Today Google has introduced a new feature which should be available to every Analytics user - well it is available here in Australia anyway, which made me think it should be everywhere!

The new feature is called Weighted Sort, and comes into play when you click on any metric in a Google Analytics table, with the intention to sort ascending or descending. Without clicking to sort, you won't see it.

The purpose of it is to help you sort out those metrics which are worth looking at, and those which aren't.

For the blog below, I want to look at Bounce Rate. When I click on Bounce Rate to see the worst offending pages, I get all these pages, which have had not many views. What would be more useful, is to see pages which had a more significant number of views, and which also had bad bounce rates. This is where you use Weighted Sort - as shown below;



See, the page ranked at the top of this table doesn't necessarily have the worst bounce rate, but it has a whole lot of visits, so it is pretty important.

You can only use this new functionality with some of the calculated metrics - e.g. bounce rate and % new visits.

Search Engine Optimisation is an essential activity for any business who wants to use their website to build their business, BUT not every business can afford the time or money it costs to do the most thorough job on their SEO. Small businesses particularly have to be careful with their budgets, and some businesses like to do as much as possible themselves.

Now lets not get ridiculous, of course I am a big advocate of businesses (that can afford it) outsourcing their SEO. Not only will you benefit from years of expertise, but our SEO consultants deal with lots and lots of websites around the world, we know what works and what doesn't, and we have the time, inclination and passion for increasing our SEO knowledge every single day.

But of course not everyone can afford it, and there are lots of things you can do for your website yourself which will help your SEO efforts.

The first step, is to get realistic and target your campaign. Broader, and more competitive terms, will be very difficult to rank for, and if you don't have the time or budget for an intensive SEO campaign, then you might be wasting your time on those big terms.

Smaller, more niche or geographically targetted terms might be easier to achieve, and because they are more targetted, you will be putting your small amount of investment, on the most valuable spend.

Once you have decided on the keywords to target you need to ensure that you are;
1. Putting them on your page titles
2. Putting them in your content
3. Using them as anchor text on links
4. Using H tags around them, and
5. Titling images appropriately.

It is important to do this within reason, and not spam your page - if you do, people might find you, but I doubt they will like what they see when they do.

Other important things to do for simple SEO is grow your content and get links to your site.

For growing your content - just make sure that over time you keep adding to your site, either through a blog, adding new products, or other information pages.

For getting links - this takes a lot more work. However, I have previously writen a couple of links posts, like this one about "Top 10 places to ask for a link" and my original "Best Linking Strategies" post, so check them out for inspiration.

Another great idea, if you have a small budget, is to get a consultation from an SEO specialist (like us, why don't you call us?). Just tell them before you start that you want to do the SEO yourself, and you just need a strategy with a clear action plan on how to do it.

And P.S., here is a checklist for doing SEO on your Blog.

I can't believe there is no good website online where I can easily compare the different political parties stances on different issues. Are the big newspapers too biased? Are bloggers too politically apathetic? Is there something illegal about it that I don't know about?

To compare the policies, you have to go to their individual websites, and of course I don't know their URLs, so I will Google them.

It is very interesting to see who is buying advertising space on the names of the political parties:

Australian Labor Party:
Official Labor website is coming in at one, and pointing to their policies page - excellent, just what I was looking for.
Liberal Party is also bidding, with an ad about Labors Failures

The Liberal Party
Liberal Party is also bidding on themselves - but not coming in at one - and their ad is simply about Tony Abbott. I feel like it should be "Things about us which AREN"T Tony Abbott"
Labor isn't bidding on this, but an unofficial anti-Tony-Abbott Greens site is

The Australian Greens
They are paying for ads for themselves too - but only if you type The Australian Greens, not THe Greens
No other party is bidding on their terms.

The Nationals
Not even the Nationals are bothering buying PPC - but the Anti-tony unofficial greens site are bidding.

None of the parties are bidding on general 'election' or 'how to vote' type terms.

They aren't even bidding on terms related or including their policies - like carbon tax, maternity payment, mining tax (just the Keepaustraliastrong website), etc.

The Liberals are bidding on both leaders names, but Labor is not for either.

I think the parties should start bidding on searches for policies, how to vote, election information and individual candidates at least.

Update
And in a story today on the SMH - the Liberal party has pulled a series of Google Ads they were running on their competitors names which were leading to their website. Complaints were raised that it was misleading, and could lead voters into thinking that those candidates were affiliated with the Liberal party.

Link building is an essential part of any SEO strategy. It is thought to be one of the most influential ranking factors, with links from relevants sources with excellent anchor text being the Holy Grail (of course if they are no-followed).

Not every link has to be this Holy Grail, every little bit helps as long as they are 1. Relevant in some way, 2. Don't have a 'no follow' on them (although even if they do they can be valuable for click through traffic), and 3. Cached by the search engine.

Finding links can be really time consuming, but for every website there are going to be some 'easier' wins (not necessarily quick).

The following is a list of people you might want to hit up for a link, these ones should be friendlier than most.

1. Your web designer. You might not have noticed this, but the vast majority of web designers help their own SEO by putting  a link to their own site from every single page of their client's websites, through a footer link. This is not necessarily wrong, (although it doesn't help their clients), but if they are going to do that, the least they can do is link back to your site too. After all, you are the client! Even better would be if you could be on an industry page, or a case study about your business, which will make your page relevant.

2. Suppliers - Similarly to your web designers, if you use other suppliers like accountants, PR, or copy writers, you might want to be named on their client list or as a case study.

3. If you are in an industry group (e.g. any logo you display on your site for a professional qualification or membership), and especially if you pay money to be in this group, ask them for a link to your site.

4. Similarly, if you support any charities financially or with free products/services, ask them if they could put a link to your site as well

5. Resellers - If you resell products for ANYONE else, make sure that you ask them if you can be on their website as a reseller. They should want you to be there, because it helps people find your store, which will help people find their goods.

6. If your school or university has a website with case studies, history's, profiles or news, consider submitting a story which conveniently 'links' to your current business or work place. Remember that .edu links are particularly valuable!

7. Link reclamation - Use back link checkers to see who is already linking to you, and see if you can get those links changed to have relevant anchor text, or see why they are linking to you and see if you can get more links like that

8. Chamber of Commerce  - If you are lucky enough to be in an area which has a chamber of commerce, or if you are operating in a foreign market, you can join your national chamber.

9. If you are in an office block, shopping centre, or some other complex, make sure there is a link to your site from their tenants list. Again, it is even better if there is a category page for your listing.

10. On your site - If you have an article, picture, statistic or graph that is unique and attractive, make sure you ask for links to it! A short "link to this graph" will not only prompt people to think of linking to it, but will make it easy for them to do so.

I am writing this piece just because the instructions provided by Google are hidden away among the instructions for various other things, and also because it stops (in my opinion) just short of what I wanted them to explain.

So, I hope this is a helpful and comprehensive explanation on how to track subdomain traffic when using Google Analytics.

In my example, Suzy's shoe shop www.suzyshoes.com, has some subdomains - www.stiletto.suzyshoes.com and www.slipper.suzyshoes.com.

Each of these subdomains has a contact page, as does the main domain;

www.suzyshoes.com/contact
www.stiletto.suzyshoes.com/contact
www.slipper.suzyshoes.com/contact

The problem with this is that in Google analytics, reports show only the trailing slash page. E.g. if each of these pages got a visit, then in Google Analytics, Suzy will see 3 visits to the page "/contact", but this is in fact 3 different pages

To improve on this reporting, Suzy needs to make changes both to her Google analytics code, and her Google analytics settings.

Changing Your Google Analytics Code
First step, the code changes. You need to add a snippet of code into the existing code. Note here I am using the old code, not the new asynchronous one. If you are using the new asynchronous code, check out the instructions here. So, below is a bit of the code which is on Suzy's site already, and the red line is the new bit she needed to insert to track the subdomains separately.

<script type="text/javascript">

try {
	var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X");
 pageTracker._setDomainName(".suzyshoes.com");
	pageTracker._trackPageview();
}catch(err){}
</script>

Changing Your Google Analytics Setup
Now that this tracking is in place, you need to make some changes in your GA settings.

First, make duplicate profiles of the one you are working on. So, Suzy will leave her existing one as is, and also make three more profiles;
1. Excluding subdomains
2. Stiletto Subdomain
3. Slipper Subdomain.

Then, in each of these three new profiles, she will implement the following filter;
Filter Type: Custom filter -> Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Hostname -> (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Request URI -> (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Request URI    /$A1$B1
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

The result of this is that in each of these profiles, her page reports will now show the visits to her contact page like this;

.suzyshoes.com/contact
.stiletto.suzyshoes.com/contact
.slipper.suzyshoes.com/contact

So she can see exactly what contact pages got the visits.

Now, the last step is to include/exclude the traffic in each of the different profiles, so as to make them just for one particular subdirectory.

You need to install a filter on each of the profiles, which looks something like this;

Filter Type: Custom filter -> Include
FIlter Field: Hostname
Filter  Pattern:  ^stiletto\.suzyshoes\.com$
Case Sensitive: No

Suzy would then repeat this for the slipper profile, but for the other profile (which is excluding the two subdomains), she would implement two filters, making each of them 'exclude' instead of 'include'.

For more information or specific help, call us about our web analytics consulting.