How to view regional search traffic in Google Analytics
As a web analyst, I have been playing around with Google Analytics for many years now and have increasingly enjoyed watching and waiting for new features that a)add better ability to gain insight about a web business and b) make my life easier!
Features such as custom variables and event tracking have been an absolute gift in terms of being able to understand who visits my clients’ websites, which features are interacted with and what value this delivers my clients.
Frustratingly of course, there are areas where things could just be a little bit better and that’s where (in all honesty) we get to have some fun by re-working the way Google Analytics delivers data by creating hacks and being creative with filters.
How JC Penney recovered from a Google penalty
Just three months after it was downgraded as a penalty for alleged 'black hat' link-building techniques, US department store J.C. Penney has recovered its organic search visibility on Google.
How the retailer achieved this provides a good example of how Google penalties work.
Six key tactics for alternative search engine marketing
Whether you’re a copywriter, marketer or fully fledged SEO ninja, the
chances are that your optimisation will be primarily focused on the
larger search engines.
More people use Google and Bing, so they’ll be your primary sources of revenue. However, there comes a time in every campaign's life when results level off. At times like this it’s worth taking time to consider other search engines.
There’s is no shortage of them available, and while they don’t have quite the same audience share, they can still provide you with a healthy traffic boost.
Five common SEO mistakes made by e-commerce sites
Parts of the search engine optimisation work e-commerce sites undertake require a certain level of technical understanding which is where SEO consultants can shine. Other parts need some common sense and an eye for detail.
Here are five SEO mistakes e-commerce sites make, so that you don't have to make them...
Four tips for analysing SEO Google Analytics style
Having spent time improving your SEO, building natural links and optimising on site elements then I bet you cannot wait to see the results. If you're anything like most people (including yours truly), you'd look at traffic to your site as an indication of how well you've done. Although the end result is higher numbers of visitors to your site due to better ranking, it might be while before your ranking will improve.
On the other hand by using Google Analytics it's easier to see short term improvement in your SEO by extracting hidden data gems so it's really a question of knowing where to look. Here are four tips...
Wolfram Alpha - what does the search community think?
Yesterday's release of "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha generated a lot of debate, with some folks falling over themselves to praise it, while others poured cold water on it.
To try to cut to the chase I thought I'd ask a few of the UK's search industry ninjas to comment. So is it a Google killer, or just Cuil MKII? Here's what they had to say...
The links you don't want indexed by the engines
An important part of successfully managing your search engine optimisation targets is to nudge the search results your way when it's in your control. To help you achieve this target, there are some links you should prevent from getting indexed by the engines to begin with.
Firstly, because they offer little or no user experience benefits, secondly because they might get indexed instead of the desired content and lastly because preventing the engines from crawling unnecessary pages will reduce your bandwidth costs.
Here are few links you really don't want indexed:
25 SEO tips to create trust with the search engines
There's no two ways about this, Google and the other search engines have their favourites. I'm sure you've seen it all before, either working for your client or evaluating your competition. There are a number of sites in every niche, whatever content they publish they rank well whether or not the content is optimised, has any inbound links and without really trying too hard.
You, on the other hand might have worked hard to rank for that content, have got some great natural links, lots of buzz but you've got little to show for it. What you don't know is that these websites have managed to reach a high trust level with the search engines which helps their content rank highly.
Wikia and Jimmy Wales shutter Wikia Search
Can search be crowdsourced? It's a question that Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, set out to answer when his for-profit company Wikia launched Wikia Search.
Wikia Search, which we reviewed here on the Econsultancy blog when it launched, tried to give users the ability to edit search results in much the same fashion that users can edit pages on Wikipedia.
50 SEO tips for online retailers
SEO for online retailers is the process of improving a website potential in order to gain more organic non-paid traffic from the major search engines. Normally, SEO uplift doesn't happen overnight and it can take a long while to rank well for non brand key terms.
The rule of thumb is this: the more competition a relative term has, the harder you'll find it to rank for the term. With that said, you've got to start somewhere and there at least 50 ways I can think of to improve your SEO.
