Web Analytics: Expert Guides and Resources

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strange business. It’s full of conjecture, misinformation, and snake oil. SEO businesses are 80 percent scam, so if you hire someone to do it for you, you’ve got one chance in five of things going well. Therefore, you need to understand the basics of SEO so that you can either create a search engine–friendly website yourself or find a firm that knows what it’s doing.

One of the first things you may want to do when analyzing your site's search engine optimization is find out who is already linking to your site. Or perhaps you’d like to know who is linking to your competitors’ sites. The following sections look at how you can find this information. Google for a link analysis Google used to have a link search operator that purported to show you links pointing to a particular URL.

If you’re looking online for a product you want to buy, where do you start? With a major search engine? Well, if you’re like many Internet users, the answer is no. You start at your favorite shopping site. Late in 2018, eMarketer reported that almost half of all American Internet users begin their search at Amazon and about a third began at Google.

When you’re scheduling social media posts for future delivery in a tool like Buffer, you may need to modify those posts at some point before they’re released. In Buffer, you can change the delivery date and time, edit the post’s content, or delete the post altogether. The sections below tell you how. Changing a post’s delivery date and time Your scheduled posts for a particular social media channel appear in a stacked list in your dashboard.

Yammer boasts that it is a “leading enterprise social network for businesses to get work done smarter and faster.” Well, how do you know if that is true? One great way to see how it is working for you is by checking out Yammer’s analytics. How do you access these great tools? It’s easy. Log into Yammer. From the Home screen, select the More button (three dots) at the top right-hand corner of the screen.

After you go to all the trouble to make your website work well on the iPhone and iPad, don’t forget to make it search engine friendly as well. Although many of the same rules of search engine optimization (SEO) apply, you need to understand a few key differences and special additions if you want to be included in mobile search engines, such as Google’s.

Measuring the amount of time visitors spend on your website provides important insight. You can figure out whether visitors are taking a quick look, then leaving, or whether they’re hanging around a bit longer and actually reading your online material with the view to possibly taking action. If the majority of your website visitors aren’t staying long, review your site content and look at ways to attract and hold visitors’ attention.

You can use a robots text file to block a search engine spider from crawling your Web site or a part of your site. For instance, you may have a development version of your Web site where you work on changes and additions to test them before they become part of your live Web site. You don't want search engines to index this “in-progress” copy of your Web site because that would cause a duplicate-content conflict with your actual Web site.