Use Google Analytics Data to Learn about your Visitors Expectations: when you know what they are looking for you can change your pages accordingly

If your visitors are finding what they want on your site they are more likely to contact you or make a purchase. Google Analytics is a powerful and free tool – the data it provides can indicate where you need to make changes to your site.

Referrers
Referrers indicate how your visitors arrived at your site, from this you can infer your customer’s intentions from the keywords they used to get to your site. When you know what your customers are interested are looking for you can modify your pages accordingly.

Here are just a couple of examples:

Landing Pages
It would be handy to know where most visitors enter your site, you would know where to dedicate your design and editing efforts – it is often assumed that visitors land on the home page although this often not the case. You could spend hours dedicating your best efforts to fine tuning your landing page but your visitors actually land on a sub page.

Bounce Rate
The bounce rate indicates where users have visited to your site then quickly left – this page may then need a rethink so that visitors are engaged.

There is a wealth of other features for ecommerce sites; if you are selling online you could probably sell more by analysing your users path through your site.

For step by step instructions to add this this to your site see our article on Adding Google Analytics to your site.

Common Website Errors to Avoid

Domain not Renewed or Expired Domain Name
Many providers renew domain names automatically when they are due, some do not – check that your provider renews automatically

Splash Pages
These pages are often Flash movies with a ‘click here to skip’ or ‘continue’ option, they often contain insufficient content for search engines to index and so they are ranked lowly. If you need a splash page for your website make sure they are optimized.

Missing Title Tags or Meta Tags
It is crucial to create these for each web page, the search engines use them to categorise the pages and content – this information is seen in search results and a potential customer may see no information or incorrect information about your site, this may well influence their decision to visit your site.

Duplicate Title Tags or Meta Tags
Search engines reject pages that are found to have tags duplicated across pages.

Website not Visible or Distorted in Some Browsers
Your website may look fine in one browser but may look odd or not be visible at all in another.

No Site Map
Add an XML site map, site maps can improve Search Engine Optimisation by making sure every page on your site can be found.

Contact Information Missing
Visible contact information will improve the search engines trustworthiness of your site and is also a legal requirement.

Text or Other Content is in Flash or PDF or Doc files
Avoid putting your content into these files, search engines can not see inside them, they are lost opportunities for search engines to index your text. Add PDFs as an option for users to download.

ALT tags Missing
These help with usability for the visually impaired. Most of the search engines provide an ‘image’ search facility, if you have an online shop and your products have been indexed and tagged properly then users who image search could find your products.

For more information see: www.pinkmayhem.co.uk/

How to Add a Google Map to Your Site

For this you will need some knowledge of HTML, or ask your web company to do it for you.

1. Go to Google and click on Maps
2. Enter the address or postcode for the location
3. You should now see a map
4. When you are happy that you have zoomed in sufficiently, click the Link option to the top right side of the screen

5. Two sets of code are shown

6. The first one is one that you might send to someone in an email, that may be useful for you to copy and keep
7. The second is the code is the one that we are interested in, click customise and preview, fill in the options for size and copy the code provided on this page
8. Open your web page where you want the map and paste in the code
9. Save your page, the map should now appear on your page

For more information see: www.pinkmayhem.co.uk/