Category: SearchEngines

Useful links: Dissected tweets, photo apps, Google places

This is what a tweet looks like from ReadWriteWeb is the sort of thing that would make a great poster to put in your office. Endlessly fascinating. (When I saw the headline in my RSS reader, I got all excited, because I thought the post would be about Twitterscapes.)

Demo Girl has been quiet lately, but she’s back with 3 Fun Photo Editing iPhone Apps.

Google Local Business Center Becomes “Google Places” at Search Engine Land says you can add tags, photos, QR codes, favorite places, coupons, and real time updates to your business listing with Google. More at Google Places.

A look at Google Analytics

This is the first in a series about analytics tools. In following weeks I’ll also examine Woopra and Post Rank Analytics. We’ll start off this look into the hows and whys of analytics with a look at Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free tracking tool that will help you understand how many people visit your site and what they are doing on your site. You find out what entry pages are most used, what page users were on when they left your site, where visitors came from both in a geographical sense and a referring link sense.

Elise Bauer wrote How to Build Blog Traffic – Search Engines and SEO, and it’s a definitive explanation of what Google or any other analytic tool does to help you build your blog and understand your audience. If you’ve never read Elise’s post, go take a look.

To get started with Google Analytics, set up a profile with Google for the website you’re going to track. You get a unique ID, which is inserted into a code snippet Google provides. Paste this code snippet into your web page code and you’re ready to go. SkinnyMinnyMedia has an excellent tutorial about how to insert the HTML snippet into a WordPress or Blogspot blog in Tracking Your Blog Statistics with Google Analytics. A helpful video tutorial on Using Google Analytics is available from Thirty Day Challenge.

There is a lot of documentation and help available to get you going with Google Analytics, and there’s Google customer support.

With Google Analytics, you’ll get site usage information, bounce rate (how many people left immediately), average time spent on your site, average number of pages viewed, the number of new visitors and other helpful metrics. This is more than just a count of page views. This type of information helps you understand what works on your site and what your visitors are interested in reading.

It’s the nature of a blog to read the most recent post and then leave. A blogger might not want a bounce rate report each day or week. With Google Analytics, you can customize your reports to track only the information you care most about.

Google has prepared a checklist called Get the most out of your report that will help you through each step from installing the tracking code to learning about features like keyword optimization.

With Google, you can add Google ads. The selling point for Google Analytics, from Google’s point of view, is that the knowledge you glean from the metrics you collect helps you target your advertising more effectively. As you can see in this video on Google Analytics from Google, the emphasis is definitely on monetization of a web site.

Even if you aren’t displaying Google ads, or any ads, the knowledge you gain about what captures the interest of your readers is helpful to you in planning new content and keeping your blog growing.

Google Analytics scales. It works on a mega-site but it can also work for a small site. If you have a mega-site, it would be a no-brainer decision to use it. If you have a smaller site, you might want to compare it with the two other analytic tools we’ll be looking at in future posts: Woopra and Post Rank.

Useful links: Stickybits, Women in Tech, Google in China

Stickybits makes QR code blocks for you that get sent to you as a stick-on. These can be attached to equipment, cards, or anything else where it makes sense to provide your contact information or URL.

New Research from ABI Highlights the Characteristics That Lead to Advancement of Technical Women. This is a summary. The full report is available as a PDF download.

A new approach to China on the Google Blog outlines their plans for dealing with the recent issues between Google and China.

Site Testing Checklist

It’s wise to test your site as you’re building it. Check your pages for accessibility, for validity, for appearance and function as you go along. Don’t wait until you’re finished to think about things like valid code and accessibility.

Even when you do those things as a normal part of your process, you still need to perform a number of tests after the files are uploaded to a live server. Here’s a brief checklist of things you need to test when your site goes live.

  • Validate HTML and CSS
  • Run accessibility checks
  • Check every function and script
  • Check spelling and grammar
  • Check page appearance in a variety of browsers
  • Evaluate the site with CSS disabled
  • Evaluate search engine friendliness

    How to Nuture Web Pages for Growth

    Give every page the minimum nutrients for proper growth.

    • Every page needs a descriptive title. The title should give the name of the site and the page contents something like this: How to Nuture Your Web Pages: Web Teacher.
    • Every page needs headings and information that explain what the page is about.
    • The page content must be focused and clear and contain keywords that help machines like search engines identify the topic of the content.

    Titles, headings, and page content are used by the search engines to index your pages. If you want to be found by someone who might search on your topic use all three. I don’t know if this approach will work if you are waiting for Prince Charming (or Princess Charming) to find you, but it works for web surfers.

    Useful Links: center img, Webstock recordings, poll everywhere, spezify

    Centering Images with CSS is a quick and easy tutorial.

    The Webstock recordings are online. These are the February 2009 event in Wellington, but older Webstock material is still available, too. Excellent speakers and topics.

    How to  Conduct Live Polls Via Twitter and SMS is a great tip for speakers and teachers. It explains how to use Poll Everywhere.

    Spezify is a different kind of search. Try searching on your own name. You get visual results and excerpts of things you’ve published. Interesting the way it displays and organizes the results. Wonder how it decides what is important?

    Summary of eHow articles for May

    The articles I published on eHow in May are listed.

    Deb's Deli

    Jemez Springs is about 45 minutes from Albuquerque in the Jemez Mountains. I went to a Tai Chi Retreat there and took a bunch of photos. There are about 4 places to eat in this tiny town, all serve very good food. Deb’s Deli serves real homemade pie, ice cream, and you can get a hair cut in the shop in the hall. I ate a lot more than I soaked in the hot springs, and I did Tai Chi a lot more than either of those things.

    For eHow in May, I opened a new Twitter account for @Veesites. Veesites  is my eHow username, and this Twitter account will contain only tweets about eHow content. The new account will give me an RSS feed from Twitter for my eHow content, since eHow doesn’t provide for a way for individual users to get a clean RSS feed for articles.