Your website’s success depends largely on the effective search engine optimization. If you have not included web analytics tools as part of your SEO activities, then you might not be able to analyze the effectiveness of search engine marketing. In case, you are unaware of the new changes made by Google, then take note of the 7 new features introduced by Google into Google Analytics. If you are looking forward to strengthening your web analytics, then you should incorporate all the new features to your SEO plan. You have to understand the importance of all these new features so as to make best use of them in your search engine marketing strategies.

As a company, you should plan your search engine optimization in a manner that it drives maximum traffic to your website. If you integrate the new features of Google Analytics into your web analytics tool, then you can surely enhance the effectiveness of search engine marketing in terms of increased traffic and ROI. For an effective SEO exercise, you can take note of the following seven features;

• Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts – Using web analytics to understand the data requirement will become more effective through this feature called analytics intelligence with custom alerts. You can keep track of your site’s data patterns on monthly, weekly and daily basis. If you want to measure your site’s dimensions, then also you can make use of this new feature.

• Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals – Your idea of search engine optimization requires you to track the site conversions and this feature helps in that. It allows you to identify the user’s engagement with your website.

• Expanded Mobile Reporting – If you are making use of mobile as part of your search engine marketing plan, then through this feature you can track your mobile website’s performance.

• Unique Visitors – Your SEO plan should always strive for something new and exciting which can increase your returns and this feature of unique visitors allows you to keep track of all those visitors who visit your website with different cookies.

• Advanced Analysis Features – You can understand the actual meaning of web analytics by this new feature.

• Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report Templates – This feature allows you to share URL to web analytics user and this will also help your SEO plan to be a success.

• Multiple Custom Variables – If you are looking to customize your Google web analytics, then add this feature to your search engine marketing plan so as to track the visitors to your website in terms of session and page-level.

Your selection of using Google Analytics is now more justifiable because of the introduction of 7 new features which will leverage your search engine optimization operations.

You have to ensure that all the four steps are taken care of to leverage your pay per click campaign and to make the measurement done by Google Analytics more effective. It depends on your skills of PPC campaign management that how well you use of web analytics. Apart from the already discussed first step of linking AdWords to Google Analytics, you also need to pay heed to the following three points.

• You can get a unique advantage by using Google Analytics as it allows you to customise your initial screen to display the most important PPC data that you require every time you log in. You can set up your own Google Analytics dashboard and can set as an icon on your desktop. This feature will help you to build an effective PPC campaign by evaluating all your pay per click strategies. If you want to report some improvements or questions about your pay per click efforts, you can add that to your front page for easier access.

• You cannot accurately measure your PPC performance without clearly defining goals or metrics for the success of your pay per click campaign. If you really want to enhance your pay per click performance and get right bucks from that investment, then you should look for certain improvements which can improve your pay per click campaign management. Make use of the most powerful Google Analytics while defining your goals for the PPC campaign. You have to answer certain questions while setting Google Analytics goal like did you benefit from these goals, are match types or case sensitive working, do you have any conversion goals and lastly do you have any idea what the user is doing on your site to achieve that specific goal.

• You have to create certain reports to measure the success of your PPC campaign with the help of Google Analytics which is considered as the useful and the most successful web analytics tool. If you want to make the whole process more effective and interactive, then you can make use of beautiful charts and graphs offered by Google Analytics. You can use these reports to extract and present the successes of your PPC campaign and can easily figure out the areas that needs improvement. Google Analytics have all the features to become your best PPC partner with all the analysis of pay per click data that can help you to improve your PPC campaign management and to make it more effective and impactful.

If you follow all the four steps of Google Analytics, then you can easily measure and improve the performance of all your PPC efforts and can enhance your search engine marketing campaign to make it more effective.

Your pay per click campaign works wonders for your business especially in B2B markets. As a search marketer, you have to ensure the introduction of efficient pay per click campaigns which can be done through well thought out PPC campaign management. If you want to increase return on investment to survive in this competitive business world, you should have complete knowledge about the web analytics. Information about web analytics will help you to get maximum value for high-cost clicks as part of PPC campaign management. You have to search for one tool that can analyze your PPC data so that you can derive maximum benefits from pay per click.

It is important for you to understand that you cannot make improvements in PPC campaign management unless you accurately measure it. You should measure the success of pay per click efforts so that you can incorporate the changes required to make your PPC efforts successful. As part of web analytics, you should choose Google Analytics to measure the success of pay per click campaign. As a success metrics, Google Analytics provide you one stop place to analyse your Pay per click efforts. Your business needs more enhanced and upgraded Google analytics so that you can figure out and measure the pay per click performance.

You also need to have Google Analytics URL builder as a compatible application and you can easily get this important piece of information from the web analytics mentioned in Google Analytics tool. By using this tool, you can make your PPC campaign a success with no flaws and maximum ROI.

If you rely more on Google Analytics, then make sure that you use the latest and upgraded version of this tool of web analytics so that you can get maximum returns on pay per click investment. You can enjoy more insight into your PPC campaign management through this upgraded and advanced Google tool. There are four basic steps for improving your PPC performance by using Google Analytics, the first one of which is as follows;

• You can derive great benefits by linking your AdWords account to Google Analytics so that you can bring your PPC data on one single platform for effective measurement. It is important for you to ensure that you are using the same Google account email for both Google Analytics and AdWords. You can easily measure the success of your PPC campaign with your smart and well planned PPC campaign management. You just have to follow some simple steps to get yourself connected to Google account to use this useful Google analytics.

Yahoo Analytics was launched in April 2008 and is currently available for the websites hosted on yahoo store. Merchants can setup their Yahoo Analytics account by logging into the Store manager and following the given steps. Yahoo Analytics interface being user friendly gives minute information that might be useful for tracking website parameters such as day to day traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate and revenue tracking. When one activates the yahoo web analytics by default your check out page is set up as the final goal page, however you have the flexibility of changing it. There are various features such as customized reports, adding events, adding note, cross reference filters etc. that helps monitor website performance. The prime advantage of Yahoo Analytics is that it reflects the data within couple of minutes after the transaction is completed.

Here are some of the best features of Google Analytics which you could utilize to optimize your website.

1) Setting Goals – If you don’t set goals, Google Analytics is not going to take you very far. If you have an e-commerce site your goal would probably be a sale or if your business is newsletters your goal would be a registration. After your business goals are setup in Analytics, you can analyze a large amount of data about what’s working and what’s not in your marketing efforts.

2) Historical Data Comparison – In old Analytics there was no facility to compare how your site is doing relative to a different point in time. However, now we have new capabilities that allow you to compare two different time periods and chart them immediately. This feature helps tremendously in analyzing the performance of your website.

3) Geographic Data - You can also see how your website is performing for a variety of metrics like traffic, revenue etc. in different countries / cities etc. So you know where exactly is your traffic coming from.

4)Funnel Visualization - This is an awesome feature which helps you to figure out what exactly is scaring your users away as it gives you a proper analysis of the path taken by your users and where exactly your users drop and leave the process.

So go ahead and make the best use of the above features of Google Analytics for improving the search engine rankings of your website!

Keywords research and analysis is undoubtedly the foundation of an SEO campaign. Every single strategy and all the modifications we would perform as an effort towards search engine optimization is a derivative and is dependent on the keywords you narrow down upon.

As SEO professionals, we rely heavily on Keyword Research tools and Web Analytics tools in order to discover core keyword phrases, which are commonly used across all of the commercial web search engines. Though we look at a number of factors and user search statistics during this analysis such as the competition, search volumes; there is an entire facet of reason we tend to ignore. This is – the connection between User Search Trends and Usability.

In a purer sense of the term usability means a users reaction to any website. Yes, a positive experience would include ease of use, appeal of the interface etc. but by far Relevancy is the most important factor to consider.

Keyword research tools reveal search behaviors based on which we would rebuild a site’s information architecture. We can also tailor ads and landing pages for Pay per Click marketing to searchers who typically use a single, targeted search engine. But does our web analytics data validate our keyword research? Is the particular keyword phrase appropriate for that type of website? Are we reaching our correct target audience?

As an astute SEO Company we realize that our work is not an exact science, but a combination of keyword research tools, statistical knowledge and intuitive judgment. We should understand when it is appropriate to implement keywords into a site’s information architecture with the perspective of the user as well. We do monitor the effectiveness of keyword-driven traffic via web analytics data. But without the correct user perspective of the target audience Keyword research data and Web analytics search data can be easily misinterpreted.

“Stickiness” is a metric that which can be measured by the number of page views per visitor via search engine traffic and the average time on site. Stickiness of the keyword along with the current global search trends (on a time relative graph) are effective parameters to be used in periodic iterations of Keyword Analyses.

In conclusion the most important aspect of an SEO campaign, the Keyword Research and Analysis, should be carried out with a good balance of the science (the data) and art (the intuition) that is SEO.

I’ve been working in the SEO industry for quite a while now and feel that using analytics really helps you to better understand your site, the users coming in to your site and their behavior when they are actually navigating through the pages. In some ways you can say that analytics is a mirror for a site and goes a long way to help you understand site usability.

Not long ago there was Urchin that provided all the statistics, although I must confess that it was all numbers in there and sometimes you wouldn’t blame a person if he/she were to zone out after looking at all those numbers.

Then in mid 2007 Google came up with the new and improved version of Google Analytics and the world of web analytics completely changed. You had user friendly graphs, pie-charts, maps, statistics and the works, all free of cost. All you had to do was to upload a simple code on the pages of your site and you were ready to go.
For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I feel that Google Analytics is both advantageous and disadvantageous. Let’s talk about a few advantages first.
1. Distribution of Traffic
I love the way Google uses a pie chart to show a breakup of the major traffic sources. You get to know exactly how many visitors enter your site directly (typing the domain name in the browser) vis-à-vis organic search results, paid search results (if you run a PPC campaign), referrals and other sources.
2. Keyword Analytics
This, I feel is by far the most SEO friendly data as it gives you all the information as to which keywords people are using to enter your site on search engines. In short it lets you peek into the mind of your visitors and potential customers. You can get detailed reports on which keywords are driving the organic search traffic to your site and which are not. You can also get an idea as to which PPC keywords work for you and can be targeted for SEO. It also helps in a major way to chalk out a list of negative keywords for your site and get ideas for fresh content and products.
3. Map Overlay
This is the feature I like the most interactive as it shows a geographical distribution of the traffic coming in to the site on a world map. It helps you to know about the countries and cities that generate the most traffic.

Now a few disadvantages for the SEO campaign of the site.
1. JavaScript Code
Everyone who’s anyone in the SEO business is familiar that Google Analytics uses a JavaScript code. Moreover it is a common known fact that JavaScript is not search engine friendly and may act as spider stopper for Search Engine Spiders and Bots.
2. Dependency on Google
By using Google Analytics you solely rely on Google for all your data. Moreover there is no such facility as yet for archiving this data in a proper format. You are stuck if Google decides to change the reporting system one fine day and you have absolutely no control over it.

In short, every one of us is solely on Google’s mercy and has to abide by its rules, which I think is not fair at times.

These days, I have been hearing the term website optimisation quite frequently. Most of the times people use the term website optimisation instead of search engine optimization (SEO). However, I tend to disagree there.

I think that a website optimisation campaign should include all aspects of website improvement, be it making it search engine friendly or making is better from a user’s perspective. Some of the important things that a website optimisation campaign should include are
1 – Code review to identify and remove spider stoppers
2 – Code review from browser compatibility
3 – Internal link structure review to improve indexing and ease of navigation for a user
4 – Review of the conversion process to increase the conversion rate

Further, a good web analytics application with well defined rules to track conversions and goals should be implemented. website optimisation campaigns, ideally, should be dynamic in nature i.e. – They need to be continuously reviewed and goals redefined depending on the data gathered by the web analytics software implemented.