The joy of web analytics

The joys of website analytics

How do you measure your progress on your website? Do you even measure it at all? When I began my website career I thought wow, I am a genius at this. I have a great design, people are constantly telling me how beautiful it is, and I am positive customers are visiting the site…Or are they?

If you aren’t

How Search Engines Index

When a search engine crawls your site it is referred to as a spider. We want them to do this so that we are indexed for many words. A spider killer or something that immediately stops them and will turn them away or cause them to ask the question is this a valid website, are things like “Flash” designs, Javascript, duplicate content, session id’s and poor navigation. These things do not necessarily have to disappear from a website, but they must be done correctly. If a website is done completely in flash, it will not register at all in search engines. However, if a website has flash on the home page and has good content surrounding it then a search engine will find that friendly and will index it just fine. Always have a “skip intro” button to allow a user to have an option. Otherwise you may lose your audience from staying on your page. Although we think our video is something users want to see, we do not know that and some people may not be interested. The idea is to keep users on our page not to lose them. Additionally, do not make a website that has more than one click to enter the site or the search engines will ignore you. Some people do this asking for location and then trying to drill down further asking for zip code or what are you looking for Widget A or Widget B. This is a way to get google, MSN and others to mark you as a spam site.

Navigation on a home page once were thought of as being good if they were in a menu style but this is not the case anymore. Now, to be indexed faster and more often by search engines, it is recommended to have a navigation system that is done more in sentences. This can be tricky. An example of this would be to have the sentence “Are you looking for widgets to increase productivity?” The word “widget” would then link to our pages about widgets.