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Contents:

o How To Improve Your Site With Google Analytics

o Top 10 Graphic Design Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

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How To Improve Your Site With Google Analytics

All this week, I have been working on my sites,
trying to improve them by using Google Analytics.
I am mainly concentrating on improving my conversion
rates or the number of sales I get compared to the number
of visitors.

I am getting those sales numbers up by focusing on
improving two factors which affect my conversion rates.
These two are: bounce rate and the time spent on my site.

Google Analytics is a free program from Google and
every webmaster should be using it but I am constantly
surprised by how many webmasters and marketers I encounter
daily who are not using it.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Now Google Analytics is a free program from Google and it
is truly invaluable because of all the important data
it gives you about your webpages and content. It tells
you how many visitors you’re getting, where they are
coming from, where they go to on your site and how
long they stay. All vital information for any webmaster
or marketer trying to improve the overall performance
of your content or sites.

If you’re not using Google Analytics you’re missing
out on one of the best free programs on the web. And
it’s very simple to use – simply join up and then place
a small snippet of code on all your webpages and Google
collects all your vital site stats for you. And you can
even customize your own tasks and segments to check the
effectiveness of all your marketing goals.

Why is Google Analytics so important?

First of all, I am using Google Analytics to lower
my bounce rate – if you have a high bounce rate this
means once visitors see your page they immediately hit the
back button. This is not good news. Actually it’s
horrible news. Your potential visitors and customers
are voting with their back button and leaving your
site without a second glance. No visitors, no revenues.

I have been using Analytics for years and it has helped
me immensely. Lately, I have been concerned with the
high bounce rate of some of my pages – people were not
even viewing some of my important pages. Ouch!

So I redesigned some of the page layout and placed in
more professional looking graphics and the bounce rates
are going down. I know this because I am checking my site’s
stats within the Analytics program daily.

Beside just getting people to stay on my site, there’s another
reason why lowering your bounce rate could be important.
Many SEO experts believe Google is using your content’s
bounce rate as one of their 200+ ranking factors tehy use
to rank pages or content. Makes sense, what better
measurement of a site’s worth than people voting with their
back button.

Let’s say you’re searching Google, you click thru to the
listed page and a second later you have hit the back button
and looking for the next listing in Google’s SERPs. You
obviously didn’t find what you’re looking for and that
listing can’t be very valuable to the searcher and Google
is no doubt tracking this fact. And wouldn’t it be in Google’s
main interest to lower your site’s link in their results.
Providing relevant quality results is Google’s “bread and butter”
and the cornerstone of all that search engine revenue.

How important a factor your bounce rate plays can only be
known by Google but it’s something you should definitely
try to improve. Besides, the lower your bounce rate but the
more quality traffic you will get.

Another issue and probably an even more important ranking
factor is the time people spend on your pages or content.
Google Analytics will also give you this data so you can
try and test different content to improve your times. Again
the more time someone spends on your site, the better it
will perform.

Yet another factor is the pageviews per visitor – the more
pages your visitors frequents the more popular your
site will be. You want your visitors to stay and view more of
your content and not just stay on the homepage or the landing
page.

Working with Google Analytics you can improve all these factors
by test running different graphics, different layouts and of
course, different content to see what works best.

Several things I have discovered from closely monitoring my
pages within Google Analytics:

- Traffic source is very important. Visitors coming from
reading my articles stay longer on my sites and have much
better conversion rates. This is very understandable since I
“pre-sell” in my articles and readers are familiar with
the quality of my content.

- When fine-tuning your webpages, make subtle changes or
one change at a time. If it works keep it, if it doesn’t work
change it back to your old design. I found it less nerve-racking
to make small changes and then gradually improve my pages, one
step at a time.

- Some keywords are better than others for delivering good results.
Keywords which are perfectly matched to your content obviously do
much better. For example, someone searching for cheap laptops
who lands on a page listing cheap laptops and discount coupons
will havelow bounce rates and high retention rates.

- Professional graphics and professional web design do make
a large difference in how your pages perform. I believe savvy
web users have now grown a sixth sense when browsing the web
and can instantly tell if a page is professional looking and
worth their time. Using templates and cookie cutter sites might
be cheaper but they are not always the best route to go even if
you’re on a tight budget. My suggestion – at least invest in a
good professional logo and come up with a catchy phrase that sums
up your site so that people will remember it.

- Here’s the deal clincher! Google Analytics will give you the
keyword or keyword phrases that converts into a sale or sales.
You need to make a list of all the MOST profitable keywords and
concentrate the MAJORITY of your marketing on these keywords.
Don’t forget to market your site as a whole, but use Google
Analytics to pin-point the keywords you should be paying the
most attention to in your marketing. I do articles, blog posts,
press releases – to create links and link bait for these all
important profitable keywords. By getting higher rankings I get
more traffic and by lowering my bounce rate I get more of that
traffic to my webpages and keep them there longer… all resulting
in more sales.

Google Analytics is a very useful and beneficial program to
improve the overall performance of your webpages or content.
Used properly, it can also be an invaluable marketing tool to
increase your bottom line. It doesn’t get any better than this!

http://www.google.com/analytics/

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If you want more help on how websites should be designed – I
found this very detailed free PDF report by Marlons Sanders to
be very helpful.

Top 10 Graphic Design Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

Click to view or download:

Top 10 Graphic Mistakes

Kind Regards,
Titus

http://www.bizwaremagic.com