SEO TIPS

By: Gabriel Gervelis

Understanding the Google Analytics dashboard

Google Analytics is a free program offered by Google that allows you to answer two main questions.

1) How are visitors coming to your website?
2) What are visitors doing once they are on your website?

Once you’ve installed the free Google Analytics program within the code of your website, if you don’t know how to use the program, there is no added value. Understanding the language of Google Analytics will empower you to get the most out of your SEO campaign.

The first thing you see after logging into Google Analytics is the dashboard. Understanding the terms used on the dashboard is key to understanding Google Analytics.

The Basic Google Analytics Glossary

Visits
The number of visitors entering your website. Keep in mind that visits are recorded by IP address, so this figure is not unique.

Page Views
The number of web pages within your web site have been viewed. This is the total amount of page views from all visitors within a given amount of time.

Pages/Visits
The number of pages the average visit generates. This is an average number.

Bounce Rate
How many visitors bounced off of your website. A bounce is a visitor that enters your website from any entry page, the exits the website with out visiting pages deeper within the site, or clicking on any links. For Example: a visitor that enters your website from a search engine, spends 35 seconds on that page, then exits with out clicking on any links is considered a bounce.

Avg. Time on Site
How long the average visitor stays on your website. You may want users to have a long time on site or short time on site depending on your goals.

% New Visits
How many of your total visitors are new visitors versus how many of your total visitors are repeat visitors.

Other Google Analytics Resources:

Mahalo Beta
This post shows how to install the free program, and other basic functions of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Blog
This is the official Google Analytics blog, if you can’t find the information you are looking for here, you can’t find it at all!

Good luck with your SEO ventures!

By: Gabriel Gervelis

What Is Off-Page Optimization?

When speaking with professional search engine optimization companies you will hear the terms On-Page optimization and Off-page optimization. The cost of any seo campaign should be a direct relation to how much work is conducted. How much On-Page and Off-Page Optimization needs to be preformed in order to achieve the campaigns goals. Not taking into account the time it takes to research and monitor a website’s rankings over time, on and off-page optimization are the two main factors for project costs.

Off Page Optimization
Work conducted outside of a website or domain that the search engine optimization campaign is targeting. Labor for research, and paid submissions, and agency fees are the three parts to off-page optimization costs.

Part 1: Labor For Research
Links…Links….Links…

Research of quality links and the development of link relationships is a key part to off-page optimization. Link building concepts will be covered in more detail later in the SEO TIPS blog. The main goal of this post is to introduce to you how much labor is needed for basic off page optimization, or link building.

Researching a competitor’s links is a time consuming process. There are SEO tools that will run reports and display all inbound links to a given domain. The easy part is getting the list, the time consuming part is finding the quality links that will benefit your campaign.

Example:
We represent a professional roofing company. The main competitor for all keywords is a roofing and kitchen repair company. The link report provides a list of 1,000 inbound links to the competitor’s site. Some of these links are from kitchen repair resources, other links are from roofing resources, and the other links fall into the “other” category.

Now we need to sort through the 1,000 links to find the ones relevant to roofing. From this point we need to repeat this process on all of our client’s main competitors.

How much time will this take? The amount of off-page optimization is a direct relation to the price of a SEO campaign.

Part 2: Paid Submissions
Once research is complete, a list of quality links that competitors are using to gain high search rankings. Half of the names on the list are paid directories (websites that charge an advertising fee). In order to list with these directories, an unpredictable third party fee will affect the price of the seo campaign.

Example:
Best of the Web is a popular directory with a submission charge. The cost of a lifetime inbound link is $249. After the client receives the link report they have the ability to negotiate inbound links themselves. However, further optimization is needed. The title and description of the link needs to match optimization guidelines to target keywords, and the web page where the link points to needs to be chosen.

Part 3: Agency Fees
Most Professional search engine optimization companies will have an agency fee for the submission process and the optimization of the submission process.

Example:
If Best of the Web charges $249, the SEO Company will have a 15% ($37.35) submission fee, bringing the total to $286.35.

Summary

1. The cost of a SEO campaign is directly affected by the degree of on-page optimization, and off-page optimization work that needs to be conducted.
2. Off-page optimization costs are broken down into two groups, the cost of labor, and the cost of a submission.
3. Most Professional SEO Companies have a set fee for a submission process

Good luck with your SEO ventures!