Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
Ok first up I have to say that we are all fans of Google Analytics here, with good reason: it’s zero-cost, its rich array of features: brilliant reporting capabilities, the ability to slice and dice the data in almost every conceivable way, the slick ajax-ified interface, and the support for advanced stuff like advanced segmentation and something that I really love using on e-commerce sites – goals and funnels, and for the nerds among us – filters.
- The analytics data is not available in real-time, you have to wait until midnight passes the next day to see yesterday’s data
- The data is not yours – it’s Google’s – and for all of the clean image that Google has (”don’t be evil”), forgive me when I say that I prefer to have my own copy of my website trend and visitor data.
- Google Analytics works by including a JavaScript snippet in your pages, but search engine spiders (”crawlers”) don’t execute JavaScript when they load your site’s pages, so their visits aren’t logged by Google Analytics. So when spiders from GoogleBot, Inktomi (Yahoo), Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine), Ask and Baidu crawl your site, you know absolutely zero about it from looking at your GA reports.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: crawltrack, googlebot, search engine spiders, Seo, slurp inktomi, website crawler statistics
Posted in Google Analytics, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
Ok now I make no secret that I like to build sites on WordPress whenever it is a suitable, as it allows us to do fundamental on-page SEO on a site pretty easily, and also the blogging system is easy to configure and tweak on WordPress. We have a client who is targeting the Life Coaching niche (Dating and Relationship coaching in particular), and we recently build a site for her, you can check it out at www.GoodLifeCoaching.ie. Its build on WordPress 2.7 and is also a bilingual site, as it allows the owner to write post and page content in both English and German, and allows the visitors to switch between languages by clicking on the appropriate link. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Description Tags, Google, Ireland, Keyphrase, Keyword, Keywords, Languages, Life Coaching, Niche Dating, Page Content, Regard, Relationship, Relationship Coaching, Screenshot, Search Volume, Seo, Wordpress
Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Wordpress | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
A good friend of mine has a small family business which they are looking to expand despite these troubling times, and have a very nice e-commerce website which they launched in 2008 to that end. They are located in Co. Cavan just on the Fermanagh border, and have a .co.uk domain parked on their .com so as to service the UK as well as Ireland and beyond. They got a very good site build for them by a local website company here in Cavan, my friends over at Web Edge (Irish Web Developers – http://www.irishwebdevelopers.com). The site was built on Zen Cart and got a major upgrade recently which saw some significant SEO improvement features being introduced with the new version of Zen Cart in the upgrade.
So anyway, my friend mentioned to me that he wanted to get an AdWords campaign going in order to get some traffic to the site and generate more sales as business from the website have been slow. I remarked “ah, ok, well how many visitors are you getting to the site per day at the moment?” to which he looked at me perplexed and replied “don’t know!”. So we hopped up to the computer and logged into his Google Analytics account.
We were presented with the Google Analytics dashboard: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Website, Co Cavan, Competitor, Conversion Rate, Dashboard, Family Business, Friends, Good Friend, Google, Google Analytics, Ireland, Irish Web Developers, Money, Pageviews, Seo, Traffic, Troubling Times, Uk Domain, Zen Cart
Posted in Conversion Optimisation, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Website Optimiser, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, e-commerce | 1 Comment »
