Ever wish Google would tell you, step-by-step, how to get better search results? Ever wish they’d tell you precisely what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right? Better yet, ever wish Google would listen to you?

Then Google Webmaster Tools should be a wish a come true – one of the most effective ways of identifying and addressing search engine optimization issues that can make or break your search engine results.

Not only will this FREE service help Google’s spider crawl your site more effectively and help you increase traffic, but it will also allow you to share valuable information about your site that Google would otherwise never know.

See What Google Sees

If Google is having problems crawling and indexing one of your pages, you need to know about it. The Diagnostics section in Google Webmaster Tools can tell you the answer – showing the pages successfully crawled and indexed, as well as those that are not, including an explanation as to why and what you can do about it.

Increase Your Traffic

The more you know about those who have already found you, the more effectively you can target traffic in the future. Google Webmaster Tools tells you the top queries used to find your site, which reveals a great deal about how well you are using keywords to optimize your pages, and while it is not as in depth as Google Analytics, it provides a different point of view.

Google Webmaster Tools also shows you all the external links pointing to your pages from other websites, as well as internal links among the pages in your own site. This can be helpful for a variety of reasons.

For instance, Google Webmaster Tools recently helped CyberMark discover that one of our clients had broken inbound links pointing to old “spammy” pages (i.e., keyword-stuffed and not SEO-friendly) created by a search engine optimization company they used prior to our service – a company that did not use ethical SEO practices. We fixed the problem and our client’s search engine results improved as a result.

Tell Google What to Do

You know your site better than anyone, so you should be the one telling Google the best way to crawl it. With Google Webmaster Tools, you can do just that. The Sitemap feature allows you to prioritize your pages and Google’s robot will crawl them accordingly. You can even tell Google to stop crawling pages that you no longer want indexed in search engine results.

If you are banned from Google for any reason, the only place you can request re-inclusion is through Webmaster Tools. And if Google finds problems with your site, Webmaster Tools gives them the ability to directly contact you for a resolution.

To stay on top of enhancements to Google Webmaster Tools, follow the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. And for any questions you might have, try the Webmaster Help Forum or contact CyberMark.

RELATED POSTS:

Google Analytics Part I: The Basics of ROI for SEO

Google Analytics Part II: Tracking Visits from Start to Finish

Google Analytics Part III: Google Website Optimizer

The more you know about visitors to your website today, the more successful you’ll be at using SEO to attract and convert more visitors tomorrow. Google Analytics can help with a vast array of tools for tracking visits from start to finish, including where they’re from, where they go on your website, and when and where they leave.

• Map Overlay – Displays a world map showing the areas where your visitors are coming from. Click anywhere on the map, and it will go in for a closer look at that specific country or state. Below the map is a “Site Usage” tab. In this area you may use the “Detail Level” drop down menu to specify more detailed results by continent, sub continental region, country or territory, or city.

If you see that a large percentage of your visitors are coming from New York City, for example, but you don’t have any information on the site relevant to that area, then you should be able improve your conversion rate simply by adding content more relevant to people from that part of the country.

• Site Overlay* – Shows the “hot spots” of visitor activity on each page, with a breakdown of what percentage of visitors are clicking where.

If you see that one of your call to action buttons never gets clicked, you may need to try tweaking its content or moving it somewhere else on the page.

* Be aware that if you link to the same URL twice on one page, and visitors click 2% on one and 3% on the other, both will show 5% because it’s the same URL. Though Google is working on this issue, Crazy Egg is a good alternative to refer to in the meantime.

• New vs. Returning Visitors – Compares the number of people who are new to your site with those who have visited before.

If you see that you aren’t getting a lot of return visitors, you may need to add some incentive in terms of frequently updated content, such as a blog, forum or newsfeed.

• Visitor Trending – Displays visits, absolute unique visitors, pageviews, time visitors spent on your site and the bounce rate (or the number of visitors who left the site after viewing just one page).

If you see that visitors aren’t spending much time on the site and leaving after just one or two pageviews, you may need to consider improving the relevance of the content on the site or tweaking the site design to make it more user-friendly. You can even pinpoint the specific place on your site where visitors are losing interest and tweak that page accordingly.

• Visitor Loyalty – Shows how often people have visited your site, how recently, how long they spent there and how many pages they viewed.

If you launch a new marketing campaign, for instance, take a look at visitor recency. It’s one good way of judging the success of your campaign at pulling in more visitors within the relevant time frame.

• Browser Capabilities – Identifies various aspects of browser capabilities, including a breakdown of visitor:

- Browsers used to find you, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla

- Operating systems, such as Windows, Macintosh and Linux

- Screen colors and screen resolutions used to view your website

If you see that many of your visitors use Internet Explorer 6, for example, you may need to be careful with your site design as that particular browser is very touchy and may look misaligned.

When weighing all of this data, it is important to remember that no analytics program is 100 percent accurate. However, Google Analytics serves as an invaluable guideline for evaluating your site’s SEO, content and design, then making changes accordingly.

Still to come, Google Analytics Part III: Google Web Optimizer.

For businesses looking to deflect the impact of this economic downturn, analyzing return on investment (ROI) is more critical than ever. And the key to that is choosing the most trackable of marketing options, of which search engine optimization ranks close to the top. In fact, according to a recent online poll, SEO is the number one internet marketing tool that website owners plan to use over the next six months, with blogging and cost per click advertising ranking second and third.

Of all the tools you may use to track ROI for your internet marketing, the most important one to master is Google Analytics. Last week, this fact was reinforced at an SEO seminar where much of the focus was on this valuable tool.

In this first installment of a 3-part series on Google Analytics, let’s start with the basics.

Through your Google Analytics account, you can easily determine the ROI for your SEO by tracking all of the following within a specified period of time, be it daily, weekly, monthly or the entire year:

• Total number of pages viewed on your site
• Average number of pages viewed by each visitor
• Average time visitors spend on your site
• Percentage of visitors that leave your site after viewing just one page
• Percentage of new visitors to your site
• Which countries your visitors are from
• How visitors are finding you, including:
  • Search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.)
  • Typing your URL into the browser
  • Referring sites that link to your site
  • Emails that link to your site
• Top viewed pages

Though this information is especially important in determining the ROI for your search engine optimization, it’s equally beneficial in terms of evaluating the effectiveness of your content.

For example, if the percentage of new visitors who find your site via search engines increases by 20 percent each month, it’s really inconsequential if you’re seeing similar increases in the percentage of visitors leaving your site after just one page view without converting. In that case, your SEO may be right on target, but the call to action on your pages may need to be strengthened.

Stay tuned for Google Analytics Part II: Tracking Visits from Start to Finish.

Now and then a client who’s been with CyberMark for a while will ask a question that speaks to the true nature of search engine optimization: “Do I really need to keep doing SEO?” Typically their search engine rankings are great, and have been – consistently so – for a long time. In their view, our search engine optimization was successful, so why keep up with the monthly service.

What many website owners do not realize is that SEO is not something you do once and then move on from. In fact, search engine optimization is a process that never ends.

4 Reasons You Can Never Let SEO Go

1) When search engine algorithms change, so do the rules. Problem is, they change all the time. It’s the job of SEO experts like us to know how to respond. What we’ve been doing with great success in the past may not carry much weight anymore, so we have to find new ways of keeping our clients ranking high.

2) Every day, your competitors are aggressively targeting the same keywords as you. Or they’re discovering new popular search terms that you’re not targeting at all, but should be. It’s our job to keep track of these developments to be sure you don’t get left behind.

3) Link popularity is one of the most important elements of search engine optimization. The more quality websites that link to you – with content relevant to yours – the more the search engines perceive you as an authority on your topic and rank you accordingly. Building these kinds of external links to your website is not easy, and it’s not something that should be done all at once. That’s why we have a program in place for building these links naturally, over time, which is what the search engines want to see.

4) New trends in search engine optimization are popping up all the time. As SEO experts, we make it our job to immerse ourselves in industry news and embrace these new trends so we can put them to work for our clients.

When we put it that way to website owners who question the importance of ongoing SEO services, they seem rather relieved to be getting all that for what’s really little more than a nominal monthly fee when compared to the results.

Working in search engine optimization, we’re used to being flexible with SEO strategies. You have to be, as the “rules” dictated by search engines are changing all the time. If we don’t tweak what’s working and abandon what’s not, we’re not doing our job. That said, there’s a new trend in SEO that CyberMark recommends to all website owners – advice we’re taking to heart with our own clients and this new CyberMark blog, On Target SEO.

In 1994, a form of blogging got its start as “online diaries” – the same year when I got my start in SEO. By 2004, “blogs” as they had come to be known (the contraction for “web logs”) had developed into the news-sharing, opinion-shaping tools we know them as today.

At one time, commenting on other blogs with a link back to your own site was a great way of building inbound links and, in turn, effective search engine optimization. Now though, most of these are “no follow” links, meaning the search engines will no longer give you credit for these links when determining your link popularity. Still, blogs are one of the most exciting new tools for search engine optimization for three big reasons.

Search engines love blogs because they can:

1) Ensure fresh content on your site. The more often you post, the more often the search engines are going to crawl your site – a big plus as the more new, relevant content you add, the better your search engine placement is going to be.

2) Give you an opportunity to incorporate more relevant, keyword-rich content into your site. It’s an added bonus if you can connect your blog post to current events, as you can capitalize on those searching for more information on topics in the news.

3) Attracts inbound links to quality content. The more inbound links you have (from other sites with quality content), the more search engines are going to view you as an authority on the subject and rank your site accordingly.

Plus, a blog gives you an opportunity to engage in an open conversation of sorts with both existing and potential customers. They can comment on your blog, and you can comment right back.

And if you doubt yours is the kind of business that has anything relevant to blog about, think again. Whether used to share news relevant to your industry, or simply as a place to post pictures and stories about your talented dedicated staff, a blog is a tool every website can absolutely use to strengthen your SEO and build rapport with your target audience.

“What’s the point of having a website if no one can find it?” It sounds like an obvious question today, but not the case back in the early nineties when the internet was just taking off. I was in website sales at the time. Most of the effort went into building the pages and very little into building traffic. It was an opportunity I took to break into a brand new industry – search engine optimization (SEO).

When we started CyberMark International back in 1994, the search engines were primitive compared to those of today. And there were no books on search engine optimization – no blogs or websites detailing all the ins-and-outs of SEO. It was all trial and error as those of us on the ground floor of search engine optimization collectively “wrote the book” on how to optimize webpages – no easy task considering how fast search engines have been evolving ever since.

Fourteen years later, the basics of SEO are available to anyone who wants to spend time learning them. What’s trickier is being able to instinctively respond to new search engine algorithms – not only figuring out what changes to make accordingly, but doing it fast enough and effectively enough so as not to lose search engine ranking in the process.

Though keeping up with this ever-evolving industry is what CyberMark clients pay us to do, that’s not to say they have no interest in the subject. On the contrary, when we want to make changes to someone’s website, they want to know why, and understandably so. “Because we said so” isn’t a reason. In fact, website owners should be leery of any SEO company that does not want to explain how they’re going to optimize your pages and why. Chances are they’re engaged in practices that could seriously hurt your search engine ranking in the long run.

It’s this interest on the part of website owners that has inspired this blog.

Every day we field questions from clients who want to know more – not because they want to become SEO experts themselves, but because they want to be informed consumers. That’s our goal with this blog – On Target SEO: What website owners want to know about search engine optimization.

Whether you’re a client of CyberMark or not, please feel free to submit to us your SEO questions in the Comments section of each post. We promise to respond in one of two ways – in the Comments section of the relevant post, or with a new post related to your question.

There’s a science to search engine optimization, so you will find steadfast “rules” here. But SEO is also an art, so we promise to leave plenty of room to share some of the creative inspiration that goes into finessing your website’s way to the top!