SEO and competitive analysis
SERPS redux is a useful quick way of looking at the top results from Google to use for competitive SEO analysis Read the rest of this entry »
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Finding contacts
A wonderful resource for finding contacts – Listorious. It is a Twitter search engine enabling you to find people by topic, region or profession. Really useful!
The power of content in online marketing
Push has given way to pull in online marketing and content holds the key Read the rest of this entry »
Optimising videos for search
Video is an increasingly important medium and being found in the video search can be an extremely way of driving traffic to your site. This applies to almost every market and sector.
Creating a custom search engine
Creating a custom search engine provides a invaluable information management tool Read the rest of this entry »
Researching your link profile
I was presenting a course on how to optimise on page content last week in Eastleigh and the subject of link profiles came up – not surprisingly perhaps in any SEO presentation.
The tool I recommend is Majestic SEO’s site explorer. It offers quite a lot for free – all you need to do is register – and if you want to look at more sites or go into greater depth then subscriptions start at £9.99 per month.
Wordtracker also provides an excellent tool called Linkbuilder. This is more expensive and its interface is easier to use and analyses the links a bit more for you – but the data is taken from Majestic SEO, Wordtracker then make it a little more accessible.
Google and the taxman
The world of anyone working in SEO is dominated by Google, perhaps to an unhealthy degree it is, what we eat and breath. Google has come in for a lot of stick in recent years especially in relation to privacy issues and is also increasingly Master of the Online Universe which is worrying. I am thinking of the way in which it dominates the online
space, even to the point of requiring direction from US Justice Department to limit its control of the online travel space following its acquitision of ITA.
But we all know Google’s motto, ‘Don’t be Evil’ and to some extent it has managed to retain for itself some of the internet’s original ethos of generosity and openness, the
brand of Larry Page and Sergey Brin developing this massive wonderful technology to open information up to the whole world.
Well that’s one idea. A very different view of what Google has become is outlined in the Sunday Times article (May 29th) on Google’s brilliance at tax avoidance. The amount
of US, UK, and Irish tax that Google has managed not to pay is eye watering. But then before we are too critical and moralistic about it, who of us pays more tax than we
legally have to and given the opportunity to rearrange out affairs to reduce our tax liability, which of us would say ‘but it is my civic duty to pay tax’?
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a company capable of developing such an awesome tool as the Google search engine is more than capable of developing a ‘tax efficient’
financial and corporate structure. Is this the internet losing its innocence and growing up into a corporate adult?
Exclude competitors from clicking on your Adwords
Excluding competitors from seeing and then clicking on Adwords is a valuable way of targeting your Adwords budget. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Analytics fast access mode – or no access mode?
Fast access mode in Google Analytics is causing data to disappear, at least for small sites Read the rest of this entry »
How to exclude internal traffic
To exclude internal traffic from your Google Analytics data
You need administrator access to configure your account to exclude internal traffic. If you can’t find the screens referred to, it probably means you have only ‘user’ access. You will have to contact the person who set up the GA account and either ask them to exclude the internal traffic or to give you Administrator access.
Click on ‘Analytics settings’ (top left) to open up the following screen. Click on ‘Add new profile’ (top right)
Tick the box ‘Add new profile for an existing domain’. You need to give the profile a name, I suggest ‘exclude internal’
Your new profile will now appear in the Analytics Settings window. Click ‘Edit profile.
and scroll down to ‘Filters applied to profile’ and click ‘Add filter’
In the ‘Filter type’ drop down, select ‘Exclude’ ‘traffic from the IP addresses’ ‘that are equal to’
You need to know your IP address. There are lots of website out there that will tell you, one such is http://whatismyipaddress.com/. The site will automatically detect your IP, and will present it as ‘IP information’. It will take the form of a number with four groups of digits each separated by a full stop.
Simply copy these four sets of digits in the four boxes, give the filter a name (Me or web agency etc) and your are done.
Profiles and Best Practice
You could of course simply add the filter to your existing, default profile but it is far better – and safer – to leave one profile completely untouched. This means that if you either make a mistake or for some reason want the data excluded by the filter, all data is still available.
Profiles are ways of analysing a sub set of data, so once a filter is configured, it will mean that for that within that profile, some data is excluded. This may be because you have used an exclude filter as here, or it may be that you have a used an include filter, which will have the effect of excluding everything not included by the include filter.