The company has just announced they’re opening a full App Gallery for Google Analytics.

Google Application Gallery

This gallery contains applications that extend Google Analytics in new and exciting ways.

They are solutions that help analysts, marketers, IT teams, and executives get more out of Google Analytics
(if you are part of the ones that believes that Analytics=Visits stop reading here).

Apps are available in 12 categories, including business intelligence, campaign management, content, data collection, e-commerce, email marketing, mobile marketing, phone tracking, reporting tools, SEO, site auditing, and widgets and gadgets.

According to Mashable website – Coming Soon Google Analytics will release a new set of Analytics reports for Adwords.

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Moo! Why don't raise the stickiness?

Here are 2 quick tips to make your website more user friendly and more SEO efficient using Free Google Tools.

Google recently introduced Web Elements, which are simple snippets of really simple code you can copy/paste into your site’s HTML.

Quick Tip 1 – How to insert Google Search on my website?

If you don’t have a Search tool on your website you may be missing an opportunity to improve customer retention and conversions on your site.

Because users want fast answers and because they are used to pop words and hit search, it’s a good idea to make their life easier on your website giving them a search facility,

The Google Custom Search Engine team has made it really easy to add custom search to any site. Just follow these steps:

1) Access Google Web Elements

2) Click on Custom Search

3) Configure to automatically search your website.

4) Copy the code

5) Place on your website.

Quick Tip 2 – Add Google Maps and Directions to your website.

Meet the Google Maps driving directions gadget that makes it easy for customers to get directions to your office or store.

Thanks to Google, businesses can now offer customers quick and easy step-by-step directions.

The new Google directions gadget will allow business owners to pre-fill the direction “To” field with one or multiple addresses, while leaving open the “From” field so that customers can input their address or some other starting point.

From there, customers can print driving, walking or transit directions in just one click. Google will also provide suggestions for related addresses if users enter vague starting locations, as sometimes knowing the exact details of where you are ‘right now’ is difficult.

The widgets are great for users and add a nice bit of functionality to sites. However, they’re only good for showing users where you’re located. If you want Google to know, and to rank you accordingly, you’ll still need to tell the search engines where your bricks and mortar store is located. And that means using the text on the page to convey it. You can’t leave it up to the gadget.

This helps you in 2 ways.

1) It improves the stickness on your website. Users don’t need to leave your website to find directions.

2) It helps to improve your Local Search SEO.

As a smart small business owner, you want to make sure you cover your bases, so here’s a couple more tips:

1. Grab the directions widget to make it easy for users to map out and find your  location.
2. Create a detailed, keyword-rich Directions page to make it easy for search engines to map out your location and consequently improve your SEO.

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

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However one of most important steps is most of the time forgotten – Landing pages.

This “little” detail may be the main reason you are losing money on your campaigns.

One of the most underutilised tactics in Internet Marketing is landing pages.

Landing pages have been discussed since Internet marketing started with emails and display ads. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that people talk about and write about more than they actually do.

For the sake of this article, a landing page is defined as the web page that a prospect “lands” on after clicking on a link – any link – from an email, a CPC campaign, search engine result, inbound link from another website, newsletter; you get the idea.

In essence, every landing page you develop (in fact, every website page) should have a specific goal (inspired by Seth Godin):

-          Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s).

-          Get a visitor to buy.

-          Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration of course.

-          Get a visitor to tell a friend.

-          Improve your Market Position in the visitor’s mind.

-          (and the more subtle) Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback

As Gavin Heaton once wrote – “Every page is sacred, EVERY page. You always need to consider the upstream and the downstream”

A great competitive advantage.

I cannot understand why marketers don’t spend enough time and energy in building the last, and probably most important, step in the Internet marketing process.

Most websites create their landing pages as their campaigns launch, and they leave them alone until they collapse under their own weight.

As more companies find out about the advantages of Internet marketing, and fighting for places on SERP’s or a better position on PPC campaigns increase in competitiveness, testing and improving your landing pages help you to optimise your ROI converting more visitors for less cost.

Loveday and Niehaus, the authors of Web Design for ROI, discuss some unique issues for landing pages, which I’ve summarised below:

* They have to essentially perform the entire sales process.

The landing page (remember what Gavin says) must offer a product, service, or information, capture your visitor’s attention long enough to pique his or her interest and ultimately want to convert, and entice the user to take action (fill out a form, provide payment, etc). Basically, your landing page has to act as your best salesperson. That’s a lot to ask of one little page.

* They have to capture attention very quickly.

People skim, scan, and scoot. Your landing page has only a few precious seconds to keep your visitor from hitting the back button.

* They’re viewed by a lot of new eyeballs.

A lot of new visitors see your landing page compared to your built-in audience. These new people probably aren’t going to know what your site’s about or whether it’s representing a reputable company.

Below you can find a list for guidelines:

1.Establish credibility.
2.Make sure your design looks professional to your audience and is industry-appropriate.
3.Include positive resources and testimonials when necessary or useful
4.Make sure nothing’s broken eg. links to a YouTube video.
5.Simplify and separate.
6.Reduce or eliminate navigation.
7.Minimise your branding.
8.Think of your landing page as a continuation of your ad.
9.Don’t make promises you can’t (or won’t) keep.
10.Re-iterate your ad’s call to action.
11.Use consistent graphics and images.
12.Keep the language consistent.
13.Segment for different audiences/customers.
14.Personalise for your visitor.
15.User fewer but better graphics.
16.Make sure the medium is what’s best for your offer.
17.Speak the customer’s language, not yours.
18.Emphasis benefits, not features.
19.Weed out all but the most essential points.
20.Cover all your bases.
21.Be intelligent about how you display your information.
22.Provide a clear call to action.
23.Consider providing a secondary call to action (don’t overdue it – it can cause a paradox of choice)
24.Provide offline alternatives.
25.Don’t request more than the minimum information necessary.
26.Make your buttons look like buttons.

There are different tools available (Google optimizer is a great free one) that help you to test.

Before releasing Internet Marketing Academy, my team ran more than seven variations of landing pages. There were variations with and without clients testimonials, videos and other combinations. We learnt a lot!

One of the combinations gave us around 200% more conversions, just by changing few key elements.

Only testing will tell what is better for your website. The more you test, the more profitable (useful) your website will become.

Once you have evolved a combination producing profitable results, you then have your new “control” level and you can start testing new ways to beat it.

It will cost you more time, but it will also increase your ROI.

In this case more is more.

(Obs I originaly publish this article on Digital Ministry website)

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Each section also features a marketer profile with brands such as Deloitte, Dell, Commonwealth Bank, Jaguar, and Subway.

On the Search and Online Marketing section it couldn’t be better, real guns Julian Persuad, Phil Duffield and more.

I couldn’t be happier to be part of the “around the Table” on Search and Online Marketing section. Good work and thanks to Sean and Kate.

Read the edition and be prepared to 2011.

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Lucio’s Ribeiro note:

It is a privilege to have Danny Sullivan guest posting to Marketing Easy. For those who don’t know Danny Sulivan is probably the number one SEO professional in the world. He writes and edits Search Engine Land. When we swapped emails, I suggested he wrote about Basics of SEO and what it means to a business. Voila, he brings now this post. I hope you guys like. Dan, thanks very much for you collaboration

Understanding Why You Need SEO

Before you can understand the reasons for using SEO, it might be good to have a definition of what SEO — search engine optimization — is. It’s probably a safe assumption that if you are here reading MarketingEasy.net, you have some understanding of SEO, so I’ll keep it simple. SEO is the science of customizing elements of your web site to achieve the best possible search engine ranking. That’s really all there is to search engine optimization, but as simple as it sounds, don’t let it fool you. Both internal and external elements of the site affect the way it’s  ranked in any given search engine, so all of these elements should be taken into consideration.

Good SEO can be very difficult to achieve, and great SEO seems pretty well impossible at times.

Why is search engine optimization so important? Think of it this way: If you’re standing in a crowd of a few thousand people and someone is looking for you, how will they find you? In a crowd that size, everyone blends together.

Now suppose there is a system that separates groups of people. Maybe if you’re a woman you’re wearing red and if you’re a man you’re wearing blue.

Now anyone looking for you will have to look through only half the people in the crowd. You can further narrow the group of people to be searched by adding additional differentiators until you have a small enough group that a search query can be executed and the desired person can be easily found. Your web site is much like that one person in the huge crowd. In the larger picture your site is nearly invisible, even to the search engines that send crawlers out to catalog the Web. To get your site noticed, both by crawlers and visitors, certain elements must stand out. That’s why you need search engine optimization — to help you focus on the right elements.

By accident, your site will surely land in a search engine; and it’s likely to rank within the first few thousand results without any effort from you.

A crawler will eventually find the site and bury it somewhere in the results with every other web site on the same topic.

Clearly, that’s not good enough. Being ranked on the ninth or tenth page of search results is tantamount to being  invisible.

To be noticed, your site should be ranked much higher and for the right keywords, the ones that translate to a business opportunity for you.

Ideally, you want your site to be displayed somewhere on the first two to three pages of results. Most people won’t look beyond the third page, if they get even that far.

Indeed, it’s the sites that  land on the first page of results that get the most traffic, and traffic is translated into revenue, which is the ultimate goal of search engine optimization.

To achieve a high position in search results, your site must be more than simply recognizable by a search engine crawler. It must satisfy a set of criteria that not only gets the site cataloged, but can also get it cataloged above most (if not all) of the other sites that fall into that category or topic.

This is no easy task. Some of the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines your site’s rank in a set of results include the following:

• Anchor text
• Site popularity
• Link context
• Topical links
• Title tags
• Keywords
• Site language
• Content

Site maturity It is estimated that there are at least several hundred other criteria that could also be examined before your site is ranked by a search engine.

Some of the preceding criteria also have multiple points of view. For example, when looking at link context, a crawler might take into consideration  where the link is located on the page, what text surrounds it, and where it leads to or from. These criteria are also weighed differently.

For some search engines, links are more important than site maturity; and for others, links have little importance.

These weights and measures are  constantly changing, so even trying to guess what is most important at any given time is a pointless exercise. Just as you figure it out, the criteria will shift or change completely.

Many of the elements used in search engine rankings are likely to have some impact on your site ranking, even when you do nothing to improve them. However, without your attention, you’re leaving the search ranking of your site to chance.

That’s like opening a business without putting out a sign. You’re sure to get some traffic, but because You’re sure to get some traffic, but because people don’t know you’re there, it won’t be anything more than the curiosity of passersby.

Danny Sullivan

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Unlike most marketing efforts, the bigger you are, the harder search marketing is. We know that in marketing, size has inherent advantages. The bigger the budget, the more advertising you can buy, the more free media coverage you can coax, the better a public relations person you can hire, and on and on. But search marketing is different.

Amazon may rank well when a searcher searches for “sony dvd player”—possibly even higher than Sony’s Web site.

Ecommerce and content-management based sites can have hundreds of thousands to millions of pages, products, and keywords.

Understanding search engine behaviour and how to sample and measure search engine data will lay the groundwork for effective rankings management and tracking.

Ranking and Analytics

A large e-commerce site can easily be targeting thousands to millions of keywords phrases, but it is not possible to run a ranking report with that many keywords.

Search engines do not allow for it, and the report would be indecipherable. To make such a task manageable, you must establish a structured process incorporating rankings, trends, and reporting.

Step 1: Setting up ranking categories

The primary goal is to determine keyword rankings and their baseline information, as well as your search engine traffic and its baseline information, by setting up ranking categories or levels. Whether you have an ecommerce site or a content management system, there are generally levels of pages on your website. Using Amazon.com as an example, this type of ecommerce site usually has four levels:

• Level1: Home Page
• Level2: Category pages
• Level3: Subcategory pages
• Level4: Product pages

The primary level is the Home Page.

While it can rank for thousands of keywords, it is optimal to track 25-100 keyword phrases there, some of which will be duplicates from category pages. Since the homepage is the most trusted and authoritative page of a website, it is important to include all pertinent keywords. Keywords that Amazon.com are likely to track at the home page level are “amazon”,  “books”, “electronics”, etc.

At the category level, recommendations are to track 5-10 primary keywords phrases on each category page. If your site has 10 category pages, you may have 100 primary keyword phrases you’re tracking across all categories.

Examples for Amazon.com are: “new books”, “digital camera”, “hd dvd”, etc.

The third level is the subcategory level. Depending on the size of your website, you may have 20, 500 or 5,000 subcategories. This extensive range affects the strategy used to identify keywords to track. If you have a small number of subcategories (20 or less), track 5-10 primary keywords for each page – the same strategy as the category level.

If your website has over 30 subcategories, use a sampling approach.

Group the subcategories in three groups

• High popularity
• Average popularity
• Unpopular

Next, identify 150-250 keyword phrases from each group. Keep in mind that it is important to have sampling data established to measure the overall visibility percentage for this level. Examples of keywords Amazon.com may track at this level are “science fiction books”, “point and shoot digital cameras” and “new dvd releases”.

The fourth and final level is the product level.

Most ecommerce sites have anywhere from 50 to millions of products. Since it’s nearly impossible to monitor every piece of product, use the same sampling strategy recommended for the subcategory level. Group your products into 3 categories:

• High popularity (30-50 keywords)
• Average popularity (100 keywords)
• Unpopular (100 keywords)

The ideal is to define 250 keywords or less. Use this sampling data as representation of your overall rankings. Examples of keywords Amazon.com may target at this level are “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” and “Canon powershot pro series digital camera”.

Step 2: How to configure and interpret reports for big websites?

Now you know how to set up keywords, identify categories, and create sampling data, let’s understand how to determine your rankings in each area, which will help you understand your website’s trust level.

Using ranking report software is preferable, since manual preparation would be extremely time-intensive, taking a week or longer to complete (try : http://www.advancedwebranking.com/or http://www.webposition.com/product/webpositionpro/features.asp ).

First, you begin creating different projects using the software’s utilities. Treat each category you defined at the subcategory and product levels as an individual project. Run, monitor, and evaluate each project independently every week or two.

Google, Yahoo and Bing are the main search engines to query. No need to include some others (example AOL), as it is powered by Google and it shows almost the same results.

Let’s assume you have now implemented an on-page and off-page SEO strategy.

Once you are running reports, examine your average rankings growth. Be sure to configure data in a readable format so it’s easy to analyse on Excel.

Step 3: Baseline and managing analytics

Analytics is another essential tool in determining your website’s performance. If you have not implemented an Analytics solution, I’d highly recommend Google Analytics as one of the best solutions available (and it’s free).

Also, as a suggestion, please remember to check your server bots for further information.

Although analytics will include data about all search engine traffic to your website, concentrate on organic traffic numbers for this purpose, since the number of visitors gained on paid search ads does not help determine SEO success.

Once you examine the organic traffic volume for your site, the strong and weak keyword phrases will become obvious. It is essential you ensure your baseline branded vs non-branded keywords.

Note: At  The Online Circle we see SEO as more than simple rankings. We focus on effective SEO that brings value for your business. We use different measures for different needs. One of the measures we use is the increase of users using more than branded names to find your website over time. It’s a way we guarantee that your website is not just being found using your brand keywords. The idea behind this is that once search engines start to present your website with relevant generic keywords, this demonstrates that your website is becoming more known and popular.

Example: if we were to look at the Amazon.com report, their number-one referring keyword is likely to be “amazon”, while the second and third most popular are likely to be “amazon.com” and “www.amazon.com”. Internet users often search this way to find websites with good brand recognition.

Keywords that include your brand will likely already rank well because search engines organically rank your brand well.

Optimising and Maximising results

After the reports are organised and completed, begin to use the data. Pinpoint keywords and phrases that need better rankings and traffic. Discover what categories and sub categories are invisible to search engines and dedicate resources to those areas.

This information will guide your SEO strategy. Implementing your recommendations properly and effectively will help to increase organic traffic and website profits.

Step 1

Someone is responsible for making changes to your site. Good business practice dictates you discuss the importance of search marketing with IT resources to make sure they understand what is coming and what you want to accomplish.

If they know they are helping to improve company sales they will also know their value to the company also increases. People do their job best when they know the strategy and know they can proactively contribute to the bottom line.

Also remember to conduct regular checks on your recommendations and the related implementations. Creating and completing a checklist with the action items to be fulfilled is an effective technique.

Step 2

Implement on-site SEO, page by page and site wide changes.

Assess your website page by page when working with webmaster tools or putting together recommendations. Address the homepage, category pages and, if possible, subcategory pages. As with determining keyword categories, define the needs specific to each area to help organise and prioritise optimisation efforts.

If you go beyond subcategories, site wide changes are needed to modify the way titles, description tags and content blocks are created and displayed on the website.

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

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Google has now rolled out a special embedded gadget you can use on your wesbite or blog. Use this gadget to see what people are searching for on your own website. For example, show your readers which American Idol contestants are searched for the most.

Google Trends is a great way to see what’s popular on the web — people tend to search for what they care about — and the Trends gadget makes it easy for you to put Trends on your website. Just cut and paste a small snippet of code, input your search terms, and you can show your readers, for example, how SEM and SEO is far more searched than Social Media and you can use as justification and prove of a post argument.

The gagdets are

• Based on search query volume
• Updated daily
• Scale is based on average traffic

Get one for your blog / website acessing Google Trends.

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

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