When 'Base One Search' launches SEO campaigns we usually configure Google Analytics (GA) accounts in order to provide more detailed reports, and for client to be able to view the information themselves.  However, as user-friendly as Google Analytics seems to us, some of our clients feel overwhelmed by the vast amount of information and reports it generates. Getting started with GA can be somewhat knotty.  In this first article, we uncover some of the most useful functionalities of GA.

The Dashboard

Once logged-in with your ID and password you'll see the dashboard which contains snapshots of several reports generated by Google Analytics (GA).



The Site Usage contains the following:

• Visits: The number of visits to our site during a given time period and this is the most basic parameter for any website owner.  Note this number includes new visitors and returning visitors.  So, a site that receives 20 visits in a day may be from four people, who each go to the website 5 times that day.  

By default Google shows the last 30 days of activity (number of visits), however this default setting is customable and allow us to view figures for a specific period and even compare two different date ranges.

• Unique Visitors: This represents the number of un-duplicated visitors that have visited the website for a given period. This means that visitors were counted only once, even if they may have visited the website several times in a given period.

• Pageviews: is the total number of pages all visitors viewed on the site for a given period.

• Unique Pageviews: can be seen in the Top Content report. It is the aggregation of pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session.  A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

• Pages/Visit: The average number of pages viewed by each visitor.  A high Average Pageviews number may suggest that visitors interacted lengthily on the website, this can be the result of appropriate targeted traffic or good content (of high interest) on the website. However, this is not always a good thing because it may also mean visitors could not easily locate the information they wanted to find.  It is important to ensure that web pages are designed with good web-usability principles. 
  

• Bounce Rate: is the percent of traffic that viewed the landing page without visiting any other pages on the website.  A High bounce rate is a double edged sword because it may be caused by poor website usability, poor call-to-actions on the landing page or simply because users are landing on your page and not finding what they were looking for.  But it may also be a result of a high quality landing page, that provides exactly what the user is looking for, hence the user doesn't need to cruse on to other pages.

 

• Average Time on Site: This one is pretty self explanatory.  It is believed that if visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting more extensively with it. However, this theory can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open while they may not be actually visiting the website.

• Percentage of New Visits: the percentage of how many computers went to the website for the first time, which Google tracks by IP address.  A high percentage of new visitors can indicate that the website is doing well at driving fresh traffic while a high percentage of returning visitors suggests that the content of the website is appealing enough to keep visitors coming back.

Traffic Sources
Understanding where your visitors come from is essential. GA shows us figures of where our traffic comes from together with a pie chart.

                          Traffic Sources in Google Analytics

• Referring Sites - shows the number of other websites that have links that brought visitors to the site.

• Direct Traffic - The number of visitors who directly accessed your site by typing the URL directly in their browsers or via bookmarks.

• Search Engines - the amount of traffic coming from user search queries on search engines, includes both organic clicks and PPC clicks.

There are several factors that affect those figures, it can depend on the nature of your website, the power of your brand and how much effort you put into optimising your site. For example, a newly launched website normally have a higher number of direct traffic or referring sites, but over time as the page contents are indexed by the search engines and with more SEO effort, traffic will shift more to search engines.

• Top Traffic Sources: This is an excellent tool to analyse where exactly most of your traffic comes from.  The report provides a deeper insight into the traffic sources of your website. It separates 'Organic traffic' to 'Paid traffic' (PPC) as well as details on exact referring sites.  By default GA shows top five results but you can see the full report anytime by clicking "view full report".

• Top Keywords: Give a list of the most popular keywords together with their number of visits.  The report grows with more and more results and figures when you have more and more web-pages that are indexed by the search-engine.  Sometimes you don't see your targeted keywords in the table, this is quite normal when a website is new, in this case you are most likely to see long-tail (mainly descriptive) keywords.  It can take a while to rank for targeted keywords, however with consistent SEO effort you'll soon see your targeted keywords ranking well.

• Map Overlay:The Map Overlay in Google Analytics allows you to have a geographical view of where your visitors are accessing your website.  Geotargeting is helpful in a lot of industries, including travel websites when we want to know where our target audiences are coming from.  It also helps us spread out PPC budgets across relevant nations, and tell us what other languages may bring in more traffic.

By default GA gives you a view of the world map with varying shades of green. The darker the green, the greater number of visitors from that particular section or place.
 

To all you web surfers out there... did you hear that Google released a browser?  Seems that this is the big news in the nerdy world!  Hum, we know pretty well the dramatic browser wars  that occurred a few years ago, witnessing the fall of Netscape and the dominance of Internet explorer as the main browser and can also see how it is now struggling against Firefox.  But as my granny likes to say 'War does not determine who is right, war determines who is left!' and i think in this case this is true.  If we look at the actual browser market we still see Internet Explorer as the dominant force (all versions inclusive) but just behind it lies 'Firefox'!  Other modern browsers like Safari or Opera are far behind with only about 5% of the market compared to IE (all versions) 50% and Firefox 44% of the browser market!

I have a rant that I have wanted to get off my chest for a while now,  it's like an itch that has been just out of reach, one that I have not been able to scratch until now...

One of the most often overlooked SEO issues that can have an explicit impact on your organic search engine rankings is URL structure. This is one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of SEO.   I have witnessed countless times the mess left by poorly optimised and down right messy URLs. It is a crime and if asked I am willing to point those accused out in police line-ups.  Not paying attention to your websites URL structure can make it difficult for the search engine spiders to index your site, let alone rank well! Too often we see website developers not planning carefully their site's architecture and finally ending-up looking for corrective measures after launch. 

It's a bit like constructing a huge tower on poor bases...



Here're some issues we consider important when constructing the URL structure of a website.

Few folders - When creating a directory structure, we have to be careful not to create too many sub-categories under too many categories.  At the most, we should keep the depth of the directory structure to two levels.  Most search engines don't go beyond one or two levels of directory structure, therefore keeping it to 2 levels is good from a SEO perspective but it is also good for the user experience.  This is because shorter URLs are better than longer ones for usability (easier to remember)

Descriptive keywords in URLs - Avoid using numbers (usually from dynamically generated URLs) as opposed to using descriptive and targeted keywords in the URL.  The URL structure should be as straightforward as possible and constructed logically as well as being comprehensible to users.  That is using clear words rather than long ID numbers.
 
Keyword rich URLs - It is also important to have keyword rich URLs. Highly relevant keywords should appear in the domain name or the page URL. This became clear in a recent study on how the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, rank websites. The statistics showed that top ten ranking websites on the major search engines have keywords either in the URL or in the domain.
 
At the same time we can use words in the URL to promote the theme or content of a website, as far as possible we must try to ensure that our URLs accurately reflect the page content.  According to Matt Cutts  (Head of Google's Webspam team) we should keep from three to five words in our URL, having more than that can look a little 'abnormal'.

Static URLs vs Dynamic URLs - A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site.  The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query using a script.  Whereas static URLs are page addresses, in which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded into the HTML.
 
Now, static URLs typically rank better in search engine results pages than dynamic pages and they are indexed more quickly.  This is because a search engine normally wants to only list pages that are unique. Some Search engines decide to combat this issue by cutting off the URLs after a specific number of variable strings (e.g.: ? & =).
 
Example: The 3 pages may look all the same for a Search Engine


This can happen if the search engine purges the information after the first offending character, the question mark (?), now all three pages can look the same:
 
Whenever possible, we must try to shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters. To be brief, static URLs tend to be shorter and more successful than dynamic URLs.  Search engines have been pretty straightforward about that, they have a preference for static URLs...

Use of robot.txt - If we think we can have problematic URLs in our website then we can consider using a robots.txt file to block crawlers access to those particular URLs. Usually we prevent crawlers to have access to dynamic URLs, such as those that generate search results.  We can also use the robot.txt file very effectively by using 'regular expressions' thus allowing us to easily block large numbers of URLs.

Good Navigation - We have to make sure that our visitors can easily jump from one category to another, without having to click the 'Back' buttons multiple times. This is why it is important that we list all the top category links significantly on every page.  We can also use 'Breadcrumbs' to help in navigation, using breadcrumbs are good as they are navigational techniques displaying all visited pages leading from the homepage of a website to the currently viewed page.
 
Conclusion
Even if a website might be having great content, information must be logically organised for both search engines and visitors to access it.  It's somewhat pointless to put effort in optimising a Web page without giving search engines simple access to that page's content.  Badly constructed navigation schemes and URL structures can constantly act as a stop sign to search engine indexing.

Ok, let me get straight to the point, lets skip the captivating introduction, pass through the drawn out middle and land at the grand finale, what puts bums on seats, it is all about conversions... this applies to all aspects of life. Let me explain, we all want our website to attract visitors but once they are there we want to convert them into customers. What I mean is that even if we have really good rankings, it does not mean anything if our conversion rate is low.

Being dumped recently and coincidently having a lot more time on my hands I was talking to another friend (dumped too) we came to realise that perhaps there is not much difference between a first date and converting users on a website! May be the same rules apply...



RIGHT KEYWORDS - As with dates, we have to stimulate the interest of people even before they come to our website / agree to a date. We need to tweak their curiosity and make sure they click with us and not our rivals. How? Words, words & more words... No technical trick here! Our Title tags and meta-description tags are our main weapons here.

SEOMOZ a respected and valuable resource for Search Marketers place 'Keywords used in title-tags' first in the list of factors positively affecting the search rankings of a website. In brief, while a good title tag can boost rankings, a bad title tag can totally ruin your page, exactly like a few misplaced words can ruin a date. I still can't believe that my friend, whom I won't tell the name managed to say something like this on his first date "I never said you need a nose job. I just said it wouldn't hurt to consider it?"

GOOD FEELING AND CONTENT - Having a clear theme on our website ensures visitors understand and feel positive about the business right at the start. Normally we have only a few seconds before a visitor decides to stay on our site or leave. Our dialogue with the visitor (date), clean design (clean shaven and fresh clothes) are key elements that can make visitors stay (and not escape out the toilet window), thus increasing our chance of conversions. We also need some interesting and unique content on our website because we don't want our date (visitors) to get bored, do we? Talking about your lousy day at work or your ex (worst) will bore your date so much that you can possibly never see her again. The same rule applies on your website, we must ensure that our content is interesting enough to make visitors stay and hopefully provide us with a return visit (2nd date!)

Also we should never optimise for keywords that are not related to our business since this will cause our website to attract the wrong audience. In brief, we should always talk to our target audience (your date) in a way that makes you attractive...

CONSISTENT NAVIGATION - Ok, now that things are going well enough, we don't want that to end on the first night... do we? We'd like the long lasting romance. So the same applies to visitors to our site. Visitors are more likely to get what they want from a website if they are familiar with its navigation scheme. Most of the time visitors hesitate to purchase products on a website where the global navigation scheme is not consistent, they get confused, they don't know if the product they're looking for is on the same site or not and finally find themselves asking "Maybe this website (guy) isn't trustworthy and not right for me"

Therefore, we have to make sure we have a clear, consistent and well-labelled navigation that will make our visitors (our date) time on our site a pleasure...

APPEALING CALL-TO-ACTIONS - It's like making our proposal. Our goal on our site should be clear, direct and express why people should click, you don't want to mumble words and stare at your feet whilst proposing a date as the likelihood of success is slim. Whether we want our visitors to buy something, sign up for something or else (Uh hum...like spending the night together after diner).

The call to action should be clear enough and sharp to make them 'click' and convert. Therefore, when planning site architecture, part of the process is to clearly determine individual pages primary and secondary calls-to-action (depending on the type of website).

We must also think about what messages we are communicating to our visitors and the search engine spiders. If keywords, navigation and calls-to-actions are all obvious to targeted users including the search engines... then we have better chance that our visitors convert.

KEEP THEM INTERESTED - Our first conversion, hold that 'feel good' sensation. The story does not end there as within SEO we are not concerned about one night stands but the long lasting romance! So we will have to keep our dates (visitors) interested! How? We have to 'feed' them with nice and exciting offers always! Keep our content up to 'date' and interesting and also offer 'gifts' from time to time... it's all part of the game.