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How To Guide: Growing Numbers & Monitoring Web Traffic (Internet Strategy)
Written by Steph
When Jimmy and I discussed this first of all, and he told me that he wanted me to write a blog on “numbers” as part of our useful “How To” guide section, I thought to myself first of all, “well presumably he’ll need me to understand it first…oh dear, fallen at first hurdle”. Until very recently, I would never, ever have known how to do all this stuff. But let me be the first to tell you – crikey, it can become addictive. Digital strategy is my new catnip. It’s confusing and elusive, but it’s really interesting.
First of all, it was necessary to understand how Google works as a search engine. I got a fascinating lesson from Martyn in What Google Likes, and how to get your site right to the top of the search engine results page WITHOUT having to spend hundreds of pounds paying for your site to be at the top of the page. The secret is in regulating the content of your site. If say, you were a peach salesman (sorry, I’m still a bit whoozy from the anaesthetic) and you were a specialist in selling a particular type of peach, called a Mandrel (I just heard a man say it. I have no idea what it is, but for the purpose of this blog, it’s a type of peach). To make sure that when people type in the words “peach” or “mandrel peach” into Google it’s YOUR website that they find, you need to FILL up your site with those words. I mean really fill it up. Type those words everywhere – write blogs on peaches, repeating the word PEACH until you can barely stand it any more. PEACH PEACH PEACH. What this does is make your site stand out to Google; the relevance of your site to the searcher will be increased. They like this, and you will see that if you type into Google the word “peach”, your site will be getting further and further towards the top of the list of relevant sites. It’s very clever.
The second thing Martyn taught me about was the importance of creating a series of links on your site. He described it very nicely as “making the site hold hands with itself”. What he meant was that Google prefers pages which aren’t simply stand-alone and isolated, but that are part of the “web” along with other pages, and other sites. You can do this by linking the site that you’re moderating up to another relevant page, like this.
So far, the favourite leg of my journey of discovery into the world of SEO (that’s search engine optimisation to you…and me) and internet strategy is my foray into Google Analytics.
WARNING: once in use, this site is seriously addictive.
This site allows you to keep a really good track of your site traffic; you can see how many people have visited the site, how many of them were “absolute unique” visitors (first time visitors), the average number of pages that were viewed, which of the pages is the most popular, how long people were on the website for…with this information, you can then evaluate your site, see what’s working, and what’s not. You can see better whether you need to create more of a “hook” for the average internet browser, whether you need to make the home page easier to navigate. It’s brilliant. To use it, it couldn’t be simpler. If you have a website, sign yourself up to a Googlemail email address, or sign up to iGoogle. You can do this just by clicking on “sign up” when you type in for Google. Then, when you have your account, and have signed up your website, you type in “Google analytics”, and then “access analytics” when the option is available. I am getting a little hooked on it – today, for example, I was elated to read that our site viewings tripled since yesterday! Hurrah! This is brilliant news, and if it weren’t for Analytics, I’d be oblivious to it.
So there you go – it’s not comprehensive, and no doubt there’ll be a second and third instalment, but that’s my Beginner’s Guide to how to keep tabs on your website and make the most of the opportunities.