Google is pleased to announce their new sorting algorithm called weighted sort. This is a very useful and much needed improvement to Google Analytics. For the average user with a Google Analytics account (Don’t have one? Get it here .. it’s free) you can now find out what keywords are giving you the worst bounce rate.

So what does that mean? Simple, with the new weighted sort option you can clearly see which keywords you need to improve or tweak and which pages related to those keywords you need to optimise.

To quote Google ..

Ah ha! Now this is something you can make sense of. Weighted sort took into consideration the number of visits for each row bringing to the forefront the items you care about. Keep in mind that because weighted sort is no longer a strict sort, there will be values that don’t strictly follow the order you would assume.

Weighted sort is also available on other popular computed metrics, including goal conversion rate, % new visits etc. Try it out now on your own data! Take a look at the demo below to learn more or read the help article to get started.

Here’s Google’s Video for more info ..

Also, here’s the link to Google’s own Analytics blog .. use this to really get familiar with knowing your sites best optimisation techniques. Congratulations Google, once again you have raised the bar.

~ Bonn Appetite

Google announced on the 13th August the launch of their new AdWords Alerts (and more) options in Custom Alerts in Google Analytics Intelligence. We say excellent Google, pat on the back.

By linking a users Analytics and AdWords accounts, Google Intelligence will provide and show important changes in AdWords campaigns performance within Analytics.

As Google Analytics Blogspot explains .. Launch: Intelligence Just Got Smarter!

Hopefully, by now, you’re making good use of the Intelligence report in Google Analytics. If you’re looking to avoid the feeling that Google Analytics is “puking” too much data at you – a phrase coined by Google’s beloved analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik – you’re not alone.

We’ve heard you, and Intelligence is your first stop. As we mentioned in a previous post introducing Intelligence, it’s your dedicated assistant, monitoring your website traffic for significant changes that you should know of. Wondering what’s going on under the hood of your site traffic? Intelligence will tell you.

How does this actually help you the online marketer.

Simple, without having to keep a constant eye on your clients AdWords and Anayltics Accounts taking up valuable time, you can now just do the normal reporting and “notice” any changes arrive automatically into the clients anayltics account.

~ Bonn Appetite

Since webmasters or business owners often don't have enough time on their hands to devise fruitful SEO strategies and keep a close eye on how they are working, changing and fine tuning them from time to time, they tend to hire someone competent to do the job. If you are looking for an SEO consultant, you should know certain things to make the right choice:

SEO Planning & Analysis
Your chosen SEO consultant should offer:

Analysis of your Website: There may be many reasons as to why your web pages are not indexed by the search engines. So, your SEO consultant should do a website analysis of the content and structure of your website to ensure that nothing is wrong in these aspects that might have kept the search engines away.

Statistical Tracking: Google Analytics or some other popular form of visitor analytics should be incorporated into your site. This will help you gauge your ROI, referring hits, direct hits, keywords used, and much more.

Ethical Methodology: Be sure your SEO consultant is not using any unethical or Black Hat SEO Methods. Visits and links to your site are best built organically.

Keyword Research: Your SEO consultant should help you to choose keywords and phrases that a customer is likely to use as a search string to find the goods or services that you offer. The selection of keywords should also take into consideration those words or search phrases that have a high probability of giving you a sale or 'conversion'.

Plans for Inbound Links: Getting good quality inbound links from reputed neighborhoods will not only bring credibility to your site but also help you with link juice and an increase in the search engine rankings. So, your SEO professional should help you with plans to get such links that are relevant and will help your long term goals.

Competition Analysis: It's not enough to focus on your plans and strategies alone. You should also have an insight into what your competitor is doing so as to beat the competition. That's why analyzing your competitor's website should also be a part of the package that your SEO consultant brings to the table.

SEO Consultation and Marketing Strategy: Using various avenues of internet marketing, leveraging the social media platforms, manual submission of your site URLs and Sitemap to various search engines, setting up Google webmaster tools to track the effectiveness of your SEO strategies, evaluation and revision of your Meta Tags – all these should be offered by your SEO consultant.

Ongoing Effort: Since the search engines are constantly changing or refining their algorithms to determine rankings, your SEO consultant should be willing to put a continuous effort. Remember – reaping the benefits of SEO strategies is not a one time or short-term process. Rather, it's an ongoing process where you should be alert to make the changes as and when necessary.

Regular Updates: Unless you get an update every week or at specified intervals, you will not be able to see how well your SEO plans are working or if they are working at all. Since it's your hard earned money at stake, you should make sure that your chosen SEO consultant is forthright with the submission of such reports to give you an overview of how the things are proceeding.

Though there are many other intricate details that you have to look out for, you can safely begin the hiring process of your SEO consultant by keeping the pointers discussed above in mind.

Try Creative Services at Studio1C.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michelle_Crossley
http://EzineArticles.com/?What-to-Look-For-in-an-SEO-Consultant&id=4396212

Hiring an Internet marketing consultant is not an easy job. A consultant is a person who has the knowledge or the experience and the business owner is the person who has the money. However quite often, quite sadly, when the relationship is over, it becomes the other way round. That is, the consultant has all the money and the business owner has the experience. Needless to say, it is a failed project – the consultant failed to fetch the results.

But the fact remains that, as the business owner, you should still hire an Internet marketing consultant. You just need to be careful about the person you are selecting. But even before you make the hiring, you should get it cleared up as to what are the objectives and goals. Sure enough, your Internet marketing goals may take time to achieve, but never keep the target open-ended. Set precise benchmarks and clearly mention where you want to reach in 3 months time. If the consultant tells you that the target may be too steep to achieve, then revise your expectations. But set those benchmarks and ask your consultants to send you monthly or weekly reports. The report should include not just the number of visitors your website received, but also what activities where undertaken in the period.

Your Internet Marketing Consultant Should Not Be Offering You Any Guarantees

The fact is, in Internet marketing, guarantees are always very difficult to meet. This is because there is the third entity – the search engine, over which the consultant has no control. So you should recognize this and accept this as a fact. At best the person armed with all his or her experience and knowledge can optimize your website to make it achieve good ranks at the search engines. But it is indeed almost impossible to guarantee results in an area where there cannot be any complete control.

So where does the target or the benchmark stand if the results cannot be guaranteed. To ensure that the Internet marketing consultant gets you the desired result, it is still better that you set that target. Because once you do so, the person will know exactly what is to be done to reach the target. However even before that, the person should provide you a report of where your website stands. This report should include the following

- Whether the website has been indexed or not by the major search engines.
- Whether the search engine spider is deep crawling the website or just visiting the Home page.
- Whether there are any broken links in the website or not.
- How many visitors your website is receiving and the source of these visitors, the entry pages, exit pages, the keywords for which you are receiving traffic and other such information.
- The number of incoming links that points to your website before the Internet marketing consultant begins to work.
- A check of your current ranking at the search engines if your website has already been indexed.

The Internet marketing consultant should also provide you the following.

- A list of the most important keywords for which you should be achieving good web visibility. If you plan to run a PPC campaign then this list should also include the secondary and the long tail keywords.
- A list of all activities that is to be done to enhance the web visibility of your website.

James Copper is a writer for http://www.thebigagency.co.uk who can offer internet marketing services to all types of business

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_Copper
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Select-an-Internet-Marketing-Consultant&id=4443993

From the WebCEO Team

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher, wrote in his “The Art of War” treatise about the importance of knowing competitors before competing. The marketing revelations made by Al Ries and Jack Trout in “Marketing Warfare” (1986) also underline the same idea – marketing strategy and tactics are based on the same principles that military strategy and tactics are based on.

You should learn and analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies before you start developing your own strategy. In this way you will avoid mistakes your competitors made and employ their best practices. And to be a step or two ahead of your competition, getting information on what your competitors are doing at every moment must become your daily business routine. The good news is that to track your competitors’ online efforts, you do not need to plant a mole or steal their secret documentation. You just need a few online tools.

• Xinu Returns tells you how well your competitors’ sites are doing in popular search engines and social bookmarking sites. It shows a great variety of important sites’ statistics. Along with the SEO information such as Meta tags of the index page, its rankings in Google, Alexa, Technorati, Compete, a site’s number of backward links and indexed pages, Xinu will give you information on how many times the page’s URL was mentioned on social bookmarking sites and will let you see those mentions. Armed with this data, you can work out your own strategy to outperform your competitors: get more backlinks and add your interesting stories or helpful articles to the social media sites.

• Board Tracker is an innovative forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it was posted. Search for your competitors names and be aware of what their clients say. And, of course, do not forget to monitor your keywords and your product names to react on time.

• Google Alerts notifies you when your competitors are mentioned in the news or when you have a new competitor in your area. Google will let you set up to 1,000 alerts for each account you create with them, so you can monitor all your keywords and competitors’ names.

• PostRank monitors and collects social engagement events correlated with online content in real-time across the Web. PostRank gathers where and when stories generate comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interaction from a host of social hubs. With PostRank you will discover the best blogs, news, and articles by your topic, so you will see whether your competitors create stories that engage an audience.

• Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content gathered across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about your competitors and you, your company, a new product in your market, or any topic across the Web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

• SpyFu. Frankly speaking this tool has nothing to do with social media, but since we’re talking about spying, we can’t help mentioning it. SpyFu allows you to browse competitors’ daily AdWords PPC budget, average position of ads, estimated value of organic traffic, paid traffic compared with organic traffic estimates, top ten paid keywords with keyword ad history, total paid keywords, total organic keywords, PPC competitors (with a link to overlapping keywords), organic competitors (based on semantic relationships). You will get more information as a subscriber, but free reports also help you get the general idea.

With all of the above mentioned, remember that success in marketing and promotion of your product can be achieved only if you keep the balance between smart copying of the best competitors’ practices and introducing your own innovative marketing ideas.

- Bonn Appetite

By Dan Worth

Highlights growing censorship.

Google has revealed a global trend of internet censorship by admitting that many of its products, such as search, Docs, Blogger and YouTube, are blocked in 25 of the 100 countries where it operates.

Rachel Whetstone, Google’s vice president for global communications and public affairs, said in a blog post that the firm is routinely asked by national governments to remove certain information.

“We regularly receive government requests to restrict or remove content. When we receive those requests, we examine them closely to ensure they comply with the law, and if we think they’re overly broad we attempt to narrow them down,” she said.

Whetstone cited China as a prime example of this censorship, but explained that Google often runs into conflicts when asked to impose national laws on a global basis.

The Turkish government, for example, had asked Google to implement a worldwide ban on YouTube videos that it claims insult the country’s founder. When Google refused, arguing that Turkish law cannot apply outside Turkey, the service was blocked.

“If there are local laws where we do business that prohibit content that would otherwise be allowed, we restrict access to that content only in the country that prohibits it,” Whetstone explained.

Google declined to name any additional countries that censor or block its services.

But Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has made no secret of his desire for YouTube to voluntarily censor content that would otherwise be difficult to block using the Federal Government’s planned filter.

By highlighting the human rights problems in various regions, the web giant could also be treading a fine line, given that its own record on privacy is coming under increased scrutiny.

Google Buzz, for example, has been heavily criticised for making users’ information public, and 10 privacy commissioners from major nations, including the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, have asked the company to be more vigilant with its data.

Google Street View has also been criticised for impinging on people’s privacy, and acting as a “service for burglars”.

~ Bonn Appetite

Online Brand Popularity ..
How to measure it!

The deeper information technologies penetrate our lives, the more powerfully you and your customers can use them for decision making. All we need to make the best available choice is reliable information – from eyewitnesses, first-hand users, reviewers, and experts.

Search engines and news feeds give you a good idea if your brand is established and how it is perceived on the Web. But sites providing user-generated content – shared opinions in the form of ratings and votes, reviews and comments, tags and bookmarks – are even more important places for you to check brand reputation, and measure brand popularity.

What are the measurable signals of brand popularity?

Search for mentions of your brand name, create benchmarks, and run comparisons with your top competitors. Brand popularity metrics can be monitored at:

• Major search engines for both search volume (Google) and the number of found results.
• Blog search engines (Technorati, Google Blogs) for the overall number of blog posts, tags, comments, blog authority rates. There is no need to track all the blog search engines – select one or two with the results that you find most representative.
• Sites consisting of user submitted content (Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc.) for votes and comments.
• Twitter for found search results, followers, retweets.
• Media sharing sites (YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo Video, Flickr, Deviantart, and many others) for the number of uploads and downloads, views or listenings, video/image/photo/music ratings, number of comments.
• Social bookmark sites and toolbars (Delicious, StumbleUpon, Diigo, and others) for tags and saved bookmarks.
• Product and service review sites if applicable (Epinions, Ratings, Buzzillions etc.) for the number of reviews, pro and con votes, ratings.
• Forums for the number of search results, threads, user reputation, connections.
• Social networks for engagement facts such as the number of connections, profile completeness, recommendations, participations in groups, Q&A, etc.

At the same time, brand reputation measurement should rest not only upon the numbers being quantitative characteristics of popularity, but also upon qualitative evidence. An analysis should also include the prevailing tone of the reviews, articles or comments.

How to automate the brand popularity analysis

The market has replied to a social media boom with numerous buzz and sentiment analysis tools. The most comprehensive solutions are quite costly. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Sysomos’s MAP and Heartbeat and Radian6 are outstanding web buzz tracking and analysis solutions covering tens of millions of blogs, social networks, groups, boards and other CGM platforms, but a typical ‘do-it-yourself’ small business marketer could hardly afford them.

So if the perspective of paying a three- or even four-digit monthly fee is beyond your purse, a healthy approach would be to focus your analysis on a) the most popular (and crowded) social media and b) the most targeted (niche) sites while using free tools to check your brand reputation on them. The below free services will automate your brand reputation monitoring task rather efficiently.

• Major search engines – use the Web CEO Keywords tool to retrieve the search volume from Google and competition numbers from all the major search engines.
• Blog search engines – Nielsen BlogPulse is a great free service to see brand popularity trends. You can also use BlogScope for the same purpose.
• For Twitter info analysis, you can use TweetStats, Twitter Analyzer (< By far the best Twitter App seen in a long while), TweetVolume and Twopular.

Measuring positive and negative sentiments is still difficult to achieve via automated measuring services. Scoutlabs service (which is quite expensive) brings the best results in sentiment analysis and trend building. To our best knowledge, the current technologies for automated text meaning recognition are far from perfect. This is why, to guarantee the most accurate results, some expensive reputation management solutions offer manual sentiment measurement.

~ Bonn Appetite

Share this one please

Led by Facebook, Twitter, Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year

According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.

Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging. With 206.9 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009 and 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users spending nearly six hours per month on the site.

U.S. Growth in Average time Person on Facebook and Twitter Outpaces Growth of Overall Category
People in the U.S. continue to spend more time on social networking and blog sites as well, with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009.

Year-over-year growth in average time spent by U.S. users, for both Facebook and Twitter.com, outpaced the overall growth for the category, increasing 200% and 368%, respectively. Among, the top five U.S. social networking sites, Twitter.com continued its reign as the fastest-growing in December 2009 in terms of unique visitors, increasing 579% year-over-year, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009.

However, month-over-month, unique visitors decreased 5%

Australia Leads in Average Time Spent per Person on Social Media Sites in December
When narrowed by individual country, with 142.1 million unique visitors the United States had the largest number of social media and blog users in December, followed by Japan, which had 46.6 million unique visitors during the month.

Australia led in average time per person spent, with the average Australian spending nearly 7 hours on social media sites in December. The United States and the United Kingdom came in a close second and third, with 6 hours and 9 minutes and 6 hours and 8 minutes, respectively.

*Global data takes into account the following countries: U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy

~ Bonn Appetite

Keyword and Search Engines Statistics

All figures are given as percentages and the data is compiled from searches done in the last month from the report date.Current Report: 2009-10-01

Query Size By Country

The following table contains the percentage of single vs. multiple word searches in various languages..

It provides a good indication of the current search behavior and how it differs in key regional markets.

Search Engine Market Share Per Country

The Search Engine Market Share Per Country table shows the percentage of searches performed on each major search engine per country. This can help you determine which search engine you should be targeting for particular countries.

For example: If you are targeting the US, you may only be concentrating on Google, but 15% of searches are performed on Yahoo and you would miss out on this traffic.

Search Engine Market Share By Query Size

The Search Engine Market Share By Query Size table shows the total percentage of searches performed on each major search engine (see the Total row) and the percentage searches that are 1 word terms, 2 word terms, etc. per search engine.

Successful Search Click Percentages Per Engine

This table shows the percentage of searches that generated a click on one of the search results (shown as Organic) or PPC ads (shown as PPC) for each major search engine.

Read what you like into these figures .. one thing is for sure Bing looks slightly Bung.

~ Bonn Appetite

“Goals are great and it is amazing how many people don’t have them setup! Goals allow you to track visitors who convert on your site, so they can provide you with really quick insights with only a few minutes of setup time.”

Not a truer word/s spoken or even written.

Google is a powerhouse of excellent “free” tools to use for your website. There’s also plenty of people out there working Google tools and offering great advice on how to use them the best possible way.

Hence this posting written by Mangold Sengers deserves a good read .. here’s an example

Getting Started: To start out I would suggest setting up a traditional goal, which is simply based on the view of a key page on your site, a thank you page is best.

Start by navigating and completing the steps you expect people to take to get to the thank you page. As you go record the URLs of the pages you visit, all the way to the thank you page.

For the full article go to Google Analytics Goals & Funnels

~ Bonn Appetite

Oh yes, to get started using Google Tools, click on Google Webmaster Tools and get enthused!