These are my thoughts on the relation between the winter holydays and business. I’m not talking about the thing that this is a period of time when you should sell a lot: this is not about that relation. It’s about using Christmas as a moment when you take a deep breath and you think about what you did and what you’ll do.

Without thinking about what you did and what you have to do in order to further develop your business I think you’ll not go to far in terms of business. So, use Christmas as a moment to think:

1. Are you happy with your financial results?
2. What do you think was the most important thing you’ve done this year for your business?
3. What methods you used to market your business on the web?
4. Are you using any social network to help spread your message?
5. How many of your goals did you achieved, this year?
6. How many people did you helped?

Evaluate you and your business and also think about the future:

1. Establish goals for the next year and think about the ways of achieving it
2. Plan your SEO
3. Think about your social media activity
4. Think about the kind of content you’re going to produce
5. Think about how you’re going to help people
6. Don’t set goals that are directly connected to money; things like: increase sells. Consider additional things that in time might get more indirect value/money back; things like increasing the number of subscribers

My 10 ideas for 2010:

1. By the end of January I want to launch my Compete Guide to Keywords (for only $10)
2. Increase the number of my subscribers
3. Increase the number of Fans on my Facebook page
4. Continue helping people with problems related to SEO and Blogging, on my Facebook page
5. Produce new content every day
6. Increase the number of requests for my services and also the number of closed deals
7. Increase the conversion of my Work With Me page from my blog
8. Create a small free guide on general SEO issues that will be offered for free to anyone that subscribes to my newsletter
9. Maintain and develop my current relations on Twitter
10. Stay focused and work hard

What is your take on all this? How do you plan your next moves for the next year? Share your ideas, opinions, experience and don’t forget to subscribe to my blog and you’ll receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

Yesterday I started a small experiment related to SEO. It involved a very quick look at some websites to see how they target the keywords they say they target. The feedback was good and materialized not only in comments but in e-mails also.

After doing some of this quick analysis I concluded that people really need a complete guide on keywords. They need to know how to pick them, how to use keywords, what does it mean to target a keyword, how to check the status of their website, how to read Google Analytics reports about keywords and so much more.

So, I decided to develop an informational product only for keywords. I will keep it simple and it will be addressed to everyone: even if you know nothing about SEO you’ll still be able to understand what you need to do in terms of keywords. I’ll do my best and prepare this product until the end of January 2010.

If you have any questions, suggestions, opinions or ideas go for it and leave me a comment. You may also consider subscribing to my blog, so that you’ll be the first to know when I launch this product.

I want to try a more engaging article related to SEO. The idea is to get you, the reader, involved. And here is what I was thinking about.

You leave me a comment, where you say what your website is and a maximum of 5 keywords you say you target in your website and I’ll take a look and see if you really target those keywords. I’ll perform a quick analysis of your website to see how you use those keywords. Then I’ll post a comment and tell you the result.

There is only one rule and one limitation:

1. The Rule: The comment must be posted on my blog, in the comment section of this article
2. The Limitation: I’ll do my best to answer as many comments as possible. And I will do this only for the comments posted on 20 December 2009 and 21 December 2009.

Depending on the success of this experiment I’ll think about similar articles in the near future. Hope to see your comments on my blog. Also, if you find this article useful you may also want to subscribe to my blog and receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

Do you know about this tool from Google? The Google search-based keyword tool can help you in more than one way. It’s good to get suggestions on what keywords to target but it also tells you what keywords would “attract” high paid Google Adsense ads.

So, these are the two main directions to use this tool:

1. Enter a keyword or a domain and see related searched keywords
2. Use it to plan your keywords for your adwords

Here is how it works

1. You can enter a domain (yours or the competition) and the tool will generate a list of keywords that are related to the content from that domain. You can specify a country and a language and the list will contain monthly searches, competition and the suggested bid. The really great thing about this tool is the ability to check your competition. You’ll know exactly what they’re doing because this tool is going to show related keywords to the keywords they already use. And this is what Google sees on their websites.
2. Or you can enter a basic keyword and you’ll receive suggestions related to that keyword.
3. Or you can just browse top keywords from different categories and subcategories such as: Beauty & Personal Care, Computers, Finance, Food, Health, Home & Garden, Sport & Fitness, Travel & Tourism and many more.

I tried to keep the description as short as possible and offer you only the basic information about this tool. Now, tell me if you used it and how. Share your experience in comments bellow.

And if you find this information useful you may also want to subscribe to my blog and receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

Why you think you need SEO? Why do you pay for SEO services? Why do you want to improve your rankings? Because you want to be found by people searching for keywords related to your business. You don’t want people to go on Google, type a search term that is related to your business and not come to your website. That is why you need SEO.

In this moment I would say you need three basic things:

1. A constant attention to keywords and rising trends
2. A good knowledge of how to use those keywords in your favor
3. A close eye on what the competition is doing

As you can see without analyzing the competition why are you paying for SEO? It’s like saying I have the most beautiful car from an empty parking lot. It’s like worrying about the quality of the water but using a glass you found on the street to drink it. Why do you think there are spies? Because what the competition does matters.

And it matters more then you may think. When you manage to get to page 2 or 3 of Google for some keyword you have to take a good look at what the competition is doing and find the answer to “why they are 5 places in front of me?”.

Here are my questions to you. Do you analyze your competition? Do you know who your competition is? Do you monitor rising trends – what people are looking for lately, related to your business? Share your answers, ideas, questions, opinions.

If you find this article useful and want to get more, don’t forget to subscribe and receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

Some of you may recall my other article about “10 SEO Tips for Wordpress – the Basics” which I highly recommend you to read if you’re interested in the basic operations that will improve the SEO performance of your Wordpress website/blog. This article deals with another important aspect of your web activity and that is building content.

Everyone knows that content is what will get you traffic, rankings, conversions, clients, awareness, brand and so on. Without content you are nothing on the web. And the sooner you realize this you’ll be able to benefit from understanding how to plan your content and how to implement a good SEO strategy for content development.

The Plan

Every Wordpress blog starts with an idea that will lead to a plan and in the end to a blog. Doing SEO for your Wordpress blog is pretty much the same thing you do for any website but there are some particular aspects that make the task a little more interesting.

A blog means new content on a regular basis. New content means new ideas about how to describe your products, how to answer to people’s problems, how to present your business as a problem solver and so on. Building new content it’s not easy, if you try to always offer some kind of benefit to your reader.

Without a plan your SEO efforts to have a well optimized Wordpress blog will be governed by chance. If you don’t have a plan on what to write about and how to do it then it’s like building a house without knowing if you want a first floor or not.

The Beginning

There is a strong connection between content and keywords. Identify the problems your product solves, identify the keywords people search to find solutions to these problems, group the keywords in pyramid structures and plan your content for each pyramid.

A pyramid structure means that you have a main keyword at the top and more levels with long tail keywords that are related to each other and to the top keyword. The foundation of each pyramid will be formed by synonyms and related single words that you’ll use in your articles and in some in anchor texts.

Another important element of the pyramid structure is the fact that there is a link between each level and between elements. This will have to be reflected in your articles: plan a linking structure that will help all the articles in the pyramid. A good thing to remember is not to link all your articles to the main one.

Building articles in groups that are connected will have a great effect on your Wordpress blog. It will help your SEO and user functionality because of the fact that this way you can cover multiple aspects of the same problem and you can also deal with more particular issues.

The Opinion

Now, it’s your turn to tell me what you think of this pyramid method. How do you create your content? How do you plan it? How do you try to stay on top? Share your experience in comments bellow.

This is another short article about Google Analytics. It’s possible that you also read the previous articles too, about setting goals and custom reports. The tip from today, about Google Analytics, is a useful one, especially if you don’t have time to look at your analytics every day.

You know how you use Google Alerts to receive e-mails when someone mentions the keywords you specify? The same thing you can do in Google Analytics with Intelligence. This feature enables you to set alerts that will notify you in case something good, or bad, happens.

How to set it up

You can find this feature by logging into your Google Analytics account and click on your website’s profile. In the left side, under My Customizations, you’ll see Intelligence. Click the link and you are ready to create your own alerts or to select one from 7 templates that will notify you in case, for example, the total visits decreases by more than 50.0% or the average time on site decreases by more than 50.0% and so on.

If you want to set up your own alert you can select to receive it on a daily basis or once a week or month. Here is how you should think when you want to create your own alert. For what type of traffic I want to be alerted if a certain metric does condition-X?

Why to set up alerts in Google Analytics?

If you don’t have time or you don’t want to look at your analytics every day but still, you want to know when something bad happens or something really good then this feature called Intelligence is the thing to use.

What do you think?

Let me know if this article was useful to you by writing your comments here bellow. And if you find it useful please consider subscribing to my blog and you’ll receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

Custom reports are a very useful feature from Google Analytics. I use it all the time but I don’t actually create the report. I don’t want to overcrowd my data. I just go and set different reports for preview only and this offers me enough information.

When to use Custom Reports

I’m using Custom Reports when I want to better understand some data. Of course that Google Analytics offers you all the information you need but sometimes is not easy to see the thing that interests you with all the additional information around it.

That is why I turn to Custom Reports: I like to be able to look only at what I need: things like the bounce rate for the type of visitors or for the source referrals. Basically you can set your custom report do display any metric or combination of metrics for all sort of events.

How to create a Custom Report

Log into your Google Analytics account and click the View Report link for your website. In the left side you’ll see a link Custom Reporting. Click the link, then Manage Custom Reports and Create new custom report. Then it’s easy: drag and drop the metrics you want to see and for what dimension.

Then you can click on the Preview report link and check your custom report. You have the ability to save it or just cancel. I like to create reports and just preview the results. For me this feature is a great way to better see and understand the data about my website.

How do you use Custom Reports?

How do you use custom reports in Google Analytics? Why? Share your ideas and opinions.

If you ever wondered about goals in Google Analytics, about how to set one up and why would you do it, here is some info on that. I’ll assume you have Google Analytics installed on your website and this is not the first time you hear about it.

It’s going to be basic operations that any person with a minimum knowledge of web browsing can perform.

How to set up a Goal in Google Analytics

Before you access the data for your website you’ll see an edit link in the right side of the name of your website. Click it and on the page that opens you’ll see the add goals link. You can create a maximum of 20 goals divided in 4 sets.

You’ll have the possibility to choose what type of goal you would like to set up. If you didn’t thought about your goals here is the moment to do it. I think that the types of goals that you can set up are very helpful in understanding how to think of your website’s goal.

You can set up a goal for a certain URL, a certain number of visits to your website or a certain pages/visit. And if you think about it this is all that you need. Maybe your goal is to make people read a certain page, or to receive a certain number of visitors. Maybe you’re goal is to keep people on your website for at least 5 minutes.

A great thing is that you can also attach a certain dollar value to your goal. Why this is useful: let’s say that every person that comes to your website and reaches a certain page is worth 5$ to spend for. And from all the persons that reach that page only 10% decide to contact you. Now you do the math and see if it’s worth to spend that kind of money to advertise that page. It’s an interesting way to evaluate your efforts.

How goals help improve the functionality of your website

A really great feature is the possibility to set funnels for URL goals. This means that you can track if the reader will perform certain steps to reach a certain page. For example you may design your website with the following goal: after the main page the user should go to page-X that will prepare the sell and then to page-Y where you make the sell.

It’s possible that accessing a certain page before the page that actually presents the service is extremely important to you. Here is a reason for thinking this way: maybe you explain your services in a page and in another you talk about prices. Or you want to see if people that accessed your testimonial page, automatically went to the conversion page.

Tracking this can be very useful to see how well you can control your visitors. Another example: a page contains an add with some special offers and you want to see how many people decided to access the service page after reading about your special offers. Basically the possibilities are endless.

What uses do you see for goals?

It’s your turn to share your experience or your questions. Share your opinions and ideas in comments bellow.

First, let’s talk about what is the bounce rate and how Google Analytics calculates it. Bounce rate for a certain page is calculated only when readers land on that page. This metric is telling you if people clicked and navigated deeper in your website or just left.

The thing is that the bounce rate is not taking into account readers that come from other pages of your website. So, a high bounce rate means that people that landed on a page didn’t clicked any link to navigate further.

Analyzing bounce rates

Not all the times a high bounce rate means a bad thing. I see many people saying that a high bounce rate indicates that your content needs improvement because it’s not providing the information users look for. But you can’t say this until you look at the analytics.

If you want to analyze your high bounce rate page go to your Google Analytics accounts, select Content -> Content by Title and sort the results to see the highest bounce rates. Now click one of the pages with high bounce rate and let’s see what you need to look for

1. NOTE: if a page has bounce rate of 80% means that 80% of the readers that landed on that page decided to leave your website. The other 20% stayed on your website and performed at least one more click
2. The first thing to look for is the average time readers spend on your page. The thing is that if you have a decent average time (more than 1 minute or more than 3,5 minutes) a high bounce rate is not necessary something bad. A high bounce rate together with decent average time on that page means that the readers found the content interesting but they didn’t received a good reason to click some more links and read some more. If the average time for that page is just few seconds then you need to understand why. Why people close the page so quickly. Now it’s the time to move further with the analysis
3. You need to know how people get to your page: keywords or other sources – and compare the two overall bounce rates. You need to see what kind of source generates the high bounce rate: basically what needs improvement.
4. Check the Keywords that send you traffic and ask yourself two questions (for each keyword that has a high bounce rate attached to it):
   1. How much relevance does this keyword has to this page? If I would have to describe the page by using a keyword, is this what I would use?
   2. If the keyword has relevancy to the page, do I provide complete information?
5. Check the Source and see from where the users come. It’s possible that this page to be marketed on the wrong channels. Look at the websites that send traffic to that page and see exactly from where because if the link to your page is placed in a content with no relation to the content you’re offering then a high bounce rate is normal.

Improving the bounce rate

Depending on what the analytics offered you here are some things to do, in order to improve the bounce rate:

1. If the average time is high enough for you then you need to decide if you want to determine people to also visit other pages of your website. Maybe your ordering page has a high bounce rate but decent average time and you don’t want people to navigate further. But if you do, think about some links that you could place in your content and that point to other articles on your blog that are related.
2. If the average time is low and the high bounce rate is generated by keywords here are some things to do:
   1. If you can incorporate new information in the article that is relevant to a keyword is ok
   2. If you consider that you already have decent information then check how is presented. Try making the words bold, or italic, or change the colors. If the article is more than 500 words use subtitles to break the content and let people know what each section talks about. The idea is that if someone is interested only in some of your information then he should be able to easily find it, without having to read the entire article
   3. If you can’t incorporate new information, consider writing some new content and place links to the additional articles
3. If the average time is low and the high bounce rate is generated by the source then you may consider other channels for marketing your content

What do you think?

Let me know what you think of this article and how did you improve your high bounce rate. Share your ideas and opinions in comments.