seobridges.com

After you determine which blogs are the most popular with your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or people from other social networking sites, go to those blogs and figure out what made them so popular.  It’s easy to assume the content alone makes your blogs popular, and that might be the case.  Though, if you go to the blog I mentioned yesterday, you’ll see right away that how that blog’s laid out probably had something to do with it’s popularity.  The layout made it easy to read.  So, I can use that to go through all of my past blogs and make them as user friendly as that one.

Now, before we forget about Google Analytics,  use it to determine how people found that particular blog.  Below the main graph, you’ll see a drop down tab defaulted to “Content Detail.”  From there you can select “Navigation Summary,” “Entrance Paths,” “Entrance Sources,” or “Entrance Keywords.” Most people found that particular blog by searching for the keywords “social media monitoring” or “social media marketing” via a search engine or via the search engine on my site.

Yesterday, I said those people who visit your site from Facebook, Twitter, or other social networking sites are good barometers for the types of people who visit your site from search engines.  Since most people found my site or that blog using the keywords “social media marketing” or “social media monitoring,” I can get a better idea of which friends or followers (or at least the types of friends or followers) from those particular social networking sites might come to or be interested in the information I provide or services I offer.

Of course, Facebook has not yet offer a way to to filter through your friends by what they’re talking about or interested in learning more about.  The closest you can get is by going to your friends list and searching by interest.  Though, I only have one friend on my friends list (out of more than 900 friends) who has marked ‘social media’ as one of her interests, and I wrote the blog I used as an example yesterday before she was on my list.  Now, I just need to figure out a way to figure out the types of people who might be coming to my site from Facebook or other social networks.

Any Ideas?

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Today, let’s look at how you can use your Facebook visitors to determine what types of people are visiting your site.  If you didn’t read my blog yesterday, you might want to read yesterday’s blog Welcome to Google Analytics Sniper Training School before you read today’s blog.  For those who read yesterday’s blog, after you’ve figured out what pages or blogs people are going to on your site from Facebook the most, determine what about those pages or blogs attracts people.

Once you select Landing Page and Visitor Type, two more drop down boxes will appear.  You can use those tabs to find out more about your new and returning visitors from Facebook, such as how many pages those users who visited particular blogs visited, the average amount of time they spent on your site, the average bounce rate, and more.  Most visitors to my site from Facebook go to my homepage, but I determined my most popular was Using Google Analytics as a Social Media Monitoring Tool.

Once you’ve determined which of your blogs receives the most amount of attention from your Facebook friends, open a new tab to determine how those visitors interacted with that blog compared to visitors from other sources.  To find this go:

Content >> Top Content >> Find that blog from the bottom, right section of the page

That blog was one of my more popular blogs with all my visitors.  When you click on it, you can compare visitors to that page from Facebook to visitors to that page in general.  My Facebook friends seemed to appreciate that blog more than visitors from elsewhere, which means I might want to write more blogs like that to attract more of my Facebook friends.

Again I can use this method to find out more about people who visit my site via Twitter and other social networking sites.  Of course, I can also use this method with people who find my site via search engines, but unless that person leaves a comment you can’t interact with that person.  Okay, so you may not be able to interact with people who visit your site via social networking sites unless they comment on your blog or retweet it or other.

Though, regardless of whether you have 100 or 5,000 friends on Facebook and 10 or 20,000 followers on Twitter, a certain type of person befriended you or follows you.  I mention this to say that just as those blogs that were the most popular to my Facebook friends are my most popular blogs all around, people who befriend and follow you are a pretty good barometer of the type of people who are coming to your site via search engines.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

I’m going to teach you how to target your visitors to get more out of your blogs.  Here are some statistics for you: 23.24% of all traffic to my site comes from referring sites, many of those visitors come from social networking sites, and 5.79% of all visitors to my site come from Facebook.  The numbers go on, but I won’t bore you.  Except for one: 87.3% of all people who visit my site from Facebook are new.  If you want to follow along in Google Analytics, go into your profile, set your analytics tool to a certain date range, then select:

Traffic Sources >> Referring Sites >> Facebook (or whichever referring site you want to use).

Find the blue box that says “Referral Path”.  You may see one or more paths from your chosen referral source to your site, depending on how viral your message went.  Facebook isn’t as viral as Twitter.  So, the path to your Facebook page is probably first.

After you click there, click on the squiggly lines to the left of visits, which will reveal a graph of when people went to my site.  Below the graph, above where you just clicked, you’ll notice you’re in the “Site Usage” tab.  Below that is the blue word “None”.  Click on that, look over to last word in the first column, and select “Landing Page”.  Now, another box titled “None” will appear to the right of “Landing Page”.  Click that, click “Visitor type”, and check out what pages are attracting new and returning visitors.

So, it should look like this:

None >> Landing Page then look to the right None >> Visitor Type

This will tell you what types of visitors from Facebook (new or returning) are landing on which pages in your site.  Now, you can play with these two filters to find out quite a bit about the users who come to your site from your chosen referral site.  This graph also shows how long they’re staying on those pages, the average bounce rates for their visits, and how many pages on average per visit people who go to those particular pages are going to.

There’s much more you can do here, but I am going to let you explore.  You can also follow the same steps with Twitter, Google, or any other medium.  The point is to focus one type of visitor, figure out what type of information attracts that type of visitor, and use that to your advantage.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

After you’ve identified which pages result in your highest bounce and/or exit rates and you’ve fixed those pages, move on to see where you’re getting the most love from.  If you’re watching your analytics on Google, they categorize your visitors according to direct traffic, search engine traffic, referring sites, and other.  If you’re unsure of what these are, I explained them in this blog: The X and Y Factors of SEO.

Since everyone knows search is dead, you can disregard what your analytics says about Google sending the most (or a large portion of) traffic to your site.  All Web analytics platforms have just not updated their systems to show that search is dead, and Google (being dead itself) is of course going to tell you that they send a large portion of traffic to your site.

If you’re name is Sheldon Cooper, you probably didn’t get that that last paragraph was sarcasm (Bazinga!).  For the rest of us, since a large portion of our traffic comes from search engines, we want to pay attention to our content.  I blogged about this last week in a blog titled, Google Analytics and Keyword Density.

The point is to figure out who’s sending you the most amount of traffic and pander to their every whim.  Okay, don’t pander to their every whim, but figure out what you’re saying that attracts people from those sites to your site.  What specific blogs or pages are they going to?  What are you talking about?  Talk about those topics more.  What are they talking about?  Answer their questions, and involve them in discussions.  Find out what the people want to know, and tell them what they want to know.  It’s that simple.  Kind of.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

If you write Web/SEO content, you write.  You may not write well, but you write.  And the secret writing well is stealing from others who write better.  No, I don’t mean plagiarism.  I mean finding out what works and adapting what works to your own writing style.  Any good writer will tell you not to try something new, especially when you are a new writer.  Find out what works, and figure out how to adapt your voice to what works.  Take for example Stephanie Meyer and the Twilight Series.  There’s nothing new about vampires, but she gave them a modern-day twist.  So, what does this have to do with Web content?

First, If you want to decrease your site’s bounce rate, find out what pages have the highest bounce rates, find sites that rank in the top ten for your keywords on the major search engines, go to those pages on their sites where you’re having issues with your bounce rates, and figure out what they do on those pages to keep people around longer.

Second, do the same thing with those pages with the highest exit rates.  Many times those pages with the highest bounce rate will also have the highest exit rates, since people are exiting them within seconds of finding them.  Though, that may not always be the case.  Whether it is or not, figure out what you’re doing wrong, find websites that are doing things right, and learn from them.

If you can learn from them and improve on what they’re doing, you’ll find your bounce and/or exit rates on those pages will go down.  Though, remember, not all exits from a website are bad.  Sometimes, it means the person found what they wanted to find.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#Google #Google#Analytics #Keyword#Density #Website#Optimization #Google#Instant #Keyword#Monitoring

Yesterday, I showed that Google Instant is sending people to pages more specified to their searches.  I understand there is a temptation to create a website in such a way that will lure people in and make them want to stay for the next ten hours.  If you’re Mark Zuckerberg, then have a blast.  As for the rest of us, we want to find information quickly and easily.  Well, guess what?  So, do the people searching through your website.  So, today, let’s look at those keywords people are finding my site with.

1.    SEO Bridges
2.    San Diego Marketing
3.    Add Content Agency (They spelled it ‘Add’)
4.    Content Agency
5.    Social Networking Sites List
6.    “San Diego” Networking
7.    San Diego SEO
8.    San Diego Social Media Agency
9.    SEO Content Social Media Marketing
10.   SEO Open Source Monitor

There are others, but those are enough.  There aren’t enough people searching ‘SEO Bridges’ for me to want to optimize that anymore.  Aside from that, since that is the title of my site, there is very little chance that I will never rank first for that keyword.  There are quite a few people searching for ‘San Diego Marketing,’ most of which are people here in San Diego county.  Since I want to optimize locally, that’s a good keyword to optimize my site for.  There are also quite a few people searching for the term ‘Social networking sites list,’ but most of those people are in India.  I think you guys are great, and I love Indian food, but since you’re not my target market, I’m not going to optimize for those keywords.

So, I am going to optimize for that key term ‘San Diego Marketing.’  Of course, I want to continue to optimize my site more for SEO Content, Web content, social media, social media marketing, and social media monitoring.  The point is if you want to optimize your site, peruse Google Analytics (or whatever analytics program you use), and decipher which keywords do and don’t work.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Before getting too far into the process of SEO, you want to make sure you have a Google Analytics (GA) and a Google Webmasters (GW) account.  Even if you target Yahoo or Bing, you’ll still want those two accounts.

GA is a great way to monitor activity on your site, such as user click behavior, which pages rank well, what keywords bring users to your site, and various other SEO metrics.  If you don’t already have an account, you can sign in with your Google account or you can create a new account.

For those who want to monitor how users interact with the sites via social media, many social media monitoring services integrate with GA.  And people with a WordPress site can integrate GA onto their site using a plug-in.

GW is a great resource for Webmasters of all levels to learn and share.  You can search through a plethora of questions, answers and blogs for the best and most up-to-date information on just about any Web and/or SEO related question you might have.

To search for answers to your questions, once you have an account, sign in and go to Google 101.  Type in the keyword(s) of your question (use quotes for phrases) and click go.  It will bring up everything from Google’s blog and forum.

You’ll also want to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools, using the button on the left that says “Adding a site.”  After you’ve added your site, Google wants to know that you own the site, so all the way to the right there’s a button to verify you’re site.  Click on that, choose one of the four ways to verify your site, and follow the directions.

Those are the basics of getting started with SEO on your site.  Tomorrow, we’ll go back to looking at the most important stories in social media marketing.   Come back to find out if Steve Jobs is considering a Facebook buyout.  I’ve heard rumors.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

For those who take the time to learn how to navigate it correctly, Google Analytics can be a very effective social media monitoring tool. Here are four ways to use Google Analytics to monitor the sentimentality of how people are engaging with your site. These four methods monitor bounce rate, but don’t forget to monitor exit pages.

1. Traffic Sources >> All Traffic Sources >> View Full Report (Located at the bottom of top traffic sources): Check your site’s bounce rate from people coming from social networking and social bookmarking sites. Stop posting to social networking sites where your bounce rate is the highest and more often where it is the lowest.

2. Traffic Sources >> Search Engines: Click on the search engines, and you’ll see which words people are searching for that are causing a high or low bounce rates. Change your blogging style according to your bounce pattern.

3. Content >> Content by Title: Look at which blogs people are going to most often and which blogs have the lowest bounce rates, and change your blogging style accordingly.

4. Visitors >> Visitor Trending >> Bounce Rate: On the right side, above the graph, select the clock: See what hours people are less likely to bounce from your site and post links to your blogs in social bookmarking sites at those times.

Are there any other ways you use Google Analytics as a Social Media Monitoring tool? I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Stay social,

Erick