Tuesday, February 27, 2007

New Google Mini Integrates Google Analytics

Google's enterprise team has just released an update to the Google Mini that features integration with Google Analytics. The Google Mini is a hardware and software solution that businesses use to search internal corporate data, as well as public websites. By adding integration with Google Analytics, the Mini just became an even better solution for searching public websites. By adding Analytics tracking code into the search results, the Mini's administrator can understand what visitors are searching for and whether searchers are able to find the information they need. Previously Mini owners had to manually customize their search results to include tracking code, and the new integration makes this process much easier.

To configure a Google Mini to use Google Analytics, an admin need only set the Google Analytics account number inside of the Mini's administrative interface. The output format of the search results will automatically include the JavaScript that Google Analytics uses to study a user's navigation across your website.


Learn more about the mini and Google's enterprise search solutions, and buy the mini at the Google Store.

Fun in the Google Analytics Forum

Have you ever needed some quick advice about using Google Analytics, or wanted to learn some cool tricks? The Analytics Help Forum in Google Groups is a great place to go to see people helping out their peers by asking for, and quickly sharing, best practices, references, advice, and observations.


There are six discussion sections: Analytics Basics , Tracking Your Site , Your ROI, Troubleshooting, Urchin 5 Software, and Miscellaneous, each with a good number of interesting contributions.

For example, in this helpful discussion thread user 'MercuryTide' asks, "Does anyone know if it is possible to have tracking report to 2 different GA accounts?" User 'ShoreTel' and user 'bac' reply that this can be accomplished by resetting the _uff flag, each giving a different method of doing so.

And sometimes experienced users will answer a request for tips on more than just troubleshooting Google Analytics. In another discussion thread , user 'agapit' says, "I have just changed a site design and layout. I have not changed any marketing parameters. Bounce rate went down from 62% on home page to 49%. What proven design suggestions that lower Bounce Rates are there?"

'Caleb @ Pop,' an experienced Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, replies, "The most important thing to keeping bounce rate low is giving the visitor what they want to find right away." He goes on to give a helpful example of the path from ad click to conversion, citing that when possible, the landing pages should be customized to contain the converting action mentioned in the ad or link. And he recommends linking to a specific product page when advertising that product, rather than linking to the home page which would require some navigation by the visitor.

For lively discussion about Google Analytics, visit our Google Group. You can ask for answers to your questions, contribute your own knowledge, or just read through the different discussion threads to learn more.

AdWords Editor 3.0 now available for Windows

AdWords Editor 3.0 is now available for Windows. With Version 3.0, you can:
  • Add or edit site-targeted campaigns
  • Add or edit negative sites for keyword- and site-targeted campaigns
  • Edit another account while posting or checking your changes
  • Pause or resume individual ads, keywords, and sites
  • See the number of rows you've selected in the data view
If you're already using AdWords Editor, your version will be updated automatically the next time you start the application. You can also get AdWords Editor directly from the download page. For more details, please check out the release notes section of the AdWords Editor website.

Please note that Version 3.0 is currently available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista only. If you're a Mac user, we won't keep you waiting long -- AdWords Editor 3.0 for Mac is scheduled for release in a few weeks.

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 2 - Assessing Your Website and Goals

Two weeks ago, Stephanie L. from the Optimization team outlined the four topics of optimization that she would cover in our "AdWords Optimization Tips" series: Assessment, Structure, Keywords, and Ad Text. In the first half of Assessment, she encouraged advertisers to assess their industry and audience before beginning an optimization. Today, she will discuss the second half of Assessment -- different ways you can evaluate your website and identify your goals as you begin to optimize your campaign.

Know your website

Whether you are the marketing manager or webmaster (or both) of your business, you know the products and services on your website better than anyone else. And that means you are in the best position to evaluate your website and assess how a visitor may interact with and respond to the content on your site. Imagining yourself as your prospective customer and fine-tuning your site as necessary can result in a better experience for that prospective customer, and thus better results for you.

Some elements to consider as you evaluate your website are:

* Site structure or sitemap: Are your products and services organized in a way that makes sense from your visitor's perspective? Specific landing pages can help these prospective customers find exactly what they are looking for. For example, if a prospective customer is searching for 'women's snowboarding pants,' the ideal landing page may feature women's snowboarding pants in all brands and styles. If she is searching for a specific brand of snowboarding pants, the ideal landing page may feature all types of snowboarding pants by that specific manufacturer.
* Layout and design: Visitors to your site may respond more favorably to a site that is straightforward, clean, and simple to navigate than one that is flashy or slick. Those who do not find what they are looking for tend to leave the site within the first several seconds.
* Ease of use: When visitors come to your site, they should be able to quickly understand how to navigate your site and find the information they're looking for. Navigation and search bars allow your prospective customers to look for more specific items or different styles. Clearly marked buttons that read 'Sign Up Now!' or 'Add to Cart' encourage further action from these prospective customers. On the other hand, broken links, inaccurate or unfinished landing pages and other obstacles make it more difficult for prospective customers to become actual customers.

Know your goals

Your goals, or desired results, are perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when setting up a new account or optimizing an existing account. Are you more interested in branding your business, garnering clicks, or maximizing your return on investment? It is important to clearly identify and prioritize what specific goals you want to achieve and design your campaigns around those goals.

Depending on what your primary goal is, you may want to consider the following tips:

* Maximizing clicks: If your aim is to cast the widest net to draw as much relevant traffic to your site as possible, you may want to consider running on a broader range of keyword variations. Keep in mind, however, that running on very general, irrelevant keywords will negatively affect your clickthrough rate, Quality Score, minimum bids and positioning.
* Optimizing for Ad Performance: One component of improving ad performance is maximizing your clickthrough rate. If this is your goal, the first step is to filter out irrelevant searches by refining your keyword list and incorporating negative keywords where appropriate. In addition, your ad text should ideally reflect a user's search as closely as possible. If you are running on a keyword such as 'San Francisco travel tours,' your ad text should also highlight travel tours in San Francisco.
* Promoting brand awareness: If you want to promote your brand, you may decide to run a cost-per-impression campaign in addition to a cost-per-click campaign. You may want to supplement your text ads and incorporate image and video ads in your campaign. You could also employ site-targeting to show your ad to people who aren't actively searching for your business but may still be interested in what you sell.
* Maximizing ROI: Maximizing your return on investment calls for a little more understanding about the sales cycle unique to your product or service, and how keyword searches can reflect which stage a user might be in that cycle. If you want to separate the serious buyers from the online equivalent of window shoppers, your structure, ad text and keyword lists can be designed to target specific kinds of users. For instance, users searching on variations such as 'reviews' or 'ratings' are probably still researching the product, and you can filter out such searches by including those words as negative keywords.

Last but not least, it is important to determine how you will measure the impact of your optimization so you can clearly evaluate your campaign's performance before and after the optimization. If you are feeling extra scientific, you may want to test altered campaigns against a control group to see what works best for you. Google offers some powerful tools that can help you better track campaign performance, including Analytics, conversion tracking, and the Reports Center tab in your account.


This post ends our discussion of Assessment, the first of four topics we will be covering in this series. We have touched upon a few high level tips today on how to achieve your goals for your advertising campaigns. Stay tuned for future posts of "AdWords Optimization Tips" when we will take a deeper dive on specific advice and tips on structure, keywords, and ad text. Until then, happy optimizing!

Enhance your site with Google search results

If you're looking for an easy way to add some interactivity to your site, we've got just the tool for you. The AJAX Search Wizards allow you to add a video, news, and local search results to your web page without writing any code. Just tell us how you want the widget to display and what searches to automatically execute, and the wizard will generate the code for you to copy and paste into your web page.

Our newest wizard generates a news bar that scrolls through recent news headlines.The news bar is also available in a vertical orientation for you to use in a column or sidebar. You can easily change the look-and-feel of the our wizard-generated code just by adding some CSS or editing the JavaScript. Also, check out our video bar wizard to easily add Google videos to your site and try our map search wizard to add a searchable Google map to your site.

The AJAX Search API allows you to interact programmatically with Google search results including Google web, video, news, and blog searches. If you're a developer, take a look at the documentation to see how you can integrate dynamic Google search into your website in other creative ways.

Finally, let us know if you find these wizards useful, and we may just feature your site on our community samples page.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

AdSense Help Centre

Here you will find the tips for Google Adsense :
Google Adsense Tips

Onpage Optimization Factor Can Boost Your Rankings By Over 350 Positions

Ok, so now we've selected our main 3 keywords:


  • weight loss story
  • weight loss picture
  • safe weight loss
Notice that all of the keywords contain the word "weight loss". This will make things easier for us when we begin to optimize our offpage ranking factors which you'll learn about later.

Let's Optimize Our Webpage ...

The first thing we need to do is select a page Title for our website.

Add a Title

The page title should:

Include ONLY our main keywords. The least amount of words you can place in the title, the more weight Google will give to each of the keywords and the higher you will rank.

Note: When I say "Google", I'm really referring to all the major engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). But I am saying Google because this is the search engine you should really focus on optimizing for because Google gets roughly 50% of all the searches on the web. Yahoo receives about 30% and MSN about 20%.

When creating your page title, it should not look like this:

  • Welcome to our website!
  • Welcome to our website!This is the html code used to create this title:


It should not even look like this, which does contain our main keywords, but contains an unnecessary number of words:

  • weight loss story and weight loss picture and safe weight loss
  • </span><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:85%;">weight loss story and weight loss picture and safe weight loss</span><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:85%;">This is the html code used to create this title:

Although that title isn't horrible and does contain all of your main keywords, you should do a couple of things to cut down on words used.

This would be a perfect title for your webpage:

  • Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture
  • </span><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:85%;">Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture</span><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:85%;">This is the html code used to create this title:

Notice that I've:

  • Taken out all of the "ands"
  • Replaced one of the "ands" with a "|" character (Note: You can add this character by holding the shift key on your keyboard and pressing the backslash key above the enter key.)
  • Combined the keywords "Safe Weight Loss" with "Weight Loss Picture"

    Always Combine Your Keyword When Possible to cut down on the total number
    of words that are in your title!

Always Combine Your Keywords In The Page Title!

When Google looks at our title, it will see all 3 of our keywords only. Combining keywords to cut down on the total number of keywords displayed in the title is a great way to boost the strength of each individual keyword, which will have an immediate impact on your ranking.

Add

header tags

Next we'll need to add 1

header tag and place our most important keyword there.

The

header tag should be as far towards the top of the page as possible. When Google reads a webpage, it views the text from the top left hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page.

Note: Here's a neat free tool which allows you to visually see how the search engines view your webpage: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml

So, it's best to place your

header tag on the top left hand or top/middle portion of your page. You can think of an

header tag as a title for whatever content you have on your page.

For example, the

header tag of this lesson would be:

"How changing 1 onpage optimization factor can boost your rankings by
over 350 positions!"

... and the html code would look like this:

"How changing 1 onpage optimization factor can boost your rankings by over 350 positions!"

Of course, I would have changed my lesson title to contain my main keyword if I was actually trying to optimize this page for Google. Also, if possible, it's ideal if you can include ONLY your main keyword within the h1 header tags.

Weight Loss Story

would be perfect.

Add

header tags

Next, we'll need to create an

header tag. This can be thought of as a sub heading for our webpage. You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the

header tag. The

tag should be placed somewhere towards the top half of your webpage.

A good

header tag for our example would be:

  • safe weight loss

    (Usually it's best to place your primary keyword in your

    tags and your secondary keyword into the

    tags.

After we've done this, we need to actually create the content for our webpage. When writing the content, try to evenly sprinkle your main keywords throughout the copy. Don't overdo it though.

Try to mention each keyword in a natural way as you are writing, but be sure to include at least one of the keywords per 1-2 paragraphs, depending on how large your page is.

Tip: Make sure to mention your main keyword at the very top left and the very bottom right hand side of the webpage. A trick I like to use is to include this in the copyright information line at the bottom of the website. For our example, this would be a good example:

© 2005 copyright www.domain.com a weight loss story

Notice that it flows and doesn't really look too strange.


Bolding, italicizing and underlining ...

Once we've finished writing the copy, we should go through and bold, underline, or italicize some of the keywords only 1 time each, maximum. Only do 1 per keyword or it will hurt you more than it helps. This isn't crucial to do, but it's good to maybe do this to a couple keywords...

Properly include image tags ...

Next, click on the very top image of your webpage (This is usually your website's header graphic) and include an image tag using the text "weight loss story header" if you're adding this alt text to your website header graphic. Click on 2 more graphics throughout your webpage and enter your other 2 keywords, plus an extra word like "graphic" or "image"... For example, we would use "weight loss picture graphic" and "safe weight loss image". This ensures that Google won't view this as spam.

For example, if we have an image on our webpage called: picture1.jpg
The code that would be used to insert the image would look something like this:

Now, if we were to add an alt image tag called "Weight Loss Story Graphic", we'd simply do this:

Weight                            Loss Story Graphic

Force Google To Read Your Keywords First!

Now, remember I stated above that Google views your webpage from top left, to bottom right? Well, in general they do. But because most websites contain a left hand column which contains all of their navigation links...

Google WILL View all of the text in the left hand column Before The Body of the webpage

To show you what I mean, look at the image below to see the order of information that Google will view this webpage. because of the way the person has created the tables containing their content. I've added red lines so you can visually see the way the site was designed, has they not made the table borders invisible.

How can you get around this? I've come up with a neat little trick that will ensure that Google reads the actual body of your webpage before the left hand column containing your navigational links.

Here is what you need to do:
Rather than creating a table that looks like this:

navigational links

You body text...

You should create a table that looks like this:


You body text...

navigational links

See how I've changed the website above, so that Google now sees our content BEFORE our navigation menu:

By doing this, Google will read the top left hand row/column first... BUT will see that it is empty or only contains a couple words in this case, so it will then read the body of your webpage and then read the 2nd left hand row/column which contains your navigational links! :-)

That's all there is to it!

In summary, I really want to point out the fact that, although good onpage optimization is something you'll really want to do, it is NOT how you make dramatic changes in your search engine ranking!

Important! Let me repeat that again, onpage optimization... which is what I've taught you thus far, will make small changes in your ranking, but WILL NOT help your site make dramatic jumps in ranking.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions in the search engine world. Many believe that by getting your keyword density just right, or by moving your keywords around on the page in just the right places, you'll really move up in the search engines.

That is not the case at all. It is the offpage optimization factors that will get you high rankings. I will teach you exactly what offpage optimization factors are, AND how to make sure you optimize these factors perfectly for Google!

Source : http://www.seoelite.com/HTML_SEOLesson2-as.htm