Google Them Google Tips and Tricks

The answer to this is sitting right next to another interesting fact from the google forums, how does google count page hits?

From: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=11df99a64a48364c&hl=en

“Caching: Google Analytics directly calls Google’s servers each time a page is visited, even if the page has been cached. Other analytics solutions may not record an additional visit if the page is pulled from a user’s or server’s cache.”

I stumbled across this while looking for the answer to another question (does google count cached page hits in my analytics?).

From google’s forum about adwords tracking: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=11df99a64a48364c&hl=en

“Visitor browser preferences: Visitors must have JavaScript, images, and cookies enabled in their browsers in order for Analytics to report their visit. Depending on their method of collecting data, other analytics solutions may still register these visitors.”

This is basically the same post as this other one here talking about google needs javascript enabled to count website visits.

I stumbled across this while looking for the answer to another question (how does google count page hits if you clear your cookies, javascript is disabled or images are turned off).

from google’s own forums: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=11df99a64a48364c&hl=en

“Caching: Google Analytics directly calls Google’s servers each time a page is visited, even if the page has been cached. Other analytics solutions may not record an additional visit if the page is pulled from a user’s or server’s cache.”

Advanced SEO overview:

• Keywords and keyphrases: Invent, research, compare, place in website, refine, re-fold.
• Tune your Robots.txt file.
• Setup your canonical tags.
• XML sitemap and automate the creation and submission.
• Google webmaster tools, look for errors and unexpected keywords that you didn’t get traffic for.
• Setup goals and funnels in analytics.
• Build incoming links.
• Submit to just a few whitehat paid websites for listing Yahoo.com, Business.com, BestoftheWeb.com
• Link sculpting or link juice.

What to do with Google Analytics:

• First, you can tell how many people are coming to your website by typing your keyphrases.
• Second, you can tell what are your most popular pages.
• Third, see what your traffic looks like and find fortuitous spikes in traffic. These will most certainly have a reason. Drill down on the day and see what keywords came up that day and what were your best referring websites.
• Fourth, look at the map to see what countries are interested in your content, if you know analytics good enough, you can even see what cities, this is more revealing!
• Fifth, setup conversion goals and funnels to track your leads. This way you’ll know if your client’s goal has been met and how many times. This could be a shopping cart page, a checkout page, a contact form, or a newsletter signup form.

BG (before google) these were powerful tricks to cheat your way to the top quickly
Avoid SEO solicitors and companies who use these:

• Bulk website submissions to hundreds of search engine.
• Meta Tag Keyword work. (google was the first to ignore these)
• Reciprocal linking to non-pertinent websites. (it’s actually good to reciprocal link on a slow steady basis to sister sites)
• Hiding stuffed keywords. (don’t hide white text on white pages)
• Cloaking pages which are really a bait and switch routine, a smart website which offers a different page to a robot than the one a human would get.
• Access to link farms. (huge pages with links, sometimes they show up on unclaimed domain names)
• Duplicate websites pointing to one, or duplicate pages. (there is a way to have more than one domain name forward to another, one could be SEO focused and the other could be human readable, the SEO focused one would permanently redirect to the other)
• Doorway pages which are created to quickly forward a visitor to another page. The text on the first page is optimized to get a high ranking but not for humans.
• Keyword stuffing, it’s a black box secret at google labs how many times you can get away with saying the same words on the same page, several are fine. Also keyword density plays a part in this algorithm.

SEO Tips and tricks simplified to get highly ranked by google and other search engines:

• Make your website keyword focused so that popular keyphrases appear in the URL, Title and H1 tags.
• Content should be relevant to why the visitor is on that particular page.
• Write or get a copy writer to create Search Engine Friendly content.
• Arrange for relevant inbound links, they should summarize what’s on your page, not just “click here” (link:mywebsite.com).
• Check your anchor text that the links target for relevancy.
• Make your popular keyphrases very close to what you see in your analytics for search terms, add more and refine them.
• Utilize deep linking by having pages that attract traffic, like a recipe page on a ecommerce food website.
• Use alt tags for all images and treat them like extra opportunities to stuff keywords without going blackhat.
• Do a check of your total website indexed (site: mywebsite.com) and if it’s not, create a sitemap which has all of your pages in simple links so you are sure the search engines can find every one by spidering.
• Optimize your title tags, short and sweet, every word maximally relevant to that page’s purpose.
• Write and submit articles and press releases which mention and link to your other pages, this is link sculpting. You bring in traffic and flow it to the pages you want. In the link to the page use the keyphrase for that page. Check your analytics and send your incoming keyphrases to the page you want to get the action for each one.
• Submit an XML sitemap of your website to the search engines, if your website changes or products change, make it an automated XML feed.
• Make all changes look natural and do them steadily and gradually.
• Freshen up your website with regularity, both search engines and people sense this, a stale website becomes a backwater.

SEO keyword process in 6 steps:

• Find your best keywords: Figure out your golden keyphrases. Brainstorm, think like your target audience, not like a pro. Be specific for who you want to land on your website and “convert”.
• Keyword research: Research your keyphrases for popularity. Whittle out the ones that are too short and thus too competetive.
• Compare website competition on search engines: Do your competitive analysis and use the highest ranking websites for inspiration.
• Keywords on website in order of importance: Write your content, or edit your existing content to use the keyphrases. Try to use your best keyphrase in your URL, page title, H1 tag and content, in that order.
• Google analytics techniques: Setup your analytics, check your incoming search terms regularly. Suggest keyphrase changes based on what people are typing. Fold into website and repeat.