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Are you finding it difficult to keep track of your site’s performance in the search engines? Aside from having to download software that offer to keep track of your website’s SEO performance, Google now has a newly integrated service especially for SEO people out there concerned with their web site’s performance. This Google tracking service is known as the Google Analytics. It is a powerful service that keeps track of your web site’s success on organic and paid search results. Google Analytics gives you better understanding on how your web site’s web visitors react on your site. It gives you no-holds barred and detailed experience of your web site visitors.

You will also be aware and know what key words users in relation to your web site frequently use. You will be educated on the best link text that brings in the most prospects. True to its name, the Google Analytics shares with you analytical data that will help you greatly on being aware about your web site visitors and target visitors’ preferences.

Google Analytics provides free information about the way visitors to your site interact with it. By taking a good evaluation of Google Analytics, webmasters will realize how it is an invaluable tool they can and should use especially if they do not have some form of visitor tracking solution.  Google Analytics shares with you which of your SEO campaigns deliver the best ROI or return on investment. If you are not confident on the software you use in finding out your internet marketing results, Google Analytics is good in tracking down results of your internet marketing campaigns. Now alongside the Google AdWords, you can be certain of obtaining significant information about your web site.

Google Adwords is an equally powerful service for placing your web site in search results based on certain key words related to your site. Google Adwords take note of your major web site’s key words and efficiently guarantees that your web site appears in search engine results.

Google Analytics was once named as Urchin visitor tracking by Google. It was last November 16, 2005 when Google renamed this service into Google Analytics. It is free for everyone’s use and those who have signed up during its early stages are offered with a completely new set of significant and consequential information regarding your web site visitors.

Still, those who are late in signing up for this service can wait until Google offer new sign-ups to the Google Analytics system.

Google Analytics works with tracking codes that will guarantee to track down important user information for you. It uses codes in the destination URL’s that facilitates the web site visitor tracking mission by Google Analytics.

Here are some of the most important reasons why you need Google Analytics as part of your website visitor tracking and have it on your site:

1. Its functionality equals most expensive visitor tracking services, even if it is free.

2. The service is your solution to identify where visitors leave your check-out or sign-up process. Identifying this will help you make amends and modify your sign-up process that is user-friendly. You will then be prevented from losing leads

3. Utilizing Google Analytics will help you identify the pages and links your web site visitor’s click on most. You will also know which page your visitors spend most their time on. You can therefore improve these pages properly and position them and their link texts appropriately.

4. Wondering the previous site your web site visitor logged on to before coming to your site? Google Analytics will tell you all about it.

5. You will also be provided with the most popular keyword users type in the search bar of the search engine in finding web sites associated/related to your website. Knowing these popular keywords is a great boost for your SEO efforts and performance, even on other search engines.

6. Google analytics conduct visitor segmentation. It classifies new and returning web site users, their geographical information and the referral source they use. This provides you with invaluable insight if you are planning on a setting up a new online business.

7. For search advertising results, Google Analytics and Google Adwords guarantees you with end-to-end visibility

8. You can even track other non-search-engine marketing media

9. Overall, Google Analytics provides you a very cheap service on gaining more customers, if you utilize its results.

Like most search engine services, Google Analytics has its own advantages and disadvantages.

• Its setup is very straightforward. You do not have to waste time waiting for results

• It is quite flexible, provides great solution and a wide range of significant and valuable reports

• You can login once and track multiple sites. You have more than one web site to track.

• Google tracking makes it possible to track campaigns even on other media

• You need not be confused of the A/B ad testing

• Its integration with all marketing media so as you can use only single portal to track multiple campaigns is ingenious

• You will get In-depth reports on site navigation of users you never dreamed you could have

• It also has Ecommerce tracking features

However, Google Analytics package falls behind two very important features most search engine marketers need. This is the ability to track down individual user activities and trace activity back to an individual user level. Another is the ability to track fraudulent online activities so as your site will be safe from it. Even if there are the eCommerce tracking features, it cannot completely provide this important tracking capability.

The free web site analytics solution, is Google’s statement regarding their supremacy among other search engines.

Article discusses Google Analytics and how powerful it can be to marketer’s keeping track of their site’s performance in the search engines.

With all the talk about search engines and relevancy, I came up with some interesting thoughts that I wanted share about where I believe the search engines are heading concerning basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Trying to stay ahead of the search engines, which is nearly impossible, I’ve been trying to look to the future of SEO while creating web pages following the guidelines of the major search engines.

One of the largest problems the major search engines are dealing with is Search Engine Spam, Adsense Spam, and “Spammy Pages” such as keyword stuffing to gain higher rankings.  In guidelines from Google, they mention write your pages for the users, not for the search engines.  This statement alone, is a little prediction of the future of what is coming.  And in order to stay ahead of the curve with some long term planning, I am suggesting we should take this to heart, and stop using the older SEO methods that eventually will hurt us.

Websites are being currently being penalized and dropped from years of top rankings for not adapting to the search engines guidelines and continuing to use SEO methods of years ago.

In thinking in terms of long-term success to maintain high rankings for each of the major search engines, through about as much research as you do online, I have came up with a few guidelines to the basic SEO ideas for the future.

One of the most important aspect for the search engines, and what I have seen and predict will have more importance is website copywriting.  We’ll this is nothing new, we all know website copywriting is important, may as high at 45% of our copywriting contributes to our page rank.  This will always remain important, and I believe will become even more important to high as 85% of what our website says will contribute to our page ranking in the future, as a shift from the search engine giving higher ranking from a technical aspect to more of a informational or relevancy aspect.

Eliminating some of the currently used technical aspects may maintain higher ranking in the coming future.  Let me explain some of the commonly abused technical SEO habits currently, that I believe is headed toward extinction.

a.  Keyword Meta tags.  This tag alone is open to elimination due to the common abuse methods such as keyword stuffing.  Most major search engines generally ignore this tagline currently.

b.  ALT tags are another tagline that is just in the beginning stages of being eliminated.  Some search engines have been experimenting with ignoring ALT tags and have found out that pages indexed without ALT tags are returning higher relevancy results.  Again like the Meta tags, ALT tags have been abused to such from as keyword stuff.

c.  The two Meta tags that will gain in importance will be the Title tag and Description tag.  A title and description taglines accurately representing a well written website copy write will enhance your page’s relevancy. I am not suggesting that today that we immediately stop using the successful technical SEO currently in place, but the gradual elimination of this technique as the search engines stop using each method.  Personally, I no longer include the Keyword Meta taglines on my web pages, and will continue to remove useless html as that become irrelevant. In summary, my opinion is that future SEO standards will be more focused on good copywriting and less on technical aspects such as Meta taglines, Alt taglines, Headings to gain a higher page rank, or should I say higher relevancy.

Every web surfer has encountered the dreaded 404 page not found error message.
The generic error page is horrible to look at and it does not encourage web visitors to explore more of your site.Imagine being able to setup a custom error message page that looked good, told the visitor what had gone wrong and then suggested some alternative links to other locations on your site, such as the home page, sitemap or even a search page.

If the visitor wanted to, they could then visit other parts of your site.It is very easy to setup a custom 404 error page (The 404 error is the error number returned when a page or directory is not found on your site). The easiest way to redirect visitors that encounter a 404 is to either send them to your sites home page or to your sitemap page We do this by placing a one line of code in your websites .htaccess file

ErrorDocument 404 /sitemap.html

This would redirect all 404 error messages to the sitemap page.

The path to the page you want to display, must already exist on your web server, otherwise the web server will tie itself up in a never ending loop.
The full path to the error page must be specified and it must be relative to the root path of that account (remember, placing a / at the front of a file name or directory specifies that it’s relative to the root directory).

To make a custom error page, simply create a page using your favorite webpage editor such as MS FrontPage or DreamWeaver. The page can contain anything you wish, such as images, links etc. Save the file as something easy to remember (such as 404errors.html)

I would then suggest you make a directory directly off your /public_html/ folder and call it “error” and place your error files in here.

This would now mean that your .htaccess command line would now look like:
Error Document 404 /error/404errors.html

Now whenever a 404 error was generated on your site, your custom error page will be displayed, and keep your web visitors happy.

In the upcoming article, I will expand on this idea, and show you how to you can receive an email notification that a 404 error has occurred on your site. It will tell you what caused the error, and the offending page. Allowing you to try and fix all broken links leading to your site.