Central Perk

luni, 24 octombrie 2011

Getting Rankings into GA Using Custom Variables

Posted: 23 Oct 2011 01:40 PM PDT

Gathering rankings is one of the most annoying and time consuming tasks of an SEO consultant's work. Because of search personalization, it can be near impossible to find accurate rankings for keywords to report to clients or to use to gauge our work's effectiveness.

Michael King and I have found a way to get rankings for the keywords driving traffic to your site directly into your Analytics using Custom Variables. Not only that, but we can also get international rankings based off of the keywords and the location from where the person came. And finally, this may also be a step towards identifying the identity of the (not provided) keywords we are now seeing thanks to "privacy concerns".

How Do I Get These Rankings Into My GA?

Different people have come up with different ways to get rankings directly into GA. One tactic is to create a custom profile using directions from this post by Chris Abernethy. This strategy works fairly well, but requires a lot of setup and requires you to be able to create another profile on your account. It also requires many steps and custom filters to clean the data.

Mike and I decided that a custom variable would be a better way to go. In order to make this strategy work, you need to be able to do the following (or know someone who can):

1) Insert the Javascript custom variable that I will provide you below into your section of your website below your normal GA code;

2) Insert a parameter into your <body> tag;

3) Be able to slice/dice your data in Analytics; and

4) Use some Excel wizardry to present the data.

The Code

Here's the code that you need to use to send the data from your site into GA. Put this code in the section of your site, directly under your normal GA code:

Get the code here

Now you need to put this code into the <body> tag of your site. Yes, directly within the body tag. This code:

onLoad="rankingsPush();

Your <body> tag will end up looking something like this:

<body onLoad="rankingsPush();">

Now sit back and let the data collect!

Where Do I Find This Data?

You find the data that is collecting under your Custom Variables tab in GA. I'll show you some screenshots. Click on Visitors > Demographics > Custom Variables, like so:

Then you'll see this screen:

Click through that and make your Secondary Dimension "Keywords". Boom! You get rankings and keywords!

What Can We Do With This Data?

Now we've got the rankings of the keywords driving traffic (which is what we really care about, right?). Data is worthless without applications, so let's come up with a few. Endless possibilities exist for slicing and dicing the data.

International Rankings

One cool thing that I did was match up the keywords and their positions with the country from which the visit came. You get the average ranking of the keyword driving traffic (which you also get in Webmaster Tools), but now you can break this down by country! Like so:

We could guess at what the (not provided) keywords are

We may also be able to guess at what the keywords coming up as (not provided) are now. As you can see in the screenshot below, I know that my visits from (not provided) are ranking #1 and #2. Based off of this, I can narrow it down to only my keywords ranking #1 and #2. If I do this for the data set I am working off of, I get these keywords:

Now that I've narrowed this down, I can take the landing pages for these rankings (set secondary dimension to "Landing Page"):

And I can see the landing page for my (not provided) keywords (Traffic > Sources > Search > Organic):

So, we can guess that most of the (not provided) keywords probably have something to with my name, since the majority went to my homepage where my name ranks #1 or #2.

*note* I am sure that someone with some mad Excel skills could automate this. If someone wants to take a crack at it, feel free and I'll link to it.

*edit* I need to give a shout out to Mike Pantoliano's post from last September where he details a very similar process. He also has some great applications in that post.

What other applications can you think of? How could we make this data sing even more?

I welcome your comments below!

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Interview With Sunita Biddu of SEO-Peace.com Graywolf's SEO Blog

Interview With Sunita Biddu of SEO-Peace.com

Posted: 24 Oct 2011 10:46 AM PDT

The following is a sponsored post for SEO Peace.

For today's post we're going to be talking to Sunita Biddu of SEO Peace , Hi Sunita for my readers who don't know you can you tell us a little about yourself and your company.

Glad to be talking to you, Michael. Back in 2003 when I finished my post graduation with Biotechnology, I wasn't even closer to the thoughts of this SEO industry. I worked as a Bioinformatics Lecturer for a few months and one fine day, I got to know about copywriting while surfing online. Before that, Internet was meant only for chatting and making friends to me. Once I got into copywriting and SEO with a staff of 3 writers, I never wanted to look back. Today SEO-Peace.com is backed up with a team of 50+ competent inhouse employees. I plan the campaigns but the credit goes to my dedicated staff that executes those campaigns to deliver results and gains credibility from our clientele. Today, from unique article marketing to building authority web 2.0 pages, we handle almost all conventional to advance link building methods to make a link profile as powerful and diversified as possible.

SEO and internet marketing has experienced some dramatic changes this year, what do you feel are some of the most important things that site looking to rank should focus on

The fun of SEO is that it is ever-changing but the fundamental rules stay same. To outrank its competitors, a site should focus on 3 most important things:

First and foremost; relevant and conceptually unique content that offers value to its visitors. Google is implementing regular updates and changes to enhance the search results and weed out spam sites with redundant, low value and keyword stuffed text. The site content must be written primarily for audience, not for search engines. Publishing fresh & unique content on regular basis on-site helps with an extra edge. Remember, if you target your audience properly, you already targeted the search engines.
Second focus goes to powering up the site's link profile. Stronger the link profile is, higher the site ranks. By stronger, I do not mean the number of backlinks but the quality (age, number of external links) and relevancy (niche, authority) of pages the incoming links coming from.

Another important factor for a powerful link profile is to achieve links using as many diverse methods and root domains as possible in a steady manner. Both, over on-page optimization and aggressive off-page SEO may raise red flags. If you're working with a genuine SEO company or consultant, they will only employ diverse link building techniques to claim a stronger foothold in all major search engines while staying abreast of all upcoming changes and adapt to avoid any traffic loss.

These days, I often see the forums full of dirt cheap offers like 2000 links for $39 and buyers fall prey to the number of links without considering the quality at times. They tend to go hand in hand with their regular SEO professionals and such cheap offers. When things collapse, they've nothing to do but lose and regret.

Third and final focus is to go with trends; using social media. A strong SEO campaign complemented with social media works as an insurance to gain authority. Your become a brand, you engage with your audience, you get to know better what they want. No matter it is Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus, you get full benefit of social media in SEO as well as ensuring direct traffic to your site.
I must say, the first focus helps achieving your second focus and second focus complements the third focus. No quality site would like to link to a sloppy site. You have higher chances of getting natural links if own a user oriented site (guest bloggers love 'em to share on their sites as well as social networks).

If all goes fair, the site has lesser to no chances of getting affected irrespective of any changes in algos.

A lot of times companies miss the easy things, or get the easy stuff wrong, what are some basics that you see a lot of websites don’t get right?

Right choice of keywords is one of the easy and initial things that go wrong with many companies. Even if the client has a ready list of keywords, a professional SEO company should cross check the profitability of those keywords. Client and you'll end up feeling upset if you rank for non-profitable keywords and get traffic like peanuts.

Second thing; many companies miss the beauty of on-page optimization in SEO. A good on-page work solves half of the SEO stuff. Many people jump straight to the link building without bothering the basic and easy things about on-page that may help them get ultra quick results. With a good onpage work, we have brought many sites to page 1 for many keywords within as quickly as 30-40 days for a decent competition.

Another easy stuff that people miss is the use of anchor text diversity and pace of link building. Working under assumption that building hundreds of quick links to few keywords would get them on top 3s, may get a site either penalized or filtered for spamming. Some easy notes and a little care may help your time, money and effort deliver the expected results.

For small and mid size organizations, it’s important to learn to use their time correctly, when do you think they should outsource?

It's not just time but money as well that they need to learn to utilize in the right direction to ensure higher returns. Looking at SEO getting diverse everyday and the need of uniqueness in your brand, the organizations should outsource only when

They don't have experienced staff to handle the SEO with a dedicated attempt. SEO isn't impossible but definitely complex and ever-changing. You cannot afford to assign it to someone with half knowledge and half-hearted attempts. One should outsource when lacking an expert staff.
They have already tried and failed with no expected results. Then you need an outsider professional help.
When they've a decent budget to afford a professional SEO. Good SEO can't be too cheap. They need to trust the one who can take full accountability of their website's SEO. SEO can't be quick and one-time job either. It's ongoing and demands time as well as ongoing learning.

What are the services that people come to you to help them with the most

One of our best sellers is contextual blogpost service that ranges from mixed PR, general, niche to high PR blogs. Most of the clients try us out with smaller service packages and 85% of them sign up for full service SEO packages on monthly basis looking at good results they get. Monthly special discounted offers are something our regular clients wait for.

We're good at updating our inventory with latest link building methods and this makes our clients keep an eye on what's new with us. Apart from that, our lowcost SEO packages are getting very popular.

If you could offer some advice for people who decide to outsource, what would that be

If one decides to outsource, they can take care of few things to get best returns

Do your homework before you hire someone. Be informed of the services you're getting. It's good to have the basic knowledge so you're treated as an educated and smart customer.
Get hooked to trained professionals and expert who are liable for their steps, actions and strategies.
Inquire about the history of happy clients and success rate of the company. Make sure they make realistic goals & respect your privacy. They should have a strong customer support and should be available to answer your doubts and questions.

Let's switch gears and look into the future, what do you think are some things that are on the horizon that will have a big effect on the internet marketing industry and people should be paying attention to?

Future is not only about SEO anymore. It's about end user and real Internet marketing. Today's buyer have more options available than ever before and they want to make an informed and profitable decision. Online businesses need to target the search engines and social media at the same time. It's the time to follow the user-centered approach and optimize the websites accordingly. Looking at the frequent changes in algos almost every month, it's not wise to run only after SEO, link building and change strategies. It's not realistic either. I have literally seen some cases where some decent sites are disappeared and you wake up to wonder why.

This is the time to know your potential audience, engage with them on social media, and optimize the website content for better user experience. At the same time, I know that not every niche gets good response on social media. To help sort such niches, the best way is to follow quality link building and get people write about you. And to meet search engines' quality standards, there should be original text, optimized images, cleaner coding, accurate title tags, no broken links and a relevant backlink profile (as much as possible).

Just a last pointer to this answer, I'd recommend targeting all major search engines, to get traffic from every possible way.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions today, since you've been kind enough to spend your time answering them, why don't you take this opportunity to tell people about your company, and the services you offer.

I thoroughly enjoyed answering your questions, Michael. To give an idea about our SEO company and services, we offer a huge range of link building services from professional press release writing & distribution, contextual blogposts, authority backlinks, premium web 2.0 pages, video marketing and full service SEO packages. The good thing about SEO Peace is that there is hardly any disappointed customer or site visitor. The pricing, range of services and packages fits everybody's pocket and the results do the rest of the job.

I won't say we've the lowest pricing in industry but we definitely have the result-oriented services with genuine pricetags. Though social media marketing is still under testing and experimenting phase, we've created some good facebook pages, for clients to attract good fan base and audience.
We've lot of resellers and some of them are leading SEO companies from US and UK. The reason behind our growing list of happy clients and new referrals is our ability to pay attention to details and stay consistent in quality to deliver not just work reports but results.

Because you've been kind enough to share my thoughts and company details on your blog, SEO Peace team would be more than happy to offer a sweet 10% discount to your readers. They just need to add this coupon (wolfmichael10c) on checkout. I hope that'd be a good return gift to your site audience from my end ? For any questions, I am famous for a prompt response at sunita@contentaxis.com or skype me (contentaxis) anytime for a discussion.

The preceding has been a sponsored post. Find out more information about sponsored posts.

photo credit: Shutterstock/Jose Gil

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Interview With Sunita Biddu of SEO-Peace.com

We Can't Wait

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, October 24, 2011

We Can't Wait

Since we can't wait for Congress to act, President Obama heads to Las Vegas to highlight steps he's taking to create jobs and improve the economy.

Up first are policies that make it easier for some homeowners to refinance their mortgages, and later this week there will be measures to help students better manage their student loan debt. These steps aren’t a substitute for the bold action we need to create jobs and grow the economy, but they’ll make a difference.

Learn more about what President Obama is doing because "We Can't Wait"

American Jobs Act by the Numbers: $1,500

Inaction won't work for American families that are just scraping by. That's why this week we're continuing to pull out different aspects of the American Jobs Act to show how it will impact you, like the expansion of the payroll tax cut passed last year that will provide a $1,500 tax cut to the typical American family in 2012.

Seth's Blog : Form and function

Form and function

When the form changes, so does the underlying business model, which of course changes the function as well.

Mail ---> email

Books ---> ebooks

DVD ---> YouTube/Netflix

1040 ---> Online taxes

Visa ---> Paypal

Open outcry ---> Electronic trading

Voice call centers ---> forums and online chat

Direct mail ---> permission marketing

In each case, the original players in the legacy industry decided that the new form could be bolted onto their existing business model. And in each case they were wrong. Speed and marginal cost and ubiquity and a dozen other elements of digitalness changed the interaction itself, and so the function changes too.

The question that gets asked about technology, the one that is almost always precisely the wrong question is, "How does this advance help our business?"

The correct question is, "how does this advance undermine our business model and require us/enable us to build a new one?"

There are projects that are possible with ebooks or Kickstarter or email that could never have worked in an analog universe. Most of the money made in the stock market today is via trading approaches that didn't even exist thirty years ago.

When a change in form comes to your industry, the first thing to discover is how it will change the function.

• Email to a friend •

duminică, 23 octombrie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

China Still Fails to Participate in Two Week Global Rally

Posted: 23 Oct 2011 07:35 PM PDT

A quick look at the Asia Pacific Markets this evening shows Australia (AORD) up 1.89%, HSI Han Seng (Hong Kong) up 2.44%, the Nikkei (Japan) up 1.4%, Seoul (South Korea) up 2.18%, Taiwan up 2.36% and once again SSEC, the Shanghai composite is not participating.

$SSEC Shanghai Composite Daily

click on chart for sharper image

Europe is in recession, the US is headed there (or already in recession), and China is slowing far more than anyone thinks. This does not bode well for strong commodity demand looking ahead.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

EU is reporting "Progress" but None of it is Meaningful

Posted: 23 Oct 2011 01:04 PM PDT

EU leaders are announcing "progress" but there is little progress to be found. Banks have "volunteered" to 40% haircuts but EU leaders want 50% minimum. Is that progress?

Germany won a major arguments with France, the latter wanting unlimited bailout access (printing) by the ECB. Since no one expected France to win that argument, that is not much progress either, except from the point of view we no longer have to listen to asinine proposals from France.

Otherwise the bickering still continues as to how best to leverage the EFSF when the best thing to do is not use leverage at all. As soon as leverage is used France will likely lose its AAA rating.

Then again France will soon enough lose that AAA rating anyway as it attempts to bailout French banks.

Otherwise, here is the misleading headline from Bloomberg: EU Sees Progress on Banks

European leaders outlined plans to aid banks and ruled out tapping the European Central Bank's balance sheet to boost the rescue fund, inching toward a revamped strategy to contain the Greece-fueled debt crisis.

Europe's 13th crisis-management summit in 21 months also excluded a forced restructuring of Greece's debt, sticking with the policy of enticing bondholders to accept "voluntary" losses to help restore the country's finances.

Bank capital needs -- estimated at 100 billion euros by a person familiar with the deliberations -- will be met first by banks themselves, then by national governments, the European officials agreed.

Only when national efforts fail can governments tap the main rescue fund, the 440 billion-euro European Financial Stability Facility, for cash to channel to banks.

"What I can tell you is that this only will happen under strict conditions," Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said.

Germany pushed through one of its main summit aims, defeating French efforts to bulk up the rescue fund by enabling it to borrow potentially limitless sums from the independent central bank. Policy makers are headed toward using the EFSF to guarantee government bond sales as a way to extend its reach. A second option is to set up an EFSF-insured fund that would seek outside investment in troubled bonds.

The goal is to complete the technical details within 24 hours, a European official said. The next summit will consider the two options as well as ways of getting the International Monetary Fund to boost its rescue role, the official told reporters.

After a year of sparring with the ECB over burden sharing for bondholders, Merkel was on the central bank's side this time, sparing it from a role in financing state deficits.

What wasn't decided is the fate of bond purchases by the Frankfurt-based ECB. The central bank has bought 165 billion euros of bonds, justifying the purchases as a way of smoothing markets and helping transmit its interest-rate decisions through the economy.

Central bankers have expressed reluctance to step up the purchases, which started with Greece, Ireland and Portugal last year and widened to Italy and Spain in August as those markets came under attack.

"One shouldn't demand more from the ECB than it can achieve according to its statutes," Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said today.

Central bankers are at the center of the dispute over writedowns for Greek bondholders. A reminder came on Oct. 21 when the ECB put a dissenting footnote into an assessment of Greece's finances that envisioned writedowns as high as 60 percent.

The IMF wants haircuts of 60%, the bankers agreed to 40% voluntary cuts. Of course the haircuts are not voluntary and never were.

EU officials are still bickering over how to do a 100 billion euro bank recapitalization when four times that amount is needed.

Leveraged EFSF will not work, but EI officials are still arguing over how to do it.

Is this progress?

Odds are overwhelming there is not going to be progress. I'm on vacation, so I'm going golfing.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

luni, 24 octombrie 2011

Getting Rankings into GA Using Custom Variables

Getting Rankings into GA Using Custom Variables