Marketing on the Web Webmaster's Tools provides powerful insights into what is really going on with your website. You may have Google Analytics and think that is enough, but Google Analytics only shows you what people did after they clicked through to your website. Webmaster's tools provides information about how your website is doing in the search results before they click, and can help you understand what content on your website isn’t working. You get a "Google's eye view" of your website's health (broken lin...
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Bing’s Updated Webmaster Tools
An update to Bing's webmaster tools was announced today. Webmaster tools provides valuable insight into the search engine's view of your website. Unlike Web Analytics, which shows you what traffic came to your site, webmaster tools tells you what search phrases triggered the Search Engine to display your content in the search results and if that content was clicked or not. Bing's new interface does list the search phrases your site is displayed for, which is especially useful when your site i...
MoreLinking Google Analytics and AdWords Accounts
Google Analytics is updating their their system. To ensure AdWords continues to pass information to your Google Analytics account, a setting change may be needed. I have already taken care of this for my customers and in doing so found several cases where a change was required. I wanted to alert other readers that you should check your AdWords account to be sure the information is correct. For instructions see this Google Post Important change to AdWords/Analytics cost data importing T...
MoreLinking Pay Per Click Campaigns to Google Analytics
It is beneficial to separate and track your Pay Per Click traffic from Organic in Google Analytics. If you don't make the effort, PPC and Organic traffic will be lumped together, making it difficult to know how your SEO efforts are progressing. Once you make the link between Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, the tracking will occur automatically. To set this up, simply access the Analytics tab in your AdWords account and then either select Create New or Link to Existing. Once you...
MoreLaunching a new Website / Changing an existing one
Whether launching a new website or changing an existing one it is important to do a little upfront work. I have had a couple of clients come to me recently either wanting to toss out their old site and start over or who have sadly, already made wholesale changes to page names or content only to find that their website can no longer be found in search results. Things to consider when launching a new Website or changing an existing one: Never rename or delete a page (well almost). If you a...
MoreMonitoring Website Uptime
Many people rely on server logs to monitor up-time or will ping a server from an in-house location. Unfortunately, this is not adequate as there can be many reasons a website is unavailable. In shared hosting environments* your bandwidth and availability is potentially at the mercy of dozens of other websites that may or may not be commercial in nature. However, even in dedicated hosting environments outages occur, modems to go off line, routers fail, and networks go down, making it important...
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