Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

So you’ve started a website and now have an abundance of traffic coming in. That’s great! But where are these people coming from? How are they finding your site? And most importantly, how are they behaving when they’re on your site? This is where the importance of web analytics comes into play.

Web analytics is the study of how your site’s visitors behave. This includes the tracking of important statistics such as unique vistis, pageviews, bounce rates and conversion rates. For many small sites, the last two statistics are not as important, but for large sites or online businesses, the last two play a key roll in optimizing your site’s performance.

There are two main web analytics technologies: server logfile analysis and page tagging.

Server logfile analysis involves the reading of log files on a server in order to collect analytics data. During the early days of the Internet, server logfile analysis only tracked the number of requests made by a visitor to the web server. This was commonly know as a “hit” and was logical since many sites only consisted of a single HTML file at the time. As more elements were added to web pages (images, multiple pages, etc.), server logfile analysis became impractical, as it would count every server request on one page as a “hit”.

These complications led to the creation of new web analytic metrics: pageviews and visits. A pageview was defined as a request to the web server for a single page while a visit was defined as a series of requests from a single person that ended after a certain time frame. Eventually, cookies were used to track unique user sessions due to the evolution of proxy and dynamic IP technologies, which made the old “visit” statistic fairly useless.

Some of the most popular software programs for tracking web analytics use the server logfile analysis method. These include Webalizer, Urchin, WebTrends and the open-source AWStats.

Page tagging involves the placement of code on a page in order to track analytics data. The earliest form of page tagging was the website counter. These visible, numeric counters eventually evolved into invisible snippets of JavaScript. The small JavaScript code would be placed on a page and send data back to an analytics program or company for analysis. Just like the server logfile analysis method, page tagging also involves assigning cookies to each user in order to determine unique visitors.

One of the most popular page tagging analytics programs is Google Analytics. The service is free to anyone with a Google account and is the standard in web analytics for any person or company on a tight budget.

So why should you worry about web analytics? So you can increase the performance of your website of course!

Why do people leave your site? A “bounce” is when a visitor leaves your website after only viewing one page. Many analytics programs have a statistic called bounce rate, which measures the percentage of people that commit a “bounce”. This metric allows you to see which pages on your site are performing poorly and then make improvements or adjustments to that page. This statistic is extremely important for e-commerce sites or sites that would like a visitor to commit a certain action.

How much time do people spend on your site? This is known as session duration and is important to know because it allows you to see what pages on your site have content that is compelling your visitors to stay. It will also let you know what pages need additional content added in order for visitors to stay on them longer.

A linkfarm is any type of website in which there is no real content, service, or purpose, but rather just a load of non-related reciprical links to other places. Generally linkfarms are built to increase search engine rankings and turn a profit, which means they’re also generally littered with advertisements from affiliate programs the site owner has partnered with.

Linkfarms are not to be confused with Linkdumps, which are simply places people dump all kinds of links to content on various websites.

The optimal keyword density doesn’t appear to have changed but rather appears to have declined in value altogether. Sites with low keyword densities are starting to appear more often for phrases based more on their links than their content and also overall site relevancy.

While the importance of a specific keyword density on a page has declined, this has been countered by an increasing importance of relevancy throughout the site. Google is opting to assign relevancy based more on the overall content of the site rather than a single page. General directories will be showing up less and less in exchange for topic-specific directories. Additionally, sites with a central theme carried throughout the majority of pages will tend to rank over sites with a specific page or even section on a topic.

Internal links are carrying a solid weight in attaching relevancy to specific internal pages. Properly worded internal links, preferably built into the content of your site (see note on natural links above) will add weight to those internal pages and increase the likelihood of those pages ranking for specific secondary phrases.

Unique content is important too. You need to provide content that has different information than what is on other sites and other Web pages.

Whilst I don’t advocate spamming other bloggers and asking for links - I would recommend that if you write a quality post on a topic that you know will interest another blogger that it might be worth shooting them a short and polite email letting them know of your post. Don’t be offended if they don’t link up, but you might just find that they do and that in addition to the direct traffic that the link generates that it helps build your own page rank in the search engines

<gmail.com>: Google’s attempt at free e-mail. Instead of the 2-6 MB of free space that Yahoo and Hotmail used to provide, Gmail gives you 2,600 MB (and growing) of space (this has already caused Hotmail and Yahoo to raise their amounts to 250 MB and more; AOL.com now gives you 2,000 MB free). I have been using it for 1.5 years and it’s terrific and fast. One caveat: Google runs small, text-ads on the side of the screen, based on content of your e-mail messages. That’s scary to a lot of people, though Google promises no human will ever see your messages, just those Google servers (remember, however, that all e-mail can potentially be scanned by various systems). I don’t use it as my primary e-mail. I use it in two ways, with two accounts. One is an account to which I send messages, photos, PDFs, I want to save for future access, including big messages that I don’t want taking up space in my regular inbox - kind of a “greatest hits” collection. The other is an account that get a copy of every e-mail message I get, so that it’s all backed up and available in one place.

Header tags will tell the search engine what “words” are important in the context of your page. Using <h1>,<h2>,<h3>, etc.. tags is the best way to highlight important keywords. With that in mind consider using keywords relevant to the page’s content (theme) in your Header Tags. The best practice is to place your primary keyword in your <h1> tags and your secondary keyword into the <h2> tags.

You can think of an <h1> header tag as a title for whatever content you have on your page and you should have ONLY ONE (1) h1 tag on any page.

h2 and h3 header tags should be thought of as a sub headings for your page. You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the <h2> header tag. The <h2> tag should be placed somewhere towards the top half of your webpage, in any case below <h1> tag.
(Read more and see header tag examples in this article about Header tags.)

Many SEO professionals still argue over this but the page title tag element is still one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines.

The title tag is displayed as the first line of text in the blue row at the top of any browsing window. Search Engine Friendly title tag is ideally 3-9 words (60-80 characters) maximum in length, straight and to the point, this is what will show up in search engine results as a link to your page. Have at least one main keyword in title tag but don’t stuff all of your keywords in it. SEO Tip: make sure your Page Title Tag is relevant to the content on the page and EVERY page should have it’s own Title tag.
(Read more and see title tag examples in this Meta tags article.)

Since web pages drive search engine rankings, Black Hat SEOs began duplicating the content of entire web sites under their own domain name, instantly producing a ton of web pages (kind of like downloading an encyclopedia onto your web site). Due to this abuse, Google aggressively attacked duplicate content abusers with their algorithm updates, knocking out many legitimate websites as collateral damage in the process. For example, when someone scrapes your site, Google will look at both renditions of the site, and in some cases it may determine the legitimate one to be the duplicate. The only way to prevent this is to track down sites as they are scraped and then submit spam reports to Google. Issues with duplicate content also arise because there are a lot of legitimate uses for them. News feeds are the most obvious example: a news story is covered by many websites because it’s the content that viewerss want to see. Any filter will inevitably catch some legitimate uses.

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