Who Can Use Google Analytics

Who uses Google analytics? The answer to that is simple. Anyone who has a website can use it. You can be an executive at a major corporation, or a sole proprietor. You can also be a marketer, content provider, or developer. There’s no sense in having a website without visitors. Google Analytics helps you understand where visitors are coming from (website urls), how they found your website (direct traffic, search engines, or referrals). You’ll also learn what keyword phrases they used.

Why Tracking Visitors?

You may be asking why track visitors? Well, look at it this way. If you worked hard on your site to get it to look really good and you spend hours creating your product, then you uploaded everything, you would want your product to sell, right? How can you tell if anyone is actually showing up? By tracking your visitors, you can tell how many go to certain pages, and how long they stay on those pages. By reviewing these stats, you can tell what pages are working and which are not. This way you can make adjustments to the pages that show low visitor count or high bounce rate.

How Do I Use Analytics?

What you do is create a free account with Google Analytics and fill in information about your website. Let them know the URL. Google provides you with a piece of code that you place on each page that you want tracked. That code will help Google keep track of visitors to those pages. Google indexes your site and reports back the pages you have and how many people actually hit those pages. Analytics will track any website, whether it is a blog, RSS feed, or a content management system (Joomla, WordPress, or Druple). If you are new to HTML or web page design, you may want to hire someone to put the code in every web page for you, as you will need to understand some HTML coding. This is to help you recognize the location of where the code will go.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you get high ranking in search results, if you use the information to your advantage. Why not. It’s free.

This checklist covers onpage SEO rules.

1. If possible, label the url for the page so that it includes the primary keyword phrase (examples: yourdomain.com/primary-keyword-phrase/ or yourdomain.com/primary-keyword-phrase.html)

2. Include the keyword in the “meta title” information for the page. Also, include a secondary keyword phrase in the meta title. (For example: Primary Keyword Phrase | Secondary Phrase) Note: Google recommends that you don’t exceed 60-80 characters for the title. Always put the primary keyword phrase first. If the target audience for our website is local, then consider adding the phone number, city or other regional reference. Just stay within the 60-80 character limits.

3. Use the “meta description” tag and include your primary keyword phrase and one or more secondary terms. Note: Make your “meta description” irresistible so that people want to click on the link to find out more information. Optional – Add “meta keywords” to your page. If you do, include all your targeted terms and maybe a couple of others. I’d try to stay to five or six terms max per page… don’t overdo it!

4. Use your primary phrase inside of the actual onpage content that is read by visitors. It’s best if it is used (a) Towards the top of the page and encased in an h1 tag (b) Used a time or two more in the actual content and again near the bottom of the page (maybe as an anchor text link if possible)

5. Make your onpage content read well (don’t just keyword stuff the page thinking that’s going to help) and don’t forget to include a call to action to the most important action for your reader. I realize that’s not really an SEO thing, but it’s important none the less. People may not be ready to buy, but if you get them on your email list you can keep in touch with them. Build a relationship with them so that one day, when they are ready, they will buy from you.

6. Keep each page as “light” as possible regarding its file size and the time it takes to load the page. More and more, search engines are taking page load times into account when indexing pages.

7. Keep your pages attractive… easy to read… and easy to navigate. You want your visitors to stay on your site for as long as possible. Search engines can track your “visit duration” and also how many pages a visitor looked at before leaving. The longer someone is on your site, the better your SEO AND the more likely the visitor will contact you!

8. Add a sitemap.xml file to your site. While this is not mandatory, this can help search engine spiders crawl your content. This is very important if you have a lot of pages on your website. Don’t have a clue how to do this? No problem. If your site is a static html site, you can generate your sitemap here (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/). If you are using WordPress then I’d recommend using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

3 Tips for Logo Design

1. Keep the logo design simple. In a world full of complexities, the simple logo is usually the logo that stays top-of-mind.

2. Simple logo designs are enduring. They won’t go out of style. They are timeless.

3. They are more easily remembered and recognized.

It’s not unusual for business owners to dabble with a little creative logo design work. Anyone with a PC and Microsoft applications has access to a library of ready-made clipart. You can create a logo with just a few hours (or evenings) of frustrations. Of course, the entire point of having a brand is so you stand out from the competition. However, having a self-made logo may make you stand out in a manner you didn’t intend. It also may break any promise of quality and professionalism you intended with your company brand.

Working with a Logo Designer or Graphic Artist

A logo designer should ask you questions prior to creating any draft logo designs. If he or she doesn’t, how can you expect them to capture the essence of your brand in the logo? That’s why it’s so important to have worked through your business mission, vision and position in the marketplace. Those unique characteristics that your company delivers to the marketplace are part of your brand. You want your logo to capture those characteristics.

Here are some things to present to your logo designer.

• Your company mission statement and vision
• Your primary business
• A description of your target audience
• If you have one, a tagline
• Your brand promise
• Your brand character
• Mood or tone of your communications
• Words that describe your brand
• Logos you like and don’t like
• Colors you think represent your brand
• Colors you like
• Colors you hate
• Font styles you like

Finally, to support brand awareness, you must maintain a strong logo identity. Your logo has to appear exactly the same every single time it’s used without exception. Use brand guidelines to maintain that consistency.

These are description guides to provide to advertisers, as well as to your internal organization. They include guides for logos, colors and fonts to use in all types of communications.

Sometimes the domain name isn’t available. You can try to purchase the domain. Be prepared to pay a premium for an aged brand-related domain name. Don’t be tempted to by a domain name with a .org or .net extension. People will always choose .com first before trying another extension. One exception to this is if you are branding for an organization like The Red Cross or www.redcross.org. For businesses and professional, get a .com top-level domain. Don’t be tempted to use hyphens in the domain name either. That makes it harder to remember.

If you can’t get a www.yourbrandname.com domain, consider using your tagline. A short, simple tagline is best for this. To borrow from Foster’s tagline, a brand related domain name could be www.australianforbeer.com.au.

Another option is to use a keyword phrase that receives a good number of local searches on a monthly basis. Google Adwords tool is free and easy to use. Brainstorm a few relevant keyword phrases and then find out if that domain name is available. For example, you have a business offering different types of cruise packages and charter boats on the Sydney Harbour; you might find www.sydneyharbourcruises.com available.

Once you settle on the top-level domain consider buying up all the other domain extension for .org,.net,.biz and so on. This prevents your competitor from using these other domains to compete with yours. Unused domain names typically cost less than $10 a year. This is a smart strategy to secure your online name.

Another way to capture people searching for your website is to brainstorm different spellings and purchase those domain names. Domain registrars allow you to redirect these domains to your main domain. For example, people may type in www.sydneyharborcruises.com instead of www.sydneyharbourcruises.com. You discover that www.sydneyharborcruises.com is available and purchase it. Now you just redirect the one domain to point to the main domain called www.sydneyharbourcruises.com.

Before building or redesigning your website, think about your target audience. What information are they looking for and the tone of the content. If the target audience is brides looking for a unique and memorable way for a wedding reception, make sure you have photos and content written along those lines. Of course, share your brand guide with the graphic artist responsible for the web design. He or she needs to incorporate the correct font, colors and brand usage within the web design.

Make an intriguing offer

The sign-up form is the most important part of the newsletter itself, because most people need a compelling reason to add to their already full inboxes. Describe what benefits subscribers can expect, including discounts and useful industry tips and information. Content is critical to a successful newsletter, but a convincing pitch is essential.

Find balance between too often and not often enough

Constantly spamming the inboxes of your mailing list is the quickest way to get subscribers to unsubscribe. However, if you’re sending messages too infrequently, your subscribers may not remember your company or be as intrigued by your sales pitches. A balance must be maintained between the two extremes, but sending newsletters once or twice per month is typically effective.

Keep the design clean and simple

Keep the design simple to ensure your message is easy to read. Include enough white space that each element of your newsletter is easy to find. Be careful when using large graphics or images. While they can give your newsletter an attractive and professional look, many people block images when reading email, so they will see large white space instead your images.

The subject line is critical

Nobody will open your email if the subject line does not grab their attention. Make your subject line specific, yet short and to the point. Highlight the most important information of the newsletter and describe the exact benefits the readers can gain by opening the email.

Don’t oversell

Your newsletters should be more than just a relentless sales pitch. Provide useful industry information to prove to your subscribers that your company is an industry expert that can be trusted to offer a premium-quality product. Readers are constantly being sold anything and everything. Offer them something more than a sales pitch.

Useful e-Newsletter services

Many e-newsletter services are available to help you begin your email marketing campaign. Two of the more intuitive services are MailChimp and iContact.

MailChimp lets you create email lists, track who has viewed the messages and integrates with useful third party applications like Google Docs and Zoho. MailChimp can build your email campaign in just three steps

1. Create the email list by adding information including list name, reply-to email and your company description. Then click “Save” and your list is complete.
2. Populate your list with email addressed by importing your contacts or adding them manually.
3. Finally, write your e-newsletter message and have MailChimp send it out to every address in your list.

iContact is also a very user friendly e-newsletter application. Its interface is visually appealing and easy to navigate, and its innumerable features let you customize your email campaigns to your precise needs.

These features include:

1. Survey builder – Create surveys to receive input from the people in your email database to focus your newsletter and promotions to your customers’ precise desires.
2. Message scheduling – Write out all your newsletters in advance and let iContact send the messages to your database on an automated schedule.
3. Open click tracking – Keep track of who is opening your emails and who is putting them in the trash folder.

User-friendly navigation – The menu navigation should be simple and easy to understand. Ensure that there is a systematic hierarchy of text links on your website. Your home page must be easily accessible on each page. Place links that would smoothly take your visitors from one page to another without any complication.

Content will always be king – Your content is the basic foundation of your website. A website with informative content never fails to end up becoming popular in the long run. Aside from having numerous visitors obtaining useful data from your site, optimized content will also rank well in various search engine results. Update your content on a regular basis to ensure the information is always fresh and current. It would also be helpful to check for spelling and grammar errors on your website copy text.

Test for usability – Be sure to test your website using different browsers. What works with Internet Explorer may not do fine with Mozilla or Safari. To guarantee a more professional appearance of your site, test your web pages using every available browser used online.

Less is actually more – Go easy with distracting flash animation or huge files that take a while to load. Music and videos are fine, as long as they are not auto-played because they can cause pages to load slower. In some circumstances, they can also crash the user’s browser. Just refer to Google’s website and you’ll understand that less bytes mean quicker loading of web pages.

See to it that there are no broken links and blank pages – Nothing is ever more frustrating for visitors than encountering the “Page cannot be displayed” message on their computer monitor.

Design consistency – There is a fine line between a well-designed site and an overly decorated site. The look and feel should be consistent all throughout by choosing the same design theme. Be sure it is simple yet interesting.

Encourage interaction – An interactive website is always good, especially for business sites, wherein you want to gain more customers. Put an email link somewhere highly visible. You can also have links to sign-up for newsletters, or fill out online forms, etc. Consider live chat support, support downloads, product specification sheets, etc.

Spread the word – What’s the use of a great site if you’ll keep it to yourself? Promote it and let people know about your website through advertising, direct mail, online marketing, referrals, and other marketing efforts.

Keep in mind these fundamental pointers above to accomplish a great website. Now, if you want to avoid the hassles, it’s always a smart decision to hire a professional website designer.

To help you choose the right web design company that meets your needs, here are some useful tips to look into:

Portfolio – Ensure that the web design company has some experience to boast of. And since any agency can claim to be the best, you should check out their successfully accomplished projects. To effectively evaluate a website, you should asses the quality of design; ease of use and navigation; and overall look. Also, they must have a broad range of past works in a variety of industries.

Services – More than just a web design agency, it’s better if they as well offer other relevant services to meet your requirements. These can be anywhere from e-commerce, Internet marketing, to list a few of the things that can help you promote your website. To save time and effort, choose a company that can provide all your needs.

Customer Service / Technical Support – Apart from creating professional design, a good web design company should possess a reliable customer service and technical support. This means that they should be able to provide prompt responses to your queries, as well as timely assistance should you encounter any technical issues.

Pricing – While everyone wants everything cheap nowadays, unfortunately, you’ll just get what you pay for. As you know, prices vary from a few hundreds to thousands of dollars. So, assess whether you can afford them. What’s really important is that the price quoted is reasonable enough to accomplish what you’re looking for.

With the tons of web design agencies in various sizes and shapes available these days, it’s really quite tricky to choose one. So, remember these practical tips above to ensure the success of your website and your business.

First of all, Total Marketing Australia is glad to unveil its newly revamped website — fully functional and very informative, and contains all of our latest marketing projects (link to portfolio). Feel free to browse it and we are sure you will love it as much as we do.

Along with this launching, we would like to introduce to you our newest team member, Stuart Anderson, who is in charge of Search Engine Optimisation & Hosting. Stuart’s boundless creativity will definitely be a great asset to the team.

Also, we would like to extend our warm greetings to one of our clients, Macchiato Pizza Bar and Grill, who are celebrating their 10th anniversary. Their birthday celebrations include the launch of their brand new website, mix 106.5 FM broadcasting from their restaurant every Monday of September, and a range of amazing Birthday Specials.

Some more good news! We want to you to meet our newest clients: Peta Hastings – Famous make-up artist for Movies and celebrities, Peta Hastings has styled various prominent icons, such as Susan Sarandan, Emily Blunt and Eric Bana.

Vodafone – Top mobile network phone provider which actually means Voice-Data-Fone, is geared towards further delivering innovative wireless services to Australia. TMA has been enrolled by one of their longest clients Successful Executive to support Vodafone in the development of one of their Internal sites.

We will keep you posted for the next buzz. Meanwhile, enjoy our new website!

• Content is and will always be king – The phrase, “Content is king” has been overused so often that it already sounds more like a cliché. Yet, this adage remains true ever since. The rule of thumb is simple—constantly update your web content with fresh, steamy content (relevant, of course). As robots dig fresh content, keep adding unique and quality content regularly to attract then and help you rank well on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
 
• Backlinks are key – The more backlinks you have, the merrier and the better. But keep in mind that quality has much more bearing than quantity. The goal is to get backlinks from high quality, high ranking websites that are related to your products/services. Plus, you need to avoid link farms and other spammy pursuits at getting links back to your website. Instead, there are numerousniche directories that you can utilize to submit your website to or some blog articles, and generate backlinks.
 
• Keep tagging – Create keyword optimized title tags for every page of your website. Your keyword should be as near to the beginning of the phrase as possible. Also, remember that the title tag of your web page can be different from the heading title of the article itself.
 
• Map it out – Create a sitemap so that search engine robots can easily visit and index your pages. A sitemap is basically an XML protocol that notifies the search engines about the URLs or web pages on a website that can be crawled. Alternatively, you can use Google and a number of free applications that generate sitemaps.
 
• Anchors away – Use the same keywords for your anchor texts that link to the different pages on your site or when backlinking. Having anchor texts instead of using “click here” helps site visitors and search engines understand what they’re going to find when they click the link.
 
• Link deeper – Don’t forget to create deep links, which is linking to a web page other than your home page. Deep linking ensures that you have backlinks coming in to as many web pages as possible. Deep linking also signifies that you build links to relevant and worthwhile content or webpages of your site.
 
• Start blogging – Create a blog about your products/services and make the URL as: yourdomainname/blog. The advantages of starting a blog are: it helps in adding fresh content, you get extra SEO love when other websites link any of your blog posts, and you also get new content when readers leave comments on your blog.
 
• Tag those pictures – All images on your site should also be well-optimized with targeted keywords. Describe them briefly using alt tags to help search engines that index images find your pages easily, offering greater chances of getting higher search engine rankings. Also, adding image alt tags or alt attributes help the visually impaired to easily access your website using a screen reader, including those visitors who use image search and text only web browsers.
 
• Don’t dare to trick the search engines – Using hidden text, joining link farms, keyword stuffing, and other practices that meant to mislead search engines is not a good idea. Doing so can only harm your ranking, and the penalties will certainly outweigh the temporary benefits. So, keep it clean and to avoid being blacklisted by the major search engines.
 
• Don’t forget your human readers – Always remember your human visitors when optimizing your website—and not just the robots. After all, SEO is meant to help your readers discover the informative content on your site. So, make your content interesting and useful while keeping in mind both the humans and the search engines.

• Create your website using efficient Search Engine Optimization methods – Employ SEO starting from day one. Why wait when you’ve already spent a fortune on your website only to find out later on that it wasn’t search engine friendly. Don’t forget to apply page techniques, such as meta tags, headers, keyword density to further improve your website’s search ranking.
• Have a strong Search Engine Optimization plan – Never assume that just as long as you build and launch your website, you are going to get the top spot on search engine results page (SERP). It takes a lot of effort to build a website that’s based on off-page optimization and other solid SEO guidelines. Off-page optimization is the process of building links from relevant third party websites to your website. The higher the Google page rank (PR) of these sites, the better search engine ranking your site will get. As a rule, be sure to incorporate your keywords within the actual link text.
• Leaving your search engine ranking to pure luck is not an advisable approach – That’s why search ranking improvement should be an ongoing mission. You must take SEO seriously if you want to continuously progress and eventually dominate the search engine results page. Execute your SEO plan accordingly and work it out until you reach the number one position. Once you’ve attained your desired results, set a maintenance plan into place to keep that spot for good.
• Reaching the top of search ranking is no joke – In fact, those sites found in the top 2-3 positions get the most traffic. Now, if your site isn’t included there, it means you haven’t maximized your website’s SEO potential. Therefore, you’re not growing your business as large or as productively as you can. So never be contented at mediocre results or settle for anything less than search engine domination.
• Improve your website’s visibility and search ranking now – Start from where you are and work your way up. While getting top search rankings that you can be proud of takes a lot of work, time and patience, the fruits of your labour will certainly pay off once you see a huge ROI.