Analytics is the doctor of your website. Imagine you have a site with a lot of traffic, but you don’t know from where they are coming, why they are coming and what they are doing to your site. Will you be able to do business?

Analytics helps us to know about the traffic and helps us to improve the quality of the traffic.

How to get analytics?

Most web servers offer free analytics service also known as logfiles. But the problem with web server analytics/ logfiles is that they are a bit complex to understand. Not many webmasters use web logfiles to know about their traffic.

Another problem with logfiles is that they offer limited data. They are also raw un-processable data. For example if you need to search for a keyword’s total number of occurrence for a given period, these logfiles will be of no help. You will have to manually do it. Its not only time consuming but very hard to do too.

How can you get a good web analytics software?

There are many web analytics software online. Some are paid and some free. I recommend Google Analytics because its free and it gives enough data for anyone to take a decision.

Why is web analytics important?

Web analytics gives you a lot of information about the traffic of your website. For example you can know the total traffic, unique traffic, total pageviews, referrers (ie. who referred the visitors to your site), keywords using which the visitors came to your site, entry pages, exit pages, total conversions etc.

Analytics is more important for people who are doing business through their website. However if you have a personal website without any business objective, you may not need analytics.

Analytics helps to take important business decisions. Let’s take an example. You have website that sells t-shirts. You sell red, blue, green and white t-shirts. For some strange reason you sell red t-shirts more than others. You want know why? So you dig into your website’s analytics.

Looking into the analytics you find that your site has come in top ranks in the search engines for the keyword “red t-shirts” because of two reasons:

1. 65% of the keywords contained “red t-shirts”.
2. 75% of traffic was from the search engines.

To check you searched for “red t-shirts” in the search engines and found that your site was ranked 3rd. You are happy. Who gave you this information? Web Analytics!

Based on what you found out, you can take a lot of good business decisions. For example make red t-shirts more, write more content related to red t-shirts to stay in the top rankings of the search engines, offer a discount on the second red t-shirt and more.

This is a small example of why analytics are important and how can they help you in your business.

Your website may be getting a lot of traffic, but if your conversion rates are low you may need to test/change a few things to improve your website’s conversion rate. Even if you feel the conversion rate it ok, you can test to see if it improves.

Before I say any further let me give you an example of why improving your conversion rate is important.

Suppose your website gets 100 hits a day and your conversion rate is 1%. Let’s also suppose you make a profit of $50 per sale. So for every 100 visitors you make $50. One day a friend of yours saw your website and advised you to change a few things that he thought would help improve conversions. You did. The next month you noticed your conversion rate doubled to 2%. Since you are now making 2 sales per 100 visitors – you are actually making a profit of $100 per 100 visitors to your site. Got the picture?

You did some changes and wow, you ended up making more than you previously did. Note that your advertising cost and/or maintenance cost remains the same still you make more. Your actual profits go way up.

Coming back to the topic – how to improve conversion rate? Honestly the answer is not easy. The only answer is to know it by testing.

It’s important to know what you want to test on your website to improve conversions. Some ways to know what to test is this:

1. Ask some of your friends or colleagues to do an unbiased review of your site. Note down on a piece of paper what they say. If there is something common most of them are saying – this is something you need to test.

2. Study your log files. These sometimes contains goldmine hidden in them. The long tail keywords are the ones that will give you an idea of what exactly people are looking for in your site.

3. Run a feedback campaign for your visitors. You won’t believe what they have to say about your site. If they are saying you are asking too much for the product it means price needs to be tested. Similarly you will get some more ideas on things to test.

3. Go through website of your competitors. See their design, layout, product pricing, headlines, content etc. Compare with your site to get more ideas on things to test.

4. Read forums and blogs on your niche. You will get a lot of help.

If you don’t have time for all these – there are some common things that most of the webmasters test. You can try some of them. These are:

a) Headline – this is the most important thing to test. Visitors first read the headline of your site. If they don’t like they are off.

b) Sub-Headline – actually a combination of headline and sub-headline should be tested.

c) Price – sometimes selling at a higher price produces better results, and sometimes vice-versa. You need to test to know what works best for your site.

d) Content – Content is the king. In that case testing content makes sense.

e) Testimonials – you can test to see if testimonials present produces better results or no testimonials.

f) Length of the copy – this is a matter of debate among test marketers. It is widely believed that short copy works better than long copy. However have you noticed how many sites do we come across everyday with long copy, in fact very long copy? Test it.

Remember that testing to improve conversion rate is costly as it involves lot of thought, time and money. It’s also important to know what you want to test and why? A wrong decision and you end up testing what you shouldn’t have in the first place. The problem is you will realize only after the test phase is over. So be sure of everything before you start testing.

Important Advice: Keep a backup of all your files. In case your conversion rates drop, you can get back to the original site.

PPC or Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing is a way to market a website where the owner of the site pays money to the search engine that brings visitors to their site. It is also known as CPC or Cost Per Click Marketing. Needless to say the owner pays for every single click.

Pay per click is a very fast way of generating traffic to a site. You register with a search engine, write an ad and select some keywords that are associated with the ad. That’s it – within minutes you may start seeing traffic to your site.

Well its not so simple as it sounds! The problem is pay per click has evolved into a huge market and “buying” traffic for popular keywords is getting unaffordable day by day. I am talking about the business generating keywords.

Just to give you an example. If you are a realtor you may want to buy traffic for the keyword “real estate”. I am sure this will cost you about 2 dollars per click or even more in major search engines like Google and Yahoo. How many business people can afford that?

Important Note: There are many smaller PPC search engines. They may be cheaper. Don’t ever try your luck with them. Most of them send junk or robot generated traffic and you will loose your hard earned money. This is known as “click fraud” and requires another post.

Don’t make a gloomy face. Though the PPC is costly, there are ways to get traffic at a reasonable cost.

You must have heard about long tail keywords. A long tail keyword is a set of keywords or keyphrases which are actually long. For example “pay per click marketing service in Washington area” or “find a home under $25000”.

As you can see the long tail keywords are very specific searches and may produce high conversion rates. The only problem with long tail keywords is their volume is low. But long tails come at a much lower cost than primary keywords. So if you have just started a PPC campaign and are not a very rich person, I recommend using long tail keywords to start your PPC campaign.

Another way to reduce the price you pay per click is making sure your ad gets above average clicks than others that are competing with your ad. If your ad gets more clicks than others that are displayed along with your ad, the search engines will think your ad to be of “higher quality” and so will reduce the price you pay per click. Higher your click through rate (CTR) lower the price you pay per click. Please don’t click your own ads, the search engines have ways to know it and may not include your clicks in the CTR algorithm. Worse you may end up paying for your own clicks.

You should also make sure your landing page satisfies the need of the visitor. Search engines now days take into account the quality of the landing page too. The better the quality of the landing page, the lesser you pay.

Always keep a check on your ROI (Return on Investment). If you are not making any profit, it’s advisable to pause your PPC campaign.

If you keep these things in mind, I am sure you will have a profitable PPC campaign.

The definition SEO or Search Engine Optimization according to Wikipedia is “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords (a set of words).

During the last 6-7 years I met many people who thought that inserting desired keywords into the Title, Description and Keywords tag is good enough for top ranking. Even today many think the same. To some extend it may be true, but not enough.

Let’s take an example:

Try searching Google for “search engine optimization”. What to you see? Did you notice how many competitors are there for this keyword? There are millions. I guess at least half of them would have inserted the keyword in their Title, Description and Keywords tag. But how many got to top 10?

Common sense says there is more to SEO process than just stuffing keywords in your webpage tags.

What are they?

There are many factors and it’s impossible to write them all in one single page, though I shall try to give you some basic idea.

SEO was simple when search engines were evolving. I am talking about 1998-2003. Then on November 2003 Google changed the way it ranked the pages, and the rest of the search engines followed too. This changed algorithm is known as the “Florida Update” (unofficial name given by webmasters). From this day SEO became hard.

Prior to November 2003 two things were essential to get a high search engine ranking.

1) Keywords in Title, Description and Keywords tags.
2) Keywords stuffing 10-12 times in content of the page.

That’s it. Wait for a few days and wow you get your pages on top ranks. Well no more!

Keywords in Title, Description and Keywords tags are important to some extend even today. Though, I have my doubts on keywords stuffing in content of the page. These search engines are so smart that they will know that you have actually “stuffed” keywords in your page, and may not rank your page well for that keyword.

Insert the keywords if it’s really required in the content. You will gain nothing by stuffing keywords.

Another important factor is how many websites link to your site. This is known as “Link Popularity”. Search engines especially Google gives a lot of importance on link popularity. Google’s logic is that if a lot of sites have linked to a particular site, it must be of some value to the visitors, and therefore the site deserves a good rank.

Link popularity itself is a huge topic and I will discuss it some other day.

Make sure your site does not have any broken link. A broken link is a link pointing to a page that does not exist. These are also known as dead links and the search engines hate them.

Your websites content is important too. Imagine a site with hundreds of incoming links but little content. Do you think the search engines will rank the page well? The content has to be meaningful and offer some value to the visitor.

These are some basic points to rank well in the search engines.

Most importantly – remember to be honest and informative – the rest will fall in place automatically.