How to Trick Out Your Entire Website Using Stats

Jacob Hodgson    Search Engine Optimization    

Your website is a gold mine. It can take your business from so-so to WOW! All you need to do is learn how to use your statistical information to help you get it done.

Website stats tell you a variety of things. You can find out where your products are booming and busting. You can learn what visitors like and dislike about your site. Are your keywords working? That can be explained also.

The sum total of your website is not content. While content is still king when it comes to providing useful information, it is just one aspect that can be optimized on your site. So much has been written about keyword optimization in content that some might wrongly believe it is the only important part of website optimization.

That is what we are really talking about here – website optimization. Start with the content but don’t leave it there. Search engines bots will crawl the entire page for keywords not just your content. Let’s take a look at other options for tricking out that website and making it sell itself.

1. Anchor Text – Anchor text is the text that is displayed over hyperlinks on your content. If your article refers to information found elsewhere on your site, don’t just say “click here” to find more information, use keywords from that page as your anchor text. Not only are you getting credit for the keyword but it links to another page that also is keyword optimized (or it will be once you are done).

1. Picture Text – People love pictures especially on websites and shopping carts. It can be a big mistake to buy sight unseen. Each picture can have a tag associated with it. When someone runs across the picture with their mouse, they can again see relevant keywords for that page.

1. Links to Other Website Pages – One technique for creating your webpage is to list what services you offer or what your product can do on the homepage. That homepage can be doing more. If you have dedicated a separate page to each unique feature, place those links on the homepage as well. In your list of product features, use keyword-rich anchor text to describe them and have each description link to a different page. Search engines love that.

Are you getting the idea? Your website can be more exciting to the search engine crawlers with just a few changes.

5 Things to Avoid When Optimizing Your Website Pages

Jacob Hodgson    Search Engine Optimization    

Search engine optimization can be one of the hardest and most rewarding tools in your business arsenal. It helps with marketing, advertising and selling your products or services. Because it is a wide category, there are plenty of places where you can go wrong with it. Here are just five of them.

Under-Using Your Website – Optimizing your website involves every aspect of your site. Most people think that the only important part is the content. Optimizing content is only one piece of the pie. When you concentrate on content and not on leveraging all areas of your site, you are robbing your own pockets.

You will get visitors if your content is on point, but the search engines can rank you even higher if you used keywords in other places. Articles have titles, pages have headlines and pictures have captions. Learn to use them all to your advantage.

Keyword Overload – Search engine bots are smarter than most people give them credit for. Using keywords too much will cause them to just skip over your content and thus give you a lower ranking for those keywords. It seems like you could use as many as you wanted in an article and that would make you more visible but it’s not true.

Search engines recognize when people are cheating by overstuffing their articles with keywords. Content that is well written will stay within the allowable keyword density. And, those keywords will show up naturally throughout the article so it doesn’t sound like it was thrown together just for the keywords.

Keyword Density – You can have too few keywords as well as too many. Some people write their content without even thinking about keywords. You might have a strong article that talks about cutting edge information but without something to help the search engines look upon you favorably; no one will ever read it. Using the word once or twice in an article is not going to cut it.

No Variety – For better optimization, a website doesn’t use just one keyword. If you started with the word “chocolate”, your entire website wouldn’t be based on it. People use a variety of similar words alone or in combination to find what they are looking for with search engines. If you make and sell chocolate fudge, there are better words to use: fudge, Candace’s fudge, how to make fudge, etc. it’s like throwing all your eggs in one basket if you don’t diversify your keywords.

Reciprocal Links – While it is true that backlinks can increase your search engine ranking, all links are not equal. And search engines like organic links better than simply offering reciprocal link sharing. You want others to link to you because they like your product and what your website presents to others. Using quality content on your site, in article directories and on social bookmarking sites can increase your quality inbound links for higher ranking.

Start out on solid footing with SEO. Learn how to avoid common mistakes that first-timers make.

What Site Stats Can Tell You

Jacob Hodgson    Search Engine Optimization    

Why do some websites do well and others just crest for a while and then sink under the surf? It could be the big picture view. Website statistics can teach you a lot about how your online business is doing. Take a minute and look at those stats.

Getting Set Up

When you roll out your website, it is going to be important to monitor your progress. You can’t visit the site every day. You may want to but there are other tasks to tend to. Besides, if you automate most everything, your site will be able to run itself with very little interference from you except for site upkeep and adding new content and products.

This will require a well thought out plan on your part. Basic to that plan is a way to measure what goes on during the course of a day on your site. People visit, read articles, click on ads, view products and use the shopping cart. Each of these activities will help you to determine how your business will proceed in the months and years ahead.

You can add files to your web page yourself to capture certain stats. An easier step would be to get involved with a website stats program to do the work for you. Choose something like Google Analytics. If you already use other Google services to help promote your business then you are already familiar with the variety of tools they can offer you.

Google Analytics lets you analyze several things:

• Traffic
• Marketing strategies (ads)
• Keywords
• Conversion rates

This is only a sampling. You sign up and the program will walk you through the rest of what you need to get be ready for business.

Making Changes

Now that you have a way to track changes on your website, it’s time to see how they can help you over not using anything at all.

• Improve Keyword Optimization – The keywords that you decided to use may all not perform well. Using stats on page views and visitors, you can tell which of your keywords is bringing in the most traffic. For the ones that are not, consider exchanging keywords on that web page and see how that might improve sales.

• Improve your Content Offerings – The low number of page views for a specific page could signify that people aren’t finding your content on the first page of search engine results. Take another look at your content. Is your keyword density within the right range? Are you using too many? Search engines don’t look kindly to keyword stuffing and will not rank your work favorably. With content, provide useful information using only as many words as you need to get your point across.

What are your site stats telling you? Remember to change one parameter at a time to find the right mix that will help your website succeed.