Do you have Web analytics installed on your small business Web site? If not, you should. How will you know how your Web site is performing if you aren't measuring the plethora of data available?

Cost is no longer an excuse for not having Web site analytics. The free options are quite robust; Google Analytics, for one, is quite comprehensive. In addition, Yahoo last year acquired IndexTools, and has made a version of that available for free to its advertisers.

Obviously, there's a learning curve involved in analyzing your data. But it's worth it because the analytics information will help you increase your conversion rate, maximize your ROI, and make more money in less time.

Once you know what you should be looking at, your online business will thrive with just a little effort. You'll be less "in the dark" about what is and isn't working for you.

Let's outline four of the more important metrics you should be looking at. Keep in mind -- depending on what you're selling and what action you consider a "conversion," these may vary a bit, but they're a good place to start.

Conversions

Conversions are the be-all and end-all for me. Are you making money, signing people up, sending people out (if you're an affiliate and you make money on advertising clicks)? Your traffic can be the best in your industry -- but it won't matter, if you're making zero dollars from that traffic?

By measuring your conversion rate, analyzing sticking points, and clearing the paths to and through your sales pages, you're making sure your conversions are on their way to being the best in the industry.

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Below, the top 10 search terms by search volume.

Top 10 Search Terms by Category, Four Weeks Ending November 1, 2008 (%)
IT and Internet		Automotive Manufacturers
Search Term	Search Volume	Search Term	Search Volume
paypal	5.50	toyota	1.89
paypal.com	1.25	honda	1.76
paypal login	0.92	harley davidson	1.27
www.paypal.com	0.65	ford	1.17
people search	0.61	nissan	0.88
pay pal	0.51	hyundai	0.86
experian	0.43	honda motorcycles	0.79
auctiva	0.29	chevrolet	0.74
intelius	0.28	oreilly auto parts	0.71
bill me later	0.20	dodge	0.70
Movies		Net Communities and Chat
Search Term	Search Volume	Search Term	Search Volume
netflix	2.22	myspace	7.03
imdb	1.47	youtube	2.52
blockbuster	0.62	myspace.co	2.42
twilight	0.49	facebook	1.91
fandango	0.48	www.myspace.com	0.88
movies	0.43	my space	0.74
netflix.com	0.39	you tube	0.67
redbox	0.23	youtube.com	0.39
regal cinemas	0.23	facebook.com	0.33
cinemark	0.23	facebook login	0.29
Food and Beverage Brands and Manufacturers		Pharmaceutical and Medical Products
Search Term	Search Volume	Search Term	Search Volume
pizza hut	2.72	viagra	0.43
mcdonalds	1.45	cialis	0.37
pepsistuff.com	1.30	cymbalta	0.34
starbucks	0.81	lexapro	0.28
subway	0.75	bipolar disorder	0.24
dominos	0.73	lyrica	0.21
candystand	0.55	abilify	0.21
pepsi stuff	0.53	zenni optical	0.20
kfc	0.43	pfizer	0.20
betty crocker	0.41	merck	0.20
Blogs and Personal Web Sites		Broadcast Media
Search Term	Search Volume	Search Term	Search Volume
perez hilton	0.33	cnn	4.67
daily kos	0.33	fox news	3.26
we blog+kansas	0.21	msnbc	1.85
360	0.19	cnn.com	1.46
dailykos	0.18	news	1.05
perezhilton.com	0.17	cnn news	0.64
wise bread	0.16	abc news	0.63
just jared	0.15	bbc news	0.61
yahoo 360	0.14	bloomberg	0.51
michael savage	0.14	foxnews	0.50
Shopping Rewards and Directories		Travel Destinations and Accommodations
Search Term	Search Volume	Search Term	Search Volume
coupons	0.42	hotels.com	0.41
grocery coupons	0.25	disneyland	0.28
free samples	0.24	holiday inn	0.24
black friday 2008	0.21	carnival cruise	0.22
black friday	0.20	disney world	0.22
free stuff	0.19	holiday inn express	0.17
consumer reports	0.17	trip advisor	0.17
free coupons	0.13	marriott	0.15
mycokerewards.com	0.13	best western	0.15
mycokerewards	0.12	las vegas	0.15
View: Top 10 Search Terms by Category, Four Weeks Ending September 27, 2008

This list features the search terms for the industry All Categories, ranked by largest relative increase for the week ending October 25, 2008, compared with the week ending October 18, 2008.

Source - Hitwise - October, 2008 - based on volume of searches.

Where does traffic come from? Now I'm not talking about that stuff we all get stuck in during rush hour. Website traffic is essential, if you have no traffic to your website you are not going to get anyone buying your products or reading your articles. Traffic is one of the key components of your website and is available in these three forms.

1. Pay For It.

You can buy traffic typically using what is known as Pay Per Click advertising. The major names in this market are Google and their AdWords program and Yahoo Network Sponsored Search. There are many smaller companies around also but they all follow the same premise.

You create your account, grab a bunch of keywords and create your adverts. You can define the amount you want to spend per click or per day, what geographical areas you want your adverts to appear in and even what time they should appear.

When someone types one of your keywords into for example Google your advert will be displayed down the right hand side of the natural search results. If the searcher then chooses to click on your advert and gets forwarded to your website you will get charged for that click.

The price you pay for each individual click depends on a variety of conditions such as how many other people are competing on that keyword. The more competition the more it costs to be higher up the ranks. The position you want to occupy. The percentage of people who click on your advert, the list goes on.

Pay Per Click advertising can be very successful but has a steep learning curve, it is essential that you do lots of research into your chosen Pay Per Click vender and in the niche you are in.

2. Borrow It.

This option is not for everyone, but in certain niches it can be effective. The first method of borrowing traffic is what is called link exchange. This is where you put links to another website on your site and they put links back to you on theirs. This can be beneficial as you can get traffic from a more successful website reasonably quickly. However this traffic is not always targeted.

The second option in the affiliate marketing world is called a joint venture or a JP. This is essentially where you would contact another marketer or company who had products that complements yours. If they are interested they may send a mailing out to their list or put an entry in their blog alerting their visitors about you and your relevant products.

The key things to remember about borrowing traffic is that you have to give something in return. This can make it tricky when targeting very successful websites.

3. Create It.

Creating your own traffic is one of the best ways to start bringing people into your website. There are literally hundreds of ways to start creating your traffic but I'm just going to tell you about two of the most popular.

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Why Google Page Rank is Important in Building Traffic For your website?

Google PageRank is important in building traffic to your website for a number of reasons. Before we discuss why, here is quick heads up on how it works.

Page Rank is based on links between your site and other sites, in fact specifically between web pages, since it is links between individual pages rather than complete websites that interests Google. That is because Google lists individual pages and not domains. There is a formula that Google uses to determine the value of each link to your site, which is based on the PageRank of the web page providing the link and also the number of other links leaving that page.

You can see the page Rank in the Google PageRank bar on the Google Toolbar - it is the green bar that shows a numerical value of 0 to 10 when you hover your cursor over it.

This value is logarithmic, which means that if it takes 10 links to reach PR 1, then it takes a lot more to reach 2. If Google uses a logarithmic factor of 8, as it might do (nobody knows), then it will take 8 links to your site to get to PR 1, 64 to reach PR 2, 512 to PR 3 and so on. This is very basic, since, as I have stated, it also depends on the PR of the page providing the link and the number of other links leaving that page.

Here are the top 4 reasons that in my opinion help to generate traffic and make you money:

1. The higher your Google PageRank, then the higher Google is likely to list you in the search engine results pages. Google take the view than the more other websites link to yours, then the more relevant your web page must be to the topic in hand, otherwise they wouldn't link to you. In fact, the links are to specific pages in your site, not to the site as a whole, which is why it is called 'Page Rank' and not Site Rank.

2. The higher the Page Rank, then the more relevant other people will consider any particular page on your website to be. They will feel more confident that if they visit your site they will have their questions answered and find the information they are looking for.

3. A high Page Rank shows that you have a high number of links on the pages of other websites. There is then the possibility of others clicking on these links to get to your website.

4. The higher your Page Rank, then the more people will want you to link to their website. That means that they too will be likely to visit your site. They will also offer you a reciprocal link if you want one, and that too will provide you with more exposure online.

There are some factors you should keep in mind that could affect your Page Rank. The way your domain name is presented is very important. Take at look at these domains: www.mydomain.com, www.mydomain.com/index.html, domain.com, domain.com/index.html

They are all different URLs that will lead somebody using them to your domain. However, search engine spiders see them all as different URLs, and if you use different ways to write your home page URL, then they will all be listed separately, and all be given a different Page Rank. Thus, the page rank for any one of them will be weaker than your page would have been if you had used only the one way to express it. Get into the habit of expressing your domain in only one way.

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Since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 it has become one of the top analytics packages for small to medium sized websites. Growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now that the waiting list has been removed anybody can sign up to use this great service.

The user interface had a major redesign in May 2007 and a lot of the features we love have become hard to find. This guide should help you find your way around the new system.

I see a lot of comments on the forums asking whether Analytics can do X, Y and Z. In most cases it can do it but people just don't realize it. As webmaster of several large sites I have been using GA for around a year now to track a huge number of variables. In this post I will go through a few of the more obscure interactions that GA can tack on your site. Tracking exit clicks, banner clicks and RSS feed subscribers

Have you ever wanted to know how many people clicked on a particular link or banner on your site? You may wish to find out how many people click on an affiliate link, how many people from a certain country click on your banner advert or even the number of visitors from Digg that clicked to sign up to your RSS feed.

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I was surfing search engine optimization forums and I ran across this great article by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch. I thought I should share with our readers. The article covers a basic question on many of your minds, how do search engines work? This great article will answer that question for you as well as provide you an overview of how the search engine process works.

The term "search engine" is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically different ways.

Crawler-Based Search Engines

Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web, then people search through what they have found.

If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

Human-Powered Directories

A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

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Clients and readers often ask why a site that's younger, smaller, or just plain "uglier" outranks them. There really isn't a simple answer. More than a few times I've had to say, "I don't know." But there are some things to take into consideration when a competitor is outranking you. Addressing these issues could be the catalyst for your Web site moving up into those coveted top spots.

Content Is King

No -- I didn't coin that phrase, but the number one reason for getting outranked by a competitor: better, and much more, content on their site. Don't forget your content needs to be original, unique and relevant.

More pages will not necessarily make you rank. We're talking about more text. Do you have an all Flash Web site with little text to feed the search engine bots? It may be a flashy classy slideshow. It may be much more aesthetically pleasing than your competitor's site.

If the search engines, though, can't spider (define) your site to determine how relevant your page is to a particular query, you're not going to rank well for that query. That's not to say you can't use Flash, just wrap some text around it -- or work around the problem.

Support System

In travel, my particular niche, many of our clients' competitors are part of a huge chain of Web sites with vast numbers of pages. The pages for hotels in New Orleans aren't relevant to the pages for hotels in New York City, but if all those pages live on the same domain, they lend power to all the pages on the site.

A 10,000 page site is going to have a much easier time ranking for a particular keyword phrase than a 10-page site, particularly if they're using that keyword phrase in their on-site optimization in the correct manner.

Architecture is the Path to Good Rankings

How is your site constructed? Do you have well thought out navigation and easy to understand "paths" through your Web site. Users and search engine spiders use your architecture to learn what your site is about.

The more pages the spiders can reach, the more "credit" you have for having a lot of content related to phrases. Think about the user navigating your site and make sure relevant content is linked together, and irrelevant content is not.

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What can I do to improve my website search engine ranking? This is a question all website owners ask from time to time, what is the answer to the riddle of the search engine? I have read over many articles with different information, I have seen software claiming to get your website that #1 ranking in google and yahoo, I have seen the companies claiming to submit your website to thousands of search engines and get your website to the top of the search kings. I have never found these SEO solutions to work, the only way to truly raise your website ranking and placement is lots of hard work and sometimes a bit of a marketing budget.

Where do I start? That is a common question, and I understand how overwhelming it can be at times but do not get discouraged, if you follow a few guidelines and put in a decent amount of work you will get the website raking you want.

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Local search is a valuable resource for any business looking to build a bigger client pool. Is your business located in the major local search listings? I recently ran across this great 8 part list that may help improve your local search traffic and improving your overall business.

1. Make sure that you have a crawler friendly web site

The first step in improving your business performance in local search engines is to make sure that the search engines can easily crawl your site, and identify your business keywords. Minimize the use of tables, and avoid deeply nested tables. Make sure that your business name and address are featured prominently on the page as text, and not hidden from the crawlers in an image file. Your page title should include your business name, address and key words. Place an "H1" header near the top of the page that also has your business name, address, and key words.

2. Include your business address twice on the page

In addition to placing your business address prominently on the page, also include it in the footer. Abbreviate the business state in one of the addresses, and spell it out in the second. Abbreviated states are sometimes misinterpreted by the crawlers. For example, MD represents both a state and a doctor.

3. Check out your business listing on the major search engines

Check out your business listings on Google, Yahoo Local, and MSN Live Search. If your business is not found, you should submit a listing at Google, Yahoo, and Superpages (for Microsoft Live Search).

For each business listing, make sure that your information is correct, your business description is complete, and that it uses the same keywords that you are using on your web site. Make sure that your description has all the information that your potential customers will need to contact you, since people often will not click through to your web site from the local business listing. Include the county in addition to the city on your business listing. Finally, check out any photos of your business on the business directories, and provide better photos where appropriate.

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