One level of doing good website analytics for your website  is to make note of the websites that are referring traffic to you.  It is advisable to develop a spreadsheet of those websites, and make note of every time a referral happens to your various websites.. If  your website is still small, it may be fine to do this on a monthly basis. Place the names of the month and year across the horizontal grid of the spreadsheet, and the website names on the vertical grid. Then, you will begin to really be able to watch the data. The basic view in Google Analytics, if that is your tool, will show you a day by day view for a month. That’s just not enough though.

Another good tactic is to note the number of pages from within a specific website that are referring to you. Certain websites may be feeding traffic from multiple pages. Note the pages that produce the most traffic to your website, and try to target material toward those specific pages.  In a kind of reverse fashion, you should also be noted what page level in your website is being targeted. Many people never look past the data for the home page of their website.

There is still another layer in this social media era that needs to be considered, if one is to do good website analytics. And it is a real proverbial honey pot. The actual people that are sending traffic to a website also needs to be noted. Sometimes, on sites like Twitter, people are clicking on a link to a specific website that was placed on a particular User’s Twitter page by retweet, direct message etc.  Good analytic software like Google Analytics will be able to show the specific User page that was used as the referral. Hence, you know the specific user, because the referral came from their User Twitter Page.

Once specific social media websites have been identified as referring sites, it becomes advantageous to do research on how wide a market those sites reach. A specific referral to any given website might have come from a Twitter User Page with only 40 or 50 followers.  But another referring page might have 8000 followers. Finding ways to frequently target the large Twitter page can help drive traffic to  your websites.

To get a start on this strategy for social media, try a website like Klout.com.  There are others as well. A strategy for website analytics needs to involve, as a minimum, these layers of analysis. I guarantee that there are others as well. We’ll see how many you can come up with, now that we have touched on the issue of digging deep into website analytics.

Raymond Province is an IT Programmer in the health care industry. He frequently writes about search engine optimization, website development, and writing good website content. You can reach him at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.

I want to focus this edition of my blog on some of the questions that still make me crazy. These can be hard questions to answer, but I will do my best.  I hope you enjoy the conversation.

The first of these questions is why my website does not rank number one in search engine optimization. That’s a fair question to ask.  First of all,  my website has not aged enough yet.  Second, I always put working on my website as a low priority anymore.  I make sure I have my client’s work done first. Then, I come back and work on my site. 

The biggest reason, though, has to do with the name of my company. Celtic Ozark Solutions.  When you are searching for SEO related topics, you will typically expect to find those words in the name of the company. SEO Book is one of my favorites. To be frank, though, I don’t care.  I have always wanted to own a company named Celtic Ozark Solutions. So, there ya go. The bottom line is, I am getting good business anyway, doing many other things right.

The second of the questions that make me crazy has to do with the fact that people think I should be working for Google, in order to understand how to do search engine optimization. That is simply not the case. I recently did an article on Design, Build, and Validate that talks about the process of how I manage to move people up the rankings with SEO.  It is an experimental process that measures results. You can learn to do anything that way. 

The other issue is that, if I worked for Google, I would not be allowed to have a company working on SEO.  Pay per click is too big a money maker for them.

These are just a couple of those questions.  When I am feeling philosophical again, I’ll write on some more. In the meantime, I need to go back to work.

Ray Province is an IT Programmer in the healthcare industry, and owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions, a company that specializes in SEO, SEO rich content, and website development. You can reach him at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.

Rule One: check their customers. You need to be able to see the type of work they are doing for their customers. Ask for referrences. They should be able to provide actual testimonials, data, etc. that shows what they have done for their customers.

Rule Two: be aware of the tactics being used for getting traffic. On a very high level, anyone can tell you that SEO and PPC are good ways to draw traffic to your site. But how, exactly, will that happen? Quite frankly, that is just the beginning anyway.

You should have a working plan for email, direct traffic, organic searches, social media sites, and a host of other things. Your SEO person needs to be able to give you a clear strategy on how this will work.

Rule Three: what will be the budget? How much are you willing to spend on marketing your website? There are lots of good companies to use, to help you with getting Traffic to your website. If you low ball your budget, though, you should know the stretegy for getting the most bang for your buck.

You can only expect so much work for $25 a month. But if you choose to go that way, you should know what will be done for the, let’s say, hour of work you will get. (You’ll be lucky to get an hour!)

Rule Four: good SEO takes a long time. The best are spending the time to get it done right. Make sure you have a good idea of how much of the budget is going to PPC (pay per click), SEO, article writing, etc. Make sure you also know what part of your website needs SEO. You may want to focus all the work on just a couple of high hitting pages.

Rule Five: measure everything. You need to have analytics on the website that will tell you how many people are visiting the site. Good search engine optimization help from any SEO experts will require a knowledge of how many people are visiting the site. A Google account can start this for free. Content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others can also let you install a plugin that will do the analytics you need. It is where the rubber hits the road.

Finding good SEO help can be a challenge, but these basic ideas will help you get it done. Good luck in finding an SEO expert to help you with your website. We are always glad to help. For more information, check out  our website  for the SEO expert near you.

Every so often, it is necessary to take a look at the overall design of your website. I know I am getting ready to look at the design of this site again. Changes in the overall design of your website can really make a difference in the number of visitors that come to your website. 

Part of your overall Google PR ratings comes from the number of people who visit your website. It can often be just as important as the content you provide.  One would think a fact should be valid under any circumstances. In a sense, that is true. But relevance comes into play in the world of the Internet. The more people that come to your site can influence people into thinking that your information is better.  It’s just a cold hard fact of life.

So now, let’s talk about a process to make changes to design, called DBV’s. Again, that stands for design, build, and validate.  In the design phase, you will look at what design changes need to be made. You may want a new template, or a new set of colors, or a new set of graphics.  You may even decide that you want to design a couple of options. This can actually be valuable to the process.

Next you will build the options. You may even want to save them on your server for quick changes.  Think of all the change options you can, and build them out. Just knock them out.

Finally, you will validate which designs have the most impact.  In this process, you want to try to keep all other variables the same.  If you have not changed content in a while, then hold off. If you post a regular blog, keep the same schedule.  You don’t want too many variables to scew your validation process. 

Analytics comes into play in the validation process. You must start by clearly knowing how many people are visiting your website. You also need to know how many normally come each day. Then, make a change, and validate that the change increased or decreased traffic to your site. Validate again you have made no other changes that could scew your results (often called negative testing in the industry.)  Then, work your way through your designs. Soon, you should be able to determine some changes that will help you.

Design, build, and validate is a great way to go about the process of making changes to your website. I guarantee it will be the process I use to update Celtic Ozark Solutions.

I know I have several followers from down under, so I wanted to share a little about his company. If you are involved in the build, design, and support of website branding and presence in Australia, you might want to give Johnny’s company a call, and see what they can do for you. SEO Experts Austrlia is live.

For the longest time, the whole Internet was run like a big science experiment, because most of the people using it were sharing academic research across the Internet.  But it did not take long for smart internet marketers to figure out that you could also use links for sales.  Instead of just giving people a link to research, being used like a footnote in a term paper, they would send you to a landing page to buy something.  Soon afterwards, the trick also started being used to take you to a website just to get your email address, address, phone etc.

Links to your own website are still OK, and when used well, they can provide needed traffic to your website. Now though, the search engines also like quality information links.  So, when you are writing articles, add one or two links to your article that helps to substantiate your facts. My trick here is to use big, popular research sites. Don’t use just Wiki references.

Put quality links in your articles, as well as links to your website, and watch the SEO build. That’s my little tid bit today.

Raymond C. Province, M.A., ACMPE

Celtic Ozark Solutions

To start the name of the picture, add your website name then the pic name. For example, a pix could be celticozarksolutionstwitterlogo. I would name a picture of a Twitter logo on my site this way. Simple and effective.

Naming your pictures with keywords for your site is also good. Bots can pick this up. Again this is simple and effective.

Pay attention to naming your pictures, and it will help people find your site.

Raymond C. Province, M.A.
Celtic Ozark Solutions

Location:Carnat,Columbia,United States

For many these days, the answer is “NO.”  It may simply be too labor intensive.  Long gone are the days that you can just join a link building service, and have those links come rolling in.  Once you did that, you could just get yourself a few quality links, and the website traffic could come rolling in.  It was a true “set it and forget it” time in the history of search engine optimization and website marketing.

To make matter worse, Google starting dinging everyone for this type of behavior.  More links suddenly became a red flag, and people started losing PageRank.  So, the only one’s left in the “link building business” were the scammers, who just wanted your money, and could not be bothered with your Page Ranking.  So, I really can’t blame people for getting discouraged about link building of any king.

People then moved to trading links one for one with other folks.  “Do Follow” networks developed.  And this did provide some good links for a while.  In today’s time, though, too many one to one links can also get you in trouble.

So much for the nay sayers.  Now I want you to consider that links are still worth the effort.  Here are some of my reasons for still doing link building:

• Links help others find your website, even if Google doesn’t give you much credit. This is especially true on social media platforms. If your part of a “tribe” on a social website, I suspect your trading links for all kinds of good stuff.
• Good quality outbound links to sites like yours, with a PageRank of 3 or better, still count in your overall PageRank score.  Plus, it lets people know the kind of sites you feel are important.  I still think it is good to have some of these on your website. Just look at my website here, and you’ll know I still practice this.
• Good quality links in from comments on your site are also good. But they must be relevant.  I have an essential “do follow’ website here, but I still monitor the comments.  More importantly, I monitor the links added. So, don’t even think about adding a Viagra link to this site!  (Though Askimet will probably get you first!)
• I still think the best links are those that are created by people bookmarking your quality information. I don’t believe you have to be a genius either.  Just provide people with solid information. Discuss what works and what does not, etc.  These links are definitely worth the effort.

That’s my take on it,

Raymond Province

If you are just spamming websites with comments, you are obviously not keeping up with the current conventionality on what really helps your website get noticed. I had a comment added today to this site, for running criminal background checks.  What’s up with that? Link it to a website that makes sense. Oh, the comment was nice enough. So, that part I don’t mind keeping.

So now, I am going into the comment via the edit comment functionality in WordPress, and changing the link to something relevant. That way, when you click on the person’s name in the comment, you get something worth looking at. If you have a site related to mine, let me know, and I’ll link some back to you!

If you want to just spam websites, be warned. My comments links will be put to good use.  Join the campaign to see what this does for your SEO ratings.

Raymond Province, M.A.

The publishers of magazines online will be working harder than ever to have their content indexed by the search engines. We will be seeing bits of the text, often called “snippets” in the industry, that will be designed to tempt us to get the article. The little morsels will be designed to help you quicklly figure out if the information is useful. Content will be kind in the first 100 words.

Once you get hooked on the summary you are given, the publishers will attempt to get you to buy the article content.  There should be a modest price for the articles. Better yet, they will want to sell you a subscription to the magaine. That will be where the big money will be.  Once you have a subscription, you’ll be subject to the advertising that will be presented. Right now, all the new ebook and eMagazine readers to set to handle advertising, and video, with the exception of the Kindle. The technology of the Kindle is still very simple, and does not lend itself well to advertising and moving graphics.

The search engine crawls will be limited to the summary material. We’ll have to see if any0ne wants to break that rule.  Google can already run with such a senario. Just take a look at Google Books.  Google Books has a large database of print publications, which also includes eMagazines. Once they have the propriatary rights to index content from the major publishers, they will be off and running. Although Bing/Yahoo! have no similar publication search database, they will probably also be able to find ways of indexing “hidden content”, in an effort to keep up with the Giant Google.

Flash based ads will only be the beginning. New technologies will be developed to exploit this new media market. Publishers will be glad to hop on board, as this new media will offer new sources of income from advertising, interactive programs, and the like. They will also have faster access to data about how the campaign is going. Real time results will be possible, versus surveys, focus groups, and the like. So, get ready for the eMagazine boom. Coming in  an eReader near you.

Ray Province, M.A., ACMPE

Celtic Ozark Solutions