The Google Sandbox Theory Explored
April 28, 2008
Like with all things Google, the Sandbox theory is one of those theories and every online business owner should know about. I’ve read a number of definitions as to what exactly the Google Sandbox is and have come up with the following…
The Google Sandbox is a place where sites with new registered domains are allowed to “play”, this could also be effected by website domains that change owners. The principle is put in place to protect websites and control spamming websites that abuse search engine optimization techniques to gain a higher rank using either grey or black hat SEO tricks.
If your website falls into the sandbox and the majority of your traffic comes from organic search results, if your website is not spamming or abusing the search engines it will rank high again but it will just take some time. Some things that you can do in the meantime are…
- Improve your website’s search engine friendliness including SEO copywriting, Title Tags, Descriptions and Robots.txt file
- Improve your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing efforts
- Improve your community (Social marketing) efforts
Whether you are a business blogger, e-commerce shop or any other kind of web property owner does not mean that you will be in the Sandbox forever if your website.
Luc
Developing Campaign Process Analysis as it relates to Web Analytics – Part 1
April 24, 2008
When it comes to setting up a campaign for your company’s online marketing initiative the ability to create, analyze and optimize is huge but it doesn’t happen overnight. You need to understand the following points in the process and at the end be willing to optimize based on the results of the campaign and when it comes to online marketing or advertising statistics and more importantly web analytics play a big role in understanding and giving insight into your customers and how they access your web presence and make a buying decision.
- Define your business’ objectives
- Define conversion events on your website
- Define key performance metrics to measure your success
- Collect data and assess about your campaign
- Optimize your campaign and repeat the process
Today I want talk about the first point “Define your business’ objectives”. It is important just like it is in any business to know where you are heading and setting goals to get there is an important practice in online business just as it is when running an offline business. Website analytics or “web analytics” means that you measure the metrics of your web site using a tool like Google Analytics to improve your company’s web presence. Setting realistic and attainable goals is a corner stone of the success of your web presence. So what do I mean when I say “Define your business’ objectives”? Have a look…
Define your business’ objectives - What is the goal of your business?
When I mean, “what is the goal of your business?” I am asking a specific question and it deserves a specific answer, something similar to this…
“To improve sales of our widgets by 15% next quarter”
Or
“To grow revenue from our online membership channel of our business by 300% over the next 18 months”
Or
“To continue to double search engine traffic from Google every month for the next 18 months”
When you define a business objective clearly it becomes easy for a web analyst to measure the success based on the goal or the outcome of an online marketing campaign. This is the first step in defining campaign process analysis and I will write the four follow-up articles on the coming weeks. Hope you enjoyed this one!
Luc
Google, Yahoo! And MSN Webmaster Tools
April 18, 2008
I thought I would write a small article about the tools offered by the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo! And MSN) because a lot of times unless you are directly or indirectly involved in SEO you are not going to take the time to know these and these tools are very useful in telling you what is wrong with your website and also what you can do to improve your website for search engine consumption.
- Google Webmaster Tools – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Note: Having an XML sitemap ready to go on your website is a MUST to setting these accounts up and you will need to verify the site when you first submit it to these search engines. All of these are FREE to use but you must register an account to use each of them
Enjoy these tools!
Luc
SEO Analytics - Tracking Search Engine Optimization
April 16, 2008
SEO Analytics is a term that has to first do with the optimization of a website so that search engines can “crawl” the web pages in the website making them “search engine friendly”. Tracking how people come to a website, understanding their behaviours and developing based off of factual results is the main idea behind Analytics.
If you put the two terms together then you get “SEO Analytics” which is the combination of optimizing a website for search engines using both on-page factors and off-page factors combined with reporting of how the optimization is affecting the customers, viewers or whoever makes up your audience that comes to view your website and in turn creating an intelligence about the efforts of SEO and the facts of Analytics.
So what are some ways to track SEO Analytics?
Internal Site Search (aka “Site Search”) – This can show you how your customers search your website once they are on, what they are looking for and how long they spend looking for it. If you’d like to have a look at what kind of metrics are tracked by Internal Site Searches in Google Analytics, feel free to write my article about this.
Referring Sites - Tracking where traffic is being referred from can help you develop new areas of inbound links to your website.
Comparing Natural (Organic) vs. Paid search – This provides you a benchmark to see how your Search Engine Optimization compares to that of your paid efforts.
Keyword Lists – This is helpful because the keywords are provided from search engines like Google or Yahoo! And show you the terms, queries and phrases people use in finding a page on your website.
All of these areas are covered when you install a tool like Google Analytics or Microsoft AdCenter Analytics to track visitors that are coming to your website. They can influence the design, layout and flow of the website and allow you to see opportunities for your business just so long as you are looking for them.
Luc
Setting up Benchmarking in Google Analytics
April 13, 2008
I recently got an email from the fine folks at Google about some of the functionality that they are releasing into Google Analytics for Beta testing. One of these was the option to use benchmarking in your Google Analytics and I can think of a few reasons why Benchmarking is important especially as you further develop your web presence.
The biggest reason is “How does my online business compare to the competition?” and benchmarking provides you a way to see how you stack up to the industry standard because it is hard plan where you want to grow your business when you cannot track the health of your business. So how do you set this up?
- Login to your Google Analytics Account
- Click on the Website Profile you want to add benchmarking to
- Click on the “Visitors” category in your dashboard
- Beneath that select “Benchmarking (beta)” option
- Lastly, click “Accept” and activate this feature
If you want to see more Google says that it may take some time to see the benchmarking data come through. That then you can compare your website, web portal, e-commerce store, etc to industry verticals when analyzing your web presence.
Luc
