Seems like Google Analytics was more popular than the folk over at Google had originally forecasted with Google temporarily suspending any new sign ups to their new free web analytics service.

The announcement which initially threw the web analytics market into disarray seems to have its impact slightly softened by this temporary suspension of new sign ups. Also, many existing web analytics providers will want to investigate the Google Analytics service further to compare the features with their existing service.

If you have an e-commerce site for example, data can take up to 6 hours to flow into your account and for someone which looks at their web analytics data several times/day, this lag can be quite irritating.

For this reason if you do spend hundreds or thousand of dollars per month on Google Adwords, it may not be a bad idea to have an independent company providing the results of how those ads perform at a comparatively small cost. HitsLink for example can provide such a service and offers real time reporting so you know within seconds from which campaign a sale had originated from.

If you want to begin measuring what is and is not working for you, you may register for a free 30 day trial here.

Posted by Peter Gavalas at 2:26 AM GMT | View Post | 0 Comments

Ever since Google's latest Jagger update was associated with possible changes of how Google views incoming links to a website, link building has been in the spotlight. Let's go back to the basics and see what link building is all about, and how it can help (or hurt) your website's ranking.

What is link building?

Link building is the process of obtaining incoming links to your website. There are several ways to get incoming links for your site. You can

• Submit your site to directories and search engines
• Exchange links with other sites, which means you link to them in exchange for them linking to you
• Buy links outright - there are companies that offer to sell links on various sites on a monthly basis
• Obtain links through public relations activities, for example by including your website address in press releases or in interviews of company staff that are published online.

Why should you have incoming links?

Incoming links are an important search engine optimization technique because they are seen as a measure of your site's popularity. The theory is that the more sites link to your site, the more authoritative, relevant and important your site must be for the topic in question. This theory worked fine before search engine spammers came along. Spammers quickly realized that there way ways to increase the number of incoming links really quickly, and tried to get high rankings that way. Therefore, the number of links alone isn't enough - you also have to make sure that your incoming links are of good quality.

What is a good quality link versus a poor quality link?

In the context of link building, a good quality link is one that is highly relevant to your topic. In addition, the "reputation" of the site linking to you can also influence how your site's quality is perceived. Most importantly, the inbound links should send qualified traffic to your site. Here's an example:

Imagine your company sells plastic piping mainly to the mining industry. You could get a high quality link if a trade publication has published your company profile online and links to you stating that you are one of the leading suppliers, or if the local Chamber of Commerce lists you in an online mining supply directory.

Poor quality links are those that have no relevance whatsoever to the topic of your website. This includes things link adding your link to a random online guestbook or blog.


What should you avoid at any cost?

• Link Farms. Link farms are sites that just contain long lists of unrelated links for the only purpose of increasing link popularity. This might have worked in the past, but certainly doesn't help your ranking anymore nowadays.
• There are some sites that call themselves "directories", but all they really do is scrape search results or paid ads from search engines like Google and Yahoo! in an effort to profit from click fraud. This scraping creates a bad neighbourhood for any legitimate links. Such sites may offer you premium placement within their "directory structure", which you should stay away from!
• The "too good to be true" offers. If someone offers to create thousands of links for you overnight, they are probably using spamming techniques, such as spamming blogs or spamming email lists with link requests. Stay away - if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

How do you get started building high quality links?

• It's not easy, but if you want relevant, high quality links, you should compile a list of relevant sites and email them individually requesting links to your site. To make this deal more attractive for them, you could offer a reciprocal link in return. In addition, other sites will be much more likely to link to you if your site contains good content. So make sure you can present relevant, well-written articles or facts that are valuable to anyone interested in the specific topic of your site.
• Submit your site to (legitimate) directories. Directory listings are a great way to get quality inbound links. Some directories might list you for free, others, like the Yahoo! directory, can cost you several hundred dollars a year. Especially if we are talking about such a big and heavily trafficked directory like Yahoo!, this is probably a very useful investment.
• Buying links outright from commercial providers can be helpful. However, don't just buy a link on the strength of a page's PageRank rating. Google's PageRank has become less important in assessing the quality of inbound links, and you should really buy links on the basis that they will provide you with qualified traffic. A page with great PageRank, but where no one clicks on your link, is not enough.
• There are a number of inexpensive online press release distribution services. If you have a newsworthy event, consider releasing an online press release. If this press release contains your website address and gets picked up by online news sites, you can create a number of new incoming links at once. But remember - press releases only get picked up if they are newsworthy; the launch of your redesigned website probably won't qualify.
• You can also try to passively obtain more inbound links by improving the quality of your website content and making it so interesting that people will want to link to your site, without you having to ask them. This again depends on interesting, original and relevant content. Including a blog on your site is an easy way to add new content regularly, and you could also consider offering free tools that others might find useful.
  

Posted by Nancy Hackett at 2:14 AM GMT | View Post | 9 Comments

With Halloween come and gone, this year's holiday shopping season is just around the corner. Findings by Forrester Research suggest that online holiday sales in 2005 are likely to be 25% higher than in 2004, reaching an amazing $18 billion! Hot online shopping categories this year will include women's apparel, toys, and consumer electronics.

While good organic search engine optimization (SEO) takes time to deliver results, this doesn't mean that you should neglect organic SEO. In addition, there are a few other tricks that you can use to boost your holiday season sales. Make sure 2006 ends on a high note for you!

1. Promote your holiday offers on your site and in your advertising.
   Your customers will love any special offers during the holiday season, especially deals like free shipping, free gift-wrapping, freebies with purchases, discounts, or charitable donations of part of the sales proceeds. Make sure your offers are highly visible throughout your site, and most of all on those pages where customers put items in your shopping cart and proceed to the checkout. The same offers can also attract more people to your website in the first place, so it's a good idea to use them in any external advertising you do.
   
   
2. Make it easy for your customers to find the brands you sell.
   If you are selling popular brands, make sure your customers can find them easily from any entry point of your website. And again, mentioning brands in external advertising helps to attract more targeted customers to your website.
   
   
3. Emphasize convenience.
   Men hate shopping - even more so when gas prices are soaring and shopping malls are overcrowded. This means males are a prime target for your marketing messages focusing on the convenience of shopping online at your website. Free shipping offers will really help to reinforce this message!
   
   
4. Prepare your customer service team.
   When traffic to your site increases, your customer service team will also be busy with more enquiries from your website. You might have to expand your customer service team temporarily to ensure you can deliver the high standard of customer service your customers are used to. Especially with new staff, it is critical that they are well trained on the special holiday offers that are available, and are able to close a sale effectively.
   
   
5. Plan ahead for your post-holiday sales.
   Before you head off and enjoy the holiday break yourself, prepare a plan to remove or update holiday content from your site and finalize your campaigns to attract post-holiday bargain hunters. Any external advertising, like pay-per-click advertising campaigns, should be coordinated to tie in with the content of your site, so update or create new landing pages or promotions. Depending on your type of business, you might even want to start thinking about Valentine’s Day!

Posted by Nancy Hackett at 2:38 AM GMT | View Post | 0 Comments