Diary of a Website: Linkbuilding

Myra's site, GraysLlandAcres.com, has been live for about a month now, and her basic linkbuilding was completed a couple of weeks ago. This timing is right. Jumping in with a lot of links all at once looks (and often is) unnatural, so we like to do regular linkbuilding over a period of time.

Ideally, you'll do regular linkbuilding on an ongoing basis, but we're talking about that initial campaign.

Spreading linkbuilding out also offers the benefit of allowing us to see what kind of link is bringing traffic. All good quality links are good for search and for establishing visibility on the web. The kind that brings traffic, though, will be what you want to focus on for ongoing linkbuilding.

Myra's site currently gets traffic primarily from her blog (which is how it's supposed to work), my blog, and her social media. It therefore makes sense for her to focus on social media.

However, her presence in business directories, lists about llamas and goats, and such will all help her site to gain visibility.

Myra will be ready to sell products next month, so her next project is to add e-commerce capability to her site. We'll tell you about that next time.

Previous posts in the Diary of A Website:

• A Cartoon Guide to the Web Design Process
  
• Waiting
  
• Communicating About Your Website
• Decisions
• Launch Day
  
• Getting the Hang of Google Analytics
  
• Discovering Your Traffic Sources
  

Doing Detective Work at Analytics

When you look at your web analytics, there are some basic things you'll want to examine:

• traffic -- you usually want to see it increasing steadily.
• traffic sources -- you'll want to notice what's bringing traffic and what's showing the highest conversion rate, so you can do more of that; you'll also want to catch any surprising results here, and see a steady increase in the number of different keywords bringing you visitors.
• interesting patterns -- you can often tell a lot about who you're reaching by noticing patterns in visitor information, heat maps, and traffic.
• spikes and changes -- you always want to find out what happened to cause these, so you can respond strategically.

But notice that most of these things you notice involve finding out more. And hooking up what you learn with real world information to see the full implications, too.

Recently, Josepha noticed that one of our education-related clients had regular small spikes on the 15th of the month -- teacher payday. Our hypothesis here is that teachers are using personal funds to shop there, not just school or grant funds. This means that some more personal approaches might work well.

Another client showed an apparent drop in visits to a particular page -- until we looked back and found a completely artificial rise in visits to that particular page, caused by the webmaster's failure to filter out worker's visits to the site. The page in question had been the subject of a lot of debate and discussion the previous month, so there were a lot of visits by workers.

Another client had a big increase in overseas traffic -- which turned out to be from a European equivalent to StumbleUpon. After thorough checking, we ignored it, thus saving the company from a lot of wasted time looking into serving overseas customers.

Moral of the story: look further when you see something interesting going on, and make sure that you know what's really going on.

Happy Thanksgiving

Are You Indexed?

I get a lot of requests for help that involve not being on the front page of Google's search results. There are lots of reasons that can happen, and I can usually help.

Last week, I had such a request that turned out to have a very easy answer: "You're not indexed."

I heard those word myself, years ago when I had been given the assignment by my then employer to make our online catalog profitable. Joel, a hardware guy of our acquaintance, was over for dinner, and I was complaining about the fact that we didn't show up for reasonable searches.

"You're not indexed," Joel said.

I stared at him blankly. I was already writing for the web at that time, but I didn't know anything about SEO yet, or even any of the terminology. I think I said, "Huh?"

I don't want you to feel this way, so let me tell you right off that Google (and this goes for the other search engines too) doesn't actually know about websites until they visit said websites and crawl around their pages and see what they're about, a process known as "indexing."

You can tell if you've been idexed by a search engine going and typing in "site:www.mywebsite.com" at your favorite search engine. Yahoo will redirect you, but all major search engines will tell you, when you do this, how many pages they've indexed at your site.

If your pages have been indexed, you're fine. If not, Yahoo and bing will invite you to submit your site to them. Google is not so inviting, but click on their name back there and you'll be in the right spot.

Do that now. The end may not be nigh, but you have no chance of improving your search rankings or traffic until it's done, so sooner is better.

Word of Mouth Marketing Online

"Word of mouth marketing doesn't work," the woman I was talking with said scornfully. And then thought a moment. "Except for you."

It's true that I had a marketing plan back when I first started my business, and haven't been able to implement it yet because I have too much work to do. I keep thinking that I need to do some email marketing or something, but I don't have time -- we're turning away work as it is.

This is a nice problem to have.

Here's the thing: I don't drive people to my website by shooing them over there with the broom of high-pressure sales and I don't then browbeat them (I guess I could use the same broom for that) into calling me by covering my home page with special offers. That's doing it the hard way.

Instead, I have a high level of online visibility, and I do my best to offer useful stuff here at my website, and to do a good job for my clients. The typical person contacting me with a job offer or a request for a proposal (and I get about three a week) has read something I've written or heard about me from someone, and was already interested in working with me before arriving at my website. My website offers enough evidence of what I do that prospective clients can feel pretty confident about me before they ever call or email with that offer.

That's enough about me. I'm only talking about myself like this because I know that some people feel as though word of mouth, online networking, inbound marketing -- whatever you want to call it -- doesn't work, and I know from my own experience that it does. I also know that seeing the statistics proving it works is sometimes less convincing than hearing about it from someone who has direct experience. Word of mouth, in fact.

Are you good at what you do? Then strut your stuff online. Have pictures of the things you make at your website, or case studies of the work you do if it doesn't lend itself to pictures, so your visitors can see for themselves that you're good at it. You don't have to announce that you're good -- let them notice it on their own. Let other people say it for you.

See the penguins up there? One is sharing the amazing experience he just had with his friends. One of those friends, excited about this great news, is sliding over to another group of penguins to spread the word. I just made that up, actually. I don't know how well word of mouth works among penguins. But I know that it works among humans, who are probably the majority of your target market.

The Myth of Black Friday

Some say that the Friday after Thanksgiving is called "Black Friday" because that's the typical day on which retail operations get into the black, or begin earning a profit for the year. Others say (with better historical data) that the term "Black Friday" actually refers to the experience of retail workers and police officers coping with the beginning of the holiday season.

Neither of those is the myth. The myth is that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year. It hardly ever is. December 23rd is more likely to be, followed by the Saturday before Christmas.

Retailers like the idea of making Black Friday into a sort of holiday, though, a special shopping day that you shouldn't miss. And a few years ago, online retailers managed to concoct a whole mythical shopping day of their own: CyberMonday.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the story went, people would get back to work and spend their coffee breaks shopping online. Internet news sources reported the phenomenon, which didn't exist, and actually managed to get a nice little spike in online shopping for that day.

E-commerce sites have, ever since, offered special deals on this day and otherwise tried to get people to see it as a special shopping opportunity. Why not? Marketing stunts can entertain and amuse people, and can also increase sales. So if you're in the mood, run a CyberMonday promotion. Don't forget to do press releases. Interview local major business owners about whether they plan to be strict about CyberMonday shopping among their employees, and describe the extra efforts you'll be making to cope with the rush. If you have a brick and mortar store, tell your Black Friday shoppers to be sure to check out the CyberMonday specials. Make it a worthwhile stunt.

Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong,or the Adwords Experiment

"Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong" was a hit song in 1927, and the phrase was used thereafter to describe the logical fallacy known as the Bandwagon Fallacy: the idea that if a lot of people believe something, it must be true.

I kind of felt this way about pay per click advertising at search engine results pages. I've never seen a client get better results with PPC than with organic search, but it must be good because lots of people do it.

So, when a large company offered me $100 worth of PPC, I figured I'd give it a try.

I made a new page with a special offer. I didn't link it up to the rest of my site or tell anyone about it, place links anywhere, or indeed do anything to encourage organic search.

During the time of the campaign, I had a grand total of 118 visits to this page. 22 of them came from the ads.

Here's where the rest came from:

• 26 from organic search at Google
  
• 24 from a link some stranger gave the page at their website
• 15 from other search engines
• 10 direct
• 9 from random social media links -- people mentioning it at Myspace, for example
• 2 from Amazon.com, and I have no explanation for that
• one each from a variety of email links and other random stuff
  

In all, there were 25 different sources. The ads were only the third most frequent, even though this special landing page was essentially a secret, isolated page which shouldn't have had any traffic at all. The ads weren't a great source of traffic, and that's what I usually see among clients who do PPC.

However, there were 22 visits to the page in the week after the ad campaign ended, and none at all since then. It appears that the ad campaign did something, even if it didn't drive much of the traffic to the page.

There were, in case you're wondering, no actual contacts or leads at all.

I'm going to continue to suggest, when I'm asked, that clients go with ads on specific websites that are well targeted to their customers. That's where I've seen people have real success with ads. I'm not going to do any PPC myself.

However, it does appear that there is some benefit -- if only as a result of people who see the ad spreading the word.

What's Lorem Ipsum?

Sometimes I write the content first and then the designer builds a design with that content. Sometimes the design comes first and I write content to fit that design. And sometimes both steps are being worked on at once.

So it is that I occasionally get an alarmed email from a client saying, perhaps, that "the homepage looks okay, but the inner pages have Italian in them."

It's lorem upsum. This is actually a passage from Cicero, sort of messed up by a printer in the 1500s who needed some random text to work with. Many designers use it to hold the place of text and show that there will be text in the place where the lorem ipsum currently is.

Not everyone uses lorem ipsum. Some designers grab a paragraph of the actual text, and then repeat it everywhere in the site. Some snag text from favorite books or poetry. I saw one design that began "stuff stuff stuff stuff stuff stuff " and then in the next section continued "more stuff more stuff more stuff more stuff ."

Why do designers use dummy text?

• So you won't get distracted. Sometimes the designer wants to know how you feel about the colors or general layout, and doesn't want you thinking about your content while looking at the design. Many people do get distracted by meaningful text, and find it hard to judge the strictly visual aspects of the design.
• So they won't get distracted. Fitting the content into the page can be more complicated than you might think. Getting everything aligned correctly, avoiding orphan words at the end of a paragraph, making sure that the spacing is just right -- a designer may prefer not to deal with those issues until the main decisions about the design have been made.
• Plus, it looks more natural than the alternatives. A paragraph of "more stuff more stuff more stuff" doesn't actually look like normal language. Lorem ipsum gives a normal distribution of letters and so looks more like actual text.

Now you know.

How Cool and Flashy Can Your Website Be?

Rosie and I were admiring a new website I was writing for. The design was particularly beautiful, for a corporate site, with an elegance of line and color that made me want to just gaze at it for a bit.

Rosie wasn't so sure. It seemed to her that it would be improved if there were some... flashy stuff. Things that whirled around, maybe, or opportunities to shoot someone.

Rosie's a gamer when she's not managing projects or delving into analytics. I've tried to convince her that getting to the front page of Google is exactly the same as winning a leather jerkin for your Dark Elf, or whatever it is. In this case, I pointed out how the lines started in the logo continued -- not visibly of course, but because your brain finished them up -- into a wonderful echo of the lines of light in the picture, which in turn led the eye to the "more information" button.

She pointed out, quite accurately, that there were no special effects of any kind.

I showed her Assassin's Creed for Twitter. It has toys from the very beginning, when you confirm that you're old enough to enter. It has heroic music. It takes an incredibly long time to load on the average non-gamer's computer. You have to click on something and wait just to see the menu (every time you want to see the menu -- it doesn't stay there once you've opened it), and then search around for a while to figure out what to do with it. There's hardly any content visible to the search engines, the meta description is too long, it lists keywords like "360" and naturally it doesn't come up for them when you search.

It's totally cool. Rosie loved it.

And if you were thinking about something like that for your dry cleaning business, it would be a terrible mistake.

It wouldn't be impossible, mind you. I can readily imagine something like that for a local dry cleaner, since I'm a highly imaginative person. And I can also imagine someone looking for a dry cleaner and not finding your site, because the search engines, immune to cool flashiness in websites, have no idea that it's about dry cleaning in your town.

Suppose, though, that there grew up around it an underground cult following and people shared the URL at Facebook. I can further imagine someone going there to get the address of the dry cleaner, and becoming deeply frustrated at having to wait for 7.5 minutes to reach the point at which it was even possible to click around in search of the address. And then becoming completely cheesed off as they clicked around through the swirling fabrics and shadowy characters in search of the address.

Here's who can have that flashy a website:

• Large companies with tremendous name recognition who don't really need to concern themselves much with the search engines. Pepsi, for example, can do anything they want.
• Companies, large or small, with enormous budgets, or who get their web design and development for free. This is one of the reasons that web design companies often do have very snazzy sites. Another is that it's a great way to show off the goods. These companies often have to work very hard to get anywhere in search rankings.
  
• Companies whose visitors are mostly interested in playing with the site, rather than with getting information. Game sites, for example.
  

I was sorry to dash Rosie's hopes of getting to work on a lot of sites with that degree of cool flashiness. In fact, I didn't even have the heart to point out to her that the Assassin's Creed for Twitter has one button that is immediately visible, and which goes immediately to the place it appears to go to, without any Renaissance fooling around: the "Buy Now" button.

New Free Tool

I've written before about content management systems, and specifically about whether you want them in your website or not. There are good points on both sides.

One of the undoubted benefits to a CMS, however, is the ease with which you can add graphics. Say you want to add a special image to your website for the holidays. You use Blogger or Wordpress, you just push a couple of buttons and your graphic is just where you want it to be. If not, then it's more complex. You have to have skills.

Clevertech is offering a neat little tool that lets you just copy and paste, and your graphic appears on your webpage just as easily as -- no, actually, more easily than -- it does on your blog. You can try the Copy/Paste tool out at the demo page, and you can read the details . Once you've done that, grab the code at the demo page and add it to your page so you'll always be able to copy and paste a graphic whenever you feel like it.

On PageRank

There's been a lot of talk about PageRank lately. Google has suggested that people are getting too het up over it, and there has been a flood of posts with titles like "Does PageRank Matter Any More?"

My PageRank just increased, and I got a bit of a kick out of it. Do I expect it to change my life? No.

PageRank is like grades in school. It's one indication of how you're doing. If your PageRank is increasing, that's probably a good thing. If your PageRank hasn't improved recently, that's not a good sign.

But just as with grades, it's not the only measure of how your web site is doing. It doesn't measure your value as a human being. And doing things that focus on PageRank rather than on the value of your site to your visitors will probably give you neither a better PageRank nor a better website -- just as focusing on grades rather than learning will usually backfire.

Here's what I've seen with clients and PageRank, though:

• Improving the website from the point of view of the user experience usually leads to an increase in PageRank.
  
• An increase in PageRank is usually followed by higher rankings, or more stable rankings, in search results.

So my conclusion is this: don't work on increasing PageRank. Do notice your PageRank and use it as one of the many ways of measuring how you're doing.

Getting the Rank Your Website Deserves

The apples shown here are divided into the #1 rankings ones and the #2 ranking ones. "Not as pretty, " those #2 apples, "but just as tasty."

It's a reminder that we don't all get #1 rankings in the search engine results pages for everything. Sometimes we don't deserve that #1 ranking. I, for example, am not the biggest SEO and copywriting firm in the world. If I type in "SEO" at Google, or "copywriting," I'm not going to be #1. This is fine with me. (I'm #1 for "quality copywriting," though. Just saying.)

But I'm talking right now with a new client who doesn't have the #1 rating his company deserves. He makes a product with which I'm very familiar -- I sold hundreds of his things when I was in retail. He is, in my expert opinion, the big dog in his field. He's been in business for 20 years. His website is 12 years old.

When he asked me to have a look at his website, I typed in the name of his company at Google, and of course his site popped right up. The rest of the page was filled with retailers who sell his product. All good so far.

Next, I typed in the generic name of his flagship product, and there he.... wasn't. I tried a few more variations. Nope. Smaller companies were eating his lunch on the SERPs.

This company deserves those #1 spots. I will of course get them for him. He won't get them by magic. He needs both on-site and off-site optimization. But he'll certainly get them, because he deserves them. When someone is searching for his products, they actually want what he has to offer.

Don't ask yourself what keywords you want to rank for. Ask yourself what keywords you deserve to rank for.

Building a Website with a Template

I've been building a website for someone with a template. I don't normally do this (it's a long story) but it gave me an excellent opportunity to learn some basic things to pass on to anyone who's thinking about using a template.

• Choosing the right template is key. The client originally chose a template (zenlike by node33) with the wood-image background shown above and similar colors -- but a structure that wouldn't fit her content at all. We looked again, trying to see all the templates just as collections of boxes into which she could put the text, images, and colors that she chose. We ended up with a different one (businesscompany by chocotemplates). If you check them out, you'll see that they had some things in common,and we kept the basic colors. Mostly, though, you should choose your template according to structure and navigation.
  
• Using a template requires skills. In theory, you can just type your content into the template. In reality, that's not true. I was sitting with the client, adding some photos and changing the background and generally messing around with various templates in order to help her find one she liked. She watched me with growing consternation. "How am I supposed to be able to do this?" she finally asked. Well, you're not, actually. You have to know html and know how to resize your photos and all sorts of other things, if you want to end up with a good result.
• Even if you use a template, you still need quality content. This website is going to be a nice one, and effective, in spite of my not being a real designer, because it has the words the client needs, and wonderful photos. (The ones you're seeing are by Jason Hudson, used with permission.) If you find the perfect template for your needs, you're in luck. Most of the time, typing stuff into a template will give you a website that looks as though you typed stuff into a template -- not a move that instills confidence in your visitors. It's rare that a template will exactly suit your content. Using a template with poor quality content, hoping that the template will work magic of some kind, is a recipe for failure.

Templates are improving, and thanks to the generosity of people like node33 and chocotemplates, there are lots of handsome choices out there. If you have the skill and the tools, you can get good results with a template. Just go into it with realistic expectations.

Are Introverts Good at Social Media?

This woman (whom I've never met) may not be an introvert at all. It's hard to say what an introvert looks like, or even to say with complete certainty who is and is not an introvert. But we've been looking at research on the subject in the writing class I teach, so it's natural that at some point I began to wonder: are extroverts better at social media than introverts?

There's quite a bit of evidence that suggests that extroverts market themselves better in traditional business networking situations than introverts do. But think for a moment about the people who follow you at Twitter. You get the announcement of a new follower and you go over to see their Twitter page. You may have no further information about them than what you see on the page, and yet you make a decision about whether or not to follow them.

Since I'm in the business, I tend also to make a judgment about whether or not they're using Twitter well. The ones who aren't don't usually strike me as too shy to tweet. Indeed, they're often pretty brash.

The people who don't seem worth following generally seem too self-centered.

I'm not talking about the people who use Twitter as a micro-journal. They may seem to be talking mostly to themselves, but if they're saying something interesting, then I'm glad they let me listen in. I mean the ones who seem to think that Twitter is a place where they can shout out announcements about themselves because they want other people to listen to them -- talking about themselves.

TV advertisers feel that, since they've paid for the ad time, they have a right to be listened to. When they learned that most viewers leave the room during commercials, they increased the volume so the hapless TV watchers would be forced to listen to their ads as they grabbed a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

As people gained technology that allowed them to avoid commercials entirely, they gave up their acceptance of the idea that having to watch commercials was the price they had to pay for free TV. And in fact, since most of us now pay for cable, we no longer have free TV anyway. Television advertisers have had to recognize that they have to offer something viewers consider valuable: generally, information or entertainment. Some have done well enough that people share their commercials on YouTube. Some have given up.

Twitter isn't about ads. It's about community. It's about interacting with people -- some of whom may need your products and services, so you should share some of that information with them.

If we feel that someone is simply using Twitter to sell us something, we don't follow them. If we like them, and find value in what they have to say, we do.

If you have some blithe spirit in your organization who loves to chat with people and enjoys spending lots of time on Facebook or LinkedIn, making friends and influencing people, then it certainly makes sense to let him or her be your social media maven. If not, go with sincere interest in the other members of your community.

If you're such a misanthrope that you can't accomplish that, check out my guide to faking it.

Diary of a Website: the Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics

This week, we've seen how to find your analytics information, how to read the Site Usage information, and how to understand Traffic Sources. While there's lots more to learn about analytics (and I write about it a lot at this blog), it can be overwhelming to try to look at and learn from everything at once.

While you're at the Traffic Sources section of your dashboard, though, check out the keywords. Click on that link for a full explanation of how to interpret the information, and learn also how to use keyword data to build SEO strategy by clicking on the link just to the left here.

There are a few other things that beginners need to know about Google Analytics:

• If you've been using some other site meter, the numbers won't match. I've noticed, for example, that numbers from e-commerce catalog sites are far higher than those from Google Analytics. I've spent plenty of time trying to calculate the correspondence, and I have to say it's a waste of effort. Just pick one source of information and notice the changes in the data from that one.
• Filter yourself out of your analytics, or have your webmaster do this for you. Go to What Is My IP Address? using your usual computer, note down the number it shows you, and ask your webmaster to filter you out. Otherwise your own visits to the website will show up and confuse your data. It's also a good plan to have people who work on your website filtered out. Baby Smart Travel had a day when Shan and I were conferring about how to do their contact form and between us we racked up 21 visits to the page. Visit... think... discuss... visit... think... go change something... discuss... Just tell Analytics not to count visits from all the computers that go to your site to work rather than as customers.
• Watch for changes. Once you have enough data to see what's normal for your site, look for the things that are surprising -- that's where you're likely to find great new ideas for bringing people to visit you.
  

Diary of a Website: Discovering Your Traffic Sources

We're continuing with our series of posts for people with new websites, or who are generally new to Google Analytics. Yesterday, we saw how to get in to look at the data, and had a look at the Site Usage section of the dashboard. It's good to have a look at that information on a regular basis.

The other part of the dashboard that you ought to get familiar with right away is the Traffic Sources section. You can click on the words "Traffic Sources" in the navigation in the upper left of your dashboard, or on the pie chart in the main section of the dashboard, which looks like this:





I wrote a post on the basics of traffic sources a few months back, so I won't repeat it, but I recommend that you click on that link and read it if you're new to Analytics. Essentially, the Traffic Sources section of your dashboard tells you how people found your website.

The pie chart example above is an established site with a nice amount of traffic. Myra Grayson, who has so kindly allowed us to keep a diary of her new website's progress, doesn't yet have that kind of traffic, and she has a different proportion of sources, too:



The established site has about half of its traffic from search engines, a bit more than a third from direct traffic, and much less from referring sites. Myra's website gets two-thirds of its visits from referring sites, and only a little bit from search engines.

The best balance of sources depends on your business, your goals, and a number of other factors. However, the fact that Myra gets very little search traffic so far shows that the search engines need to be alerted to her existence. We're currently doing a basic linkbuilding campaign for Myra's new site, so we'll expect to see the proportion of visitors from search increase. Visits from direct traffic may increase, too, though for a variety of reasons that might not be a major traffic source for Myra's site.

Let's have a look at her top referring sites:

• graysllandacres.blogspot.com (referral) 21.88%
• facebook.com (referral) 17.97%
• rebeccahaden.com (referral) 10.94%
• art.uark.edu (referral) 6.25%

Myra has 16 different referring sites right now (that number will increase as she gains more links), and four have sent her multiple visitors. Google Analytics tells how many visitors have come from each source, and what percentage that is of the traffic -- in this case, of the total traffic, but you can also see what proportion a given site provides of your referred traffic.

We can see that 21.88% of Myra's visitors are coming in from her blog -- a good blog is a good source of traffic, so we're glad to see that. She has people coming in from her Facebook page, too. It's likely that social media will be a good choice for her site. Even though the amount of data we have right now is small, Myra can already get some sense of what strategies she might choose to pursue to increase her traffic in the future.

She also has people coming from my website and from the designer's website -- those are the other two domains listed as referring sources above. Those people probably aren't customers for Myra. It doesn't hurt to have those visitors, but the fact that they send traffic doesn't mean Myra should try to get more links like those.

As she gets more visitors and more data, Myra will be able to use the information from Google Analytics to make decisions about her website, her marketing strategy, and even about her business.

Diary of a Website: Getting the Hang of Google Analytics

Myra Grayson's new website, GraysLlandAcres.com, has been live for a few weeks, and she wants to see who's visiting. Tom installed Google Analytics for her when we built the site. This is my personal favorite analytics program: it's free and it gives a wonderful depth of information.

I keep track of Analytics for some clients, but others -- including Myra -- want to do it themselves. While I do trainings for local people (like the folks at BabySmart Travel, who made cookies for the occasion yesterday), Myra isn't close enough for me to sit down with her at her computer.

So for Myra, and the owners of BabySmart Travel, and for you too, if you're wondering what all this talk of Google Analytics is about, here is the first in a series of lessons on using Google Analytics for absolute beginners.

Before you start, you have to have Google Analytics installed at your website, and you have to have access to your analytics. Ask your web master to do this for you.

#1: Get into your account. Here's the familiar Google homepage. In the top right-hand corner, you may see the words "Sign in." If so, click on them and sign in, or register. Chances are, you already have an account and you see the word "Settings" up there. Click on "Settings," and you'll get a drop-down menu. Choose "Google Account Settings."





Next you'll see a page like this one:




You'll have a list of stuff you use at Google. Your list may be longer or shorter than this one, but it's in alphabetical order, so "Analytics" will be near the top. Click on it, and you'll see your webpage (or webpages). Click on "View Report."

Now you'll see the dashboard:





#2: Get to know your dashboard. Myra is kindly allowing us to check out her dashboard, so let's look at one particular part of it. Here is the "Site Usage" section.



The blue line shows how many people came to see Myra's website. when you first open the screen, it's set to show you how many visits you've had in the past thirty days. Myra's site hasn't been live for thirty days, so she has a flat blue line until the day her site launched.

Actually, she had a few visitors in the days before it launched, while people were working on it and eagerly checking to see whether it was live and things like that. But on the first day it was live, she has a mountainous peak.

This is where she told all her friends and family to go look at her way cool new website. She announced it on Facebook and stuff like that.

Since then, she has had between 1 and 10 visitors each day. In fact, if we leave out the initial tell-everyone-to-go-look stage, she has an average of 5.5 visits a day, a fact she can discover by clicking on the word "Visits." It's in the upper left below the big blue line graph.

Here are some other things she can learn from the "Site Usage" section:

• Visits This counts the number of visits the site has received.
• Pageviews Pageviews counts the number of times someone looked at a page -- not individual people, necessarily, just the action of looking at a new page.
  
• Pages/Visit The average number of pages per visit shows how many different pages people checked out, on average, when they visited.
  
• Bounce Rate When someone comes, looks, and leaves without exploring your site further, they're said to have "bounced." The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who have bounced away.
  
• Avg. Time on Site Average time on site measures the length of time, on average, visitors stay and read. People often spend just a few seconds (12 is the widely-quoted number) deciding whether to stay or go.
  
• New Visits This metric tells you what percentage of your visitors were new people, and what percentage were coming back to see you again.

That's a good start.

Prepare Your Website for the Holidays

It's too early to play Christmas music (except in rehearsal) and too early to decorate for Christmas, but it's exactly time to get serious about holiday e-commerce.

The average American female shopper has already decided where to do her major holiday shopping. Does that make it too late to get her attention? Not at all. This generally means that she knows where she'll get the big-screen TV, the A-list toy, or the gaming system. She still has lots of purchases -- for friends, family members, and for herself -- that aren't decided.

They soon will be, though.

Male shoppers typically wait till later to do their shopping, or even to think about it. But they are also more likely to need guidance. If you can grab their attention now and make it easy for them, you have a distinct advantage.

Step 1: Cause your visitors to think about Christmas -- and to think of you as a place to shop for Christmas.

• Christmas icons can make the lightbulb go on. Switch regular icons out with them now and you'll help visitors consider you as a source of holiday gifts.
• Highlight giftable items. Even add likely things. A mountain climbing gear company adds a mountain-themed puzzle and puts it on a page with smaller items of climbing gear that non-climbers can readily identify. Descriptions point out that these things make good holiday gifts. Bundle things into gift packages, too.
  
• Banners can irritate people, but right now there's so much heavy advertising going on that your banner will pale in comparison. This is the time.

Step 2: Cause your visitors to quit their comparison shopping.

• At this time of year, visitors may be hitting every online source for your items. You need to give them a reason to stop once they get to you. Best case scenario is that you've developed a relationship with your visitors through the year and they automatically think of you, like you, and trust you.
• Analysts tell us that free shipping is the top deciding factor for shoppers. Do yourself a favor and make it free shipping for a certain size of order. Many shoppers will consolidate their shopping to reach that price point, if it's a reasonable one.
• Create a sense of urgency with sales or specials, but avoid giving the impression that prices will keep dropping. In recent years, consumers have shown that they're willing to postpone shopping even till after Christmas if they get the impression that prices are on a steady slide.

This is also the time to make sure your site is usable. If you haven't tested your shopping cart recently, do it now. You certainly don't want to lose sales because you've got a balky cart or unnoticed errors.