Young Entrepreneurs of America

One of the best things about marketing is that it is ongoing, incremental, and if done properly…easy to tweak and improve. Of course, this is only helpful if you can track your various marketing efforts and measure improvement against some baseline. Thus today’s topic - Free Tools to Track, Analyze, and Optimize Your Website.

To begin, you must first ask yourself “What do I want to accomplish?” This question is shortly followed by “What key metrics need to improve?” which is followed by “How much do those metrics need to improve?” and the ever popular “What are those key metrics currently?” and finally “How will I measure the metrics regularly in order to track changes?” - Wow! You ask a lot of questions.

Fortunately, this is one of the rare instances where the answer is much more simple than the questions. The answer, as I hope you already know…The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is, of course…42. The answer to all of the previous questions is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is an amazing web analytics site that shows how individuals find your site, how they navigate through it, and how to improve it. Their graphics and several hundred customizable reports allow you to slice and dice your data for hours of fun which could lead to paralysis by analysis if you don’t have a clear-cut goal when you enter the GA universe.

One of the tricks to Google Analytics is to make sure it is set up correctly. In order to do this properly, you need to make sure that your free account is configured properly. Make sure you exclude visits from your own URL. Set up appropriate goals so you can track the ROI of site visitors. I recently subscribed to two different e-mail help options that explain GA in conjunction with Google AdWords. They both provided a small amount of helpful advice for the neophyte SEO analyst.

• Perry Marshall - Fill out the form at the bottom of the page to get started.
• Meredith Smith - 7 Day Google Analytics Mini-Course

I also attended two free webinars designed to help users understand GA and AdWords. The first one was by far more detailed and allowed users to submit questions ahead of time so they could answer them during the webcast. The second one presented by Google was very basic but may be a good place to begin if this is all new to you.

• ROI Revolution “How to Kick Your Pay-Per-Click Advertisising into Overdrive in 3 Months with Google Analytics”
• The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer

Try not to be too surprised, but the intent of all of these newsletters and webcasts were to get you to hire a consultant to set it up for you. That being said, they still did a fairly decent job of providing a solid foundation and occasionally provided some very useful tips in getting the most out of Google Analytics.

Google also has a few more tools that are very useful in testing different versions of your website. Make sure you visit the following links for more information.

• Google Webmaster Central
• Google Website Optimizer

It’s amazing what Google has developed and are giving away for free. There have been entire companies that have spent way too much money trying to develop products that work half this well.

Go Google Go!

Chances are that when you were first planning your new website your main goal was to get the thing launched. Many organizations are under important deadlines that forced the issue of the website to begin with. The company was either going to a tradeshow, launching a new product, starting their annual fundraiser, whatever. The point is that their main goal was to get the website up before this Friday.

After several days of frustrating the graphic designer with changing ideas and frantically gathering content from the four corners of the office the site was up. Several employee comments later and it actually looked pretty good…to the human eye.

Unfortunately, this typical rushed approach rarely considers the poor search engine, slaving away at crawling the Internet 24-hours a day trying to develop a sense of what your website is all about. Your fancy graphics and killer color combination goes completely unnoticed. The fact that you went with a 2-column layout instead of a 3-column means absolutely nothing to these hard-working engines. Strangely enough, the exact concepts that impress your site’s human visitors mean absolutely nothing to these sultans of search.

They want text.

Nothing glitzy. No glamour. No graphics or creative layouts. In fact, they are blind to flash and completely ignore .JPG and .GIF and .PNG files.

How your website might look to a search engine

I tried to make this point to a client of mine who has a fairly nice home page. I removed the flash and graphics and showed him the following image to let him know how his site looked to a search engine crawler.

1. Use the right keywords as the title of each home page. Instead of naming the home page ”Home.html” try “Professional Stereo Equipment Installation - Kenwood, Sony…”. The title of your pages is one of the strongest factors in ranking among today’s search engines so make sure you use it wisely.
2. It is okay to use flash and graphics to make your sites appealing to visitors but make sure you label each graphic with the appropriate ALT tags to let the search engines know what the image is about. Also, it is usually a good idea to either repeat or paraphrase the information in the graphics or flash images as standalone text elsewhere on the page. In the case of this current client we basically took all of the keywords found in the flash presentation and repeated them in bullet format just below the graphic. Each phrase was linked to the same part of the site that the flash image linked to. 
3. Because the search engine is blind to most of the glitzy trappings of graphic design there is a simple way to take advantage of “hidden” text that is placed in the document exclusively for the use of search engine crawlers and bots. If you look at the coded text early in an HTML document you will notice a variety of text statements that do not show up on the final product as viewed in a typical browser. Placed behind an introduction of “<meta content=” lies three options to provide search engine crawlers and bots an opportunity to gain a better understanding of your site. By providing the right keywords in your “Description”, “Keywords”, and “Title” meta fields, you can more accurately describe your website without affecting the design or visual presentation.

Take every advantage of these specific opportunities to boost your rankings in the natural Search Engine Rankings.

[For an interesting post on how important "invisible" metatags can affect your searches and natural search ranking results. Check out this article on GOOGLE BOMBS.]

It is also very important to use keywords that are most interesting to your potential site visitors. Do not use a brand name or product name if your potential clients are more likely to search for “spam filtering”. Do not include geographic information unless your site or products are limited to that area. To get a better feel for what keywords are being used most often and to generate more useful keywords for your site visit www.wordtracker.com and take advantage of their free trial to help you develop and track your most useful keywords. Then use Google Analytics to track which words are working for you.

Tomorrow we will talk more about how you can use some free tools to help track, analyze, and optomize your website.