26, 2008 at 8:03 am · Filed under Site Side Analytics, SEO Tips, Measuring Success

Google Analytics is by far the most robust free site side analytics program out there.  Now owned by Google, Google Analytics started out its life as a small analytics company called Urchin.

Google Analytics is used by millions of sites (hobby as well as ecommerce) to measure the amount and quality of traffic to a website. 

Moreover, if configured properly, Google Analytics can also measure predefined KPIs and Goals such as purchases, downloads, subscriptions, thereby showing you which keywords convert to business.

Here are a few Google Analytics tips that I’ve gathered to help you get the most out of the package:

  1. Use the filter at the bottom of the keywords list to include and exclude certain keywords.  For instance, you can exclude your own brand name thereby allowing you to see which generic keywords are driving traffic to your site.

  2. Use the compare two dates/metrics at the top to be able to see trends across the same variable on two different dates.

  3. Exclude your IP address so that your figures are not skewed

  4. Configure site search measurement  in order to get valuable data on how users  search  within your site. 

  5. Under “Content” use site overlay to see what links on you site are most popular.  This will give you a better idea of what content on your site is appealing to your users and  gives you the confidence to remove or  place “Nofollows” on non popular links.

The above are a few tips for using Google Analytics.  There are many more fantastic features including the ability to export and email reports as well as integrate with Adwords in order to measure the performance of your paid ads.

In a nutshell, if you haven’t used Google Analytics yet, you’re completely missing out on a fantastic free Analytics resource. 

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Click Through Rate in SERP Positions

March 13, 2008 at 8:39 am · Filed under Surveys & Statistics, SEO Research, Keyword Research

Everybody knows that getting on the number one position in any of the search engines, and especially the big G, has its rewards in the form of lots and lots of (if you’ve done your keyword research correctly) very valuable and free targeted traffic.

Whats frustrating to most though is how much traffic?  Keyword estimation tools such as Keyword Discovery, and Wordtrackergive you a rough guesstimate of how much traffic a certain keyword generates overall but does not tell you how that figure is broken down.

Luckily, there are a few studies out there that have estimated the click through rates on the various positions in the search engines (mainly Google).  SEOmoz, estimates clickthrough rates for SERPS as follows:

  • Position 1 receives 42.1% of the clicks

  • Position 2 receives 11.9%

  • Position 3 receives 8.5% 

  • Position 4 receives 6.1% 

  • Position 5 receives 4.9% 

  • Position 6 receives 4.1% 

  • Position 7 receives 3.4% 

  • Position 8 receives 3.0% 

  • Position 9 receives 2.8% 

  • Position 10 receives 3.0% 

    • While another study conducted by a group of students at New York’s Cornell University predicts the following clickthrough rates in the Google SERPS (search engine results pages):

    • Position 1 receives 56.36% of the clicks

    • Position 2 receives 13.45% 

    • Position 3 receives 9.82%

    • Position 4 receives 4.00%

    • Position 5 receives 4.73%

    • Position 6 receives 3.27%

    • Position 7 receives 0.36%

    • Position 8 receives 2.91%

    • Position 9 receives 1.45%

    • Position 10 receives 2.55%

    As you can see, the above SERP clickthrough estimates show that ranking above the fold -and especially in the top 3 positions- generates between 60 to 80% of all possible clickthroughs for any keyword.

    Lesson to take from this post..make sure you (or your seo agency) make efforts to rank above the fold (top 3 serp positions), anything less is just not good enough!

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    Meta Tags for E-tail Sites

    March 7, 2008 at 12:21 pm · Filed under Code, SEO Best Practices

    I recently conducted a competitive analysis for one of my etail clients and to my astomishment, I found that out of the 13 competitors I tracked, none utilised the meta description tag on their site.  This prompted me to write a post on this discussing meta tags and best practices for using them on your site …

    Firstly…What is meta data?  In a nutshell, meta data is the information that is placed in the <head></head> part of your HTML (code) and primarily used to tell the search engines what your site’s pages are about as well as providing other useful data and information.   An example of meta data tags can be seen below:

     <head><title>Title goes here…</title>
    <meta name=”description” content=”Description goes here..”/>
    <meta name=”keywords” content=”Up to 5 keywords go here…”/>
    </head>

    This post will focus onthe three meta elements; Title Tag, Description Meta Tag and Meta Keywords tag, so lets go ahead and define each of these meta data elements:   

    • Title Tag: 

    The title tag is the title of your page and shows up as the title of your page in the search engine results pages (serps) and also appears on the top of a user’s browser.  It is by far the most important meta element and its presence is absolutely mandatory.  The code for the title tag is as follows:

    <title>your page’s title goes here</title>

    • Meta Description Tag:

    The Meta Description tag is the focus of this post.  Basically, the meta description is not a mandatory tag but SEO best practice says you have to have it.  The code for the meta description is as follows:

    <meta name=”description” content=”Description goes here..”/>

    Here is why…

    The meta description tag appears in the search results pages as the description snippet belwoe the title tag.  If no description tag is implemented on the site, the search engines will still find a content from the page for the description but in most cases that content will look shabby as it would contain content from various parts of the page including you breadcrumb, image alt tag or anywhere else the engine decides to get that content from.  This also leads to the description being cut off with a (…)  Very shabby!

    Having a meta description tag allows you to havee control over the image of your company and more crucially it allows you to include call to action words such as buy now, or sign up today, etc…

    • Meta Keywords Tag

    The meta keywords tag is no longer necessary or important but again, seo best practices states that you have to have it. In the past when search engines were new and unable to read the content of the page, they relied on this tag to rank pages.  Some search engines probably still do!   The code for the meta keywords is as follows:

    <meta name=”keywords” content=”Up to 5 keywords go here…”/>

    To sum up, my view on metas is that you have to have them. mainly for having a sharp looking listing which includes the appropriate call to action for your site.

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