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.”

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.

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.”

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means to build and edit a website so that it will be discovered by search engines and the content on the page is written and organized to be the most relevant it can be to what the searcher is looking for.

Organic Search Results are the usual source of search engine traffic which often comes from being listed on the first page of ten hits.

Adwords search results are the couple search results to the top in a light color called “sponsored” and the row to the right in google also sponsored in google. They are competitely bidded on and are worthwhile, however organic should always come first and adwords are optional if the budget allows.

Not only is the number of your “hit” on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) important, but what it blurts out in it’s short title and summary and even the link matter. These are the items that may compel the searcher to click yours even though it’s a lower hit number. Be aware that if you attracted them with specific text, then look at the page it links to and make sure your page speaks to that. This is called “relevancy”.

Keyphrase Research and Intelligence:

Your keywords and your keyphrases are your lure to the whole world. When it comes to search engines, you won’t even get a chance to show dazzling content if you haven’t succeeded in attracting attention. It’s almost imitating mating behaviour in life these days, the peacock has a short and distinctive call to attract through a forest of trees in order to get you close enough to see it display it’s most dazzling visual effects.

Keywords are the peacock’s call. Your website may have the feathers and features, but it must attract the attention to be seen.

Your “divining” of what your visitors will type into a search engine to find you is a marvelous sense.

Our “mining” of what they actually do type, combining with divining makes a process. This is the process of keyphrase optimization, it’s not a one time deal, a shot in the dark, or an expert’s guess at what a layman will type.

Every month (or bi-weekly) we deliver a report to you which reveals so many unexpected habits and quirky searches of your visitors. This is real world intelligence, if you are not taking advantage of your analytics data, you are wasting an opportunity presented on your doorstep.

We also have ways of finding out what people searched for and didn’t click on your hit. This can open up a world of unexpected keyphrases that can be folded into your content month by month.

You will have a baseline report, and you will have future reports which show clearly how your traffic is increasing or decreasing.

We can customize the reports to show you how many times your shopping cart was loaded with product but not purchased. This is the process of optimizing “conversions”.

Meta Tags – Titles and Descriptions – Google was the first to ignore the “keyword” Meta Tag:

Meta Tags “keywords”, “description” and “Title” Tags are hidden HTML code that helps describe and classify the content on a web page.Of these “Title” is the most important to getting organic traffic. In fact it’s #2 on the MASTER LIST.

The SERP summary is also very important because this is what humans will see as your blurb next to the other nine on the SERP page, who’s blurb will they click in their 8 second window? Meta Description can come in to play when the SERP page shows your summary, sometimes it’s this Meta Tag and you have direct control over what the search engine puts for your summary. Sometimes you don’t have direct control and have to finesse it with your actual page content. (back to page relevancy, a careful rewording by a top notch copy writer is worth it here)

We focus quickly and clearly on Meta Titles to help your SERP standing in the quickest and least laborious way.

Keyphrase Optimization Service:

Find, fix and fold. Each iteration it gets better and the analytics should show this.

Roll your own:

Have your own copy writers? We will train them. This information is gathered from over 15 years of continuous internet field experience by our founding member and amplified by our bright and sharp new guys and girls.

We want you to look good, it is in our best interest for you to do very, very well and become a testimonial and a reference for what we can do for you. When your website gets traction, you may want to take off your training wheels and be free.

Use [R] instead of [R=301] while you are testing . When you are 100% certain the rule does exactly as it’s expected to, then switch it to [R=301] for your live site.

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How to redirect any and all website pages to another website removing the page reference. This way if you have an old website with old links everyone will be redirected to the front door. Search engines will see the permanent 301 redirect and update their index to not list your old website.

# redirect anything with base url in the second line to the first one and remove any page references
redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://mynewwebsite.com
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.myoldwebsite.net

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