SEO

There's a common misconception that an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to place 'Keyword Meta Tags' into the site code.

Comments I get often sound like: 'I want to appear in Google for "Exclusive Widgets" and someone told me that you should put in a meta keyword tag to make that happen'.

The truth is that while we're happy to embed meta keywords in the code if that's what you want, Google and other search engines place no relevance on meta keywords.

The Google team are always introducing new features to their products, and the latest to receive major upgrades is Google Analytics, the powerful statistics tool that is used to track visitors to your website.

Yesterday Google announced seven new features in Analytics, some are improvements to existing features like goals while others allow new analysis like tracking mobile marketing.

The Announcement from Google

Read on to read the announcement from the Google team and then sign in to your account to try these features.

Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals

You can now track even more conversions by creating up to 20 goals per profile. Measure user engagement and branding success on your site with Time on Site and Pages per Visit goals. Set up your first Engagement goal in minutes.

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Choc Chip recently completed a major website design and online marketing campaign for www.visitgreatoceanroad.org.au using the Drupal CMS (Content Management System).

GOT (Geelong Otway Tourism) contracted us to build the new website to provide tourism information and represent the tourism association members by giving them prominent pages on the site.

Site Build

As well as an attractive, dynamic design, this site includes a considered navigation structure and content targeted to attract site visitors and lead them to the member pages.

The challenge in building this site was to incorporate data for the tourism association members from two different external sources.

So, you've got Google Analytics installed on your website and you've figured your way around the interface as shown in one of my previous posts.

You can now produce reports and see lots of detailed statistics about who your website viewers are and what they're doing on your site. Great!

But what do all those statistics actually mean?

Sometimes Google Analytics' abundance of information can be a little overwhelming, and it's hard to know what figures are important and what's good or bad - especially if you've never run a website analysis like this before.

This video is part of a series produced by the Analytics team at Google, and it guides you through what the different statistics are and what they mean.

Google Analytics is a piece of software that tracks visitors to your website and then tells you about them.

It records an amazing array of data, including where the people are coming from, how long they stay on your site and which pages are the most popular. It also includes tools to drill down through the data in a variety of ways, so you can see detailed reports on specific keywords, visitors or cross-reference other demographic data.

Although Google Analytics is made by the same company as Google search it's a totally different product, so don't be confused by the name. It gets its data about your website using a small piece of code embedded on your pages that reports back to your analytics account, it doesn't actually track anything using Google search.

Over the last two years we have become increasingly involved in Internet Marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as part of our follow-up service to web design clients. Often building a website isn't enough - once up and running, the site needs to be found by customers in order to perform correctly.

We have recently launched this service under its own banner, calling it 'Webmojo'. If you'd like your website to perform better for your business or if you'd like to know more about SEO and Internet Marketing, Webmojo is a great place to start.

There's three main ways a website can be found by potential customers: