Joining their series allows you to ask questions and offer a thumbs up or down vote on other questions already asked. The questions with the most thumbs up votes gets bumped to the top of the list. Each week, Avinash and Nick address and answer the most popular questions. While they haven’t been exactly addressing these questions once a week, they have at least been addressing them.
That said, if you’re really looking to buckle down and learn the In’s and Out’s of Google Analytics, I totally suggest tuning in to this video Q’s and A’s offered by Avinash and Nick. Here is a recap of the items that have been addressed to date.
Web Analytics Q & A With Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski: Part One
Strategies for non-bounced non-converted visitors (Macro vs. Micro conversion)
Ways to report total number of keywords over time
Benefits to tracking transactions as conversion goals
Tracking unique visitors to specific web pages
Path analysis for keyword reports — why it’s bad and what to do instead
How Google Analytics can be used on affiliate sites
How site owners can exclude themselves from being tracked by Google Analytics
How to properly track sites that reside on different domains but use a shopping cart on a different, common, site (cross domain tracking)
You’re going to want to view the blog post that correlates with the video because they include links to the resources discussed in the video tutorial.
Once again, if you’re looking to finally gain a better understanding of Google Analytics and how the program can help you, I suggest tuning in and listening to what Avinash and Nick say in these videos. While they said they’re going to be posting new videos weekly, it hasn’t been consistent. But that’s ok! I am pleased that they are doing them. That said, to assure that you don’t miss any of their new videos, I recommend subscribing to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel. Doing so, will get you a lot of great information in addition to the videos Avinash and Nick are providing.
You might be interested in learning how to become a better webmaster. Fortunately for you, Google has created a service called Google Webmaster Tools. It’s a free service which allows webmasters to check the indexing status and optimize the search visibility of their websites. Specifically you can use Google Webmaster Tools to check and set the Googlebot crawl rate, view lists of internal and external pages that link to your site, discover which keywords people search to find your site, view stats about how Google indexes your site, submit a sitemap.xml file, generate and maintain a robots.txt file, and set your preferred domain to www or non-www. If you haven’t started using Google Webmaster Tools, you need start today.
That said, if you’re interested in taking your first step towards becoming a better webmaster, I recommend reading the Google Webmaster Tools blog and subscribing to the RSS Feed. Secondly, I recommend subscribing to their YouTube Channel and investing time towards watching their videos. Just announced today, they have 154 videos with nearly 11 hours of footage generating one million views.
In celebration of this achievement, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, honored a lost bet by allowing the Webmaster Central team to shave his head and upload the video to their channel.
It happens that Matt Cutts has been using Google Moderator to compile a list of the most popular questions about how to become a better webmaster. The end result was over 100 videos uploaded into the Webmaster Central YouTube channel in a play-list called Matt Cutt’s Grab Bag. If you’re serious about wanting to become a better webmaster, then I recommend that you invest time into watching these videos. That said, what advice, tips, and tricks do you have towards becoming a better webmaster? What are some other resources that can help too? Share what you know with everyone in the comments below.
Google Analytics is a free traffic analysis program offered by Google which is capable of generating detailed statistics about the people who visit your website. Google Analytics (abbreviated GA) can track visitors from most all referring sources including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click campaigns, email newsletters, and clicks from links within PDF files.
While GA is packed full of features and functionality, initially the program can seem intimidating and daunting to use. I’d like to share a few resources with you that may help lessen the overwhelming feeling of not knowing exactly how to use the program, and what its capable of doing.
The first thing you should do before anything else is subscribe to the RSS feed of the Google Analytics blog. If you’re using Twitter, you should follow them as well. The Google Analytics team seem to have put more effort into their branding compared to other official Google blogs.
You may notice that their top horizontal navigation is seamless between their blog and their education, home, product, and support pages. A matching custom orange background and their recognizable avatar have been added to their Twitter page, giving it a nice and professional appearance. Clearly a lot of energy, time, and work have gone into the Google Analytics blog, website, and corresponding social network pages.
The second thing you should do is subscribe to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel and immediately start watching the videos. At the moment, they have a total of 36. If you feel like it will take a long time to watch them, consider how long it took to create them, and also consider what the purpose is behind making them. I also recommend subscribing to their YouTube Channel RSS feed so that when you do catch up watching the videos, you’ll be able to watch the current ones quickly as they become available.
The last thing I recommend doing if you want to learn more about using Google Analytics is to join their Google Moderator series called Web Analytics Question “Hour” With Avinash & Nick. If you don’t know what Google Moderator is, no problem, I wrote a post explaining about it, and how you can use it yourself to improve your own blog or website. Joining their series allows you to ask questions and offer a thumbs up or down vote on other questions already asked. The questions with the most thumbs up votes gets bumped to the top of the list. Each week, Avinash and Nick address and answer the most popular questions.
As you can see, Google Analytics is important. It can be beneficial for you, and Google feels it’s even more essential that you learn how to use it properly. That’s why they have gone to such extents to help you learn. That said, what other advice, tips, or tricks do you know about? Also, what are some other resources that you know about that can help people learn even more about Google Analytics? Share them with everyone else in the comments below.
Knowing and understanding what people think when they visit your blog or website, and what impressions they have is critical towards building, growing, and maintaining your site. As a site owner, it’s a good idea to open lines of communication with your site visitors. Doing so, enables you to receive vital feedback, which in return can help your site maintain forward direction.
Last year Google released a service called Google Moderator. Matt Cutts made an entry on his blog about it, and six months later the White House even found a use for it. Since then, not much else has been said about the service, nor have many people been utilizing it. Personally though, I think Google Moderator is an excellent tool, and one that you should put to use on your site right away. It’s an excellent instrument where everyone has the opportunity to submit ideas, ask questions, or even offer suggestions. From there, individuals can vote the submitted feedback up or down, which will then display the most popular topics based on total vote count.
Google Moderator is a perfect system for finding out what people think about your blog or website, what you can do or stop doing to enable growth, and what topics or questions could be answered or covered towards continuing to help people that visit your site. All in all, it’s all about feedback, and using Google Moderator is an excellent way to get the best feedback from people who visit your site.
What’s more, Google Moderator can be used to create a feedback system as simple or as intricate as you want. It can be a system that allows site visitors to express their opinions about things, or if you’re a blogger, it can be used as a system that enables you to receive material for covering future topics. To get a general idea of how to use Google Moderator, check out the series called Ask a Google Engineer. Try creating your own series and share it here with everyone in the comments.
Google suggests that it might be worth your effort to request to have links removed that are pointing from low grade sites to yours. The easiest way this can be done is by searching the site for a “Contact Us” page, email address, or a phone number. If none can not be found then a Whois search can be performed. A Whois search will typically return the contact information of the site owner. Sometimes site owners block their contact information with a private registration. If that’s the case, then it may be possible to pass a message to the owner through the hosting company.
Of course if it’s not easy to contact the owners of the sites linking to yours, then it might not be worth the time invested. On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they suggests that efforts be made towards having links removed; however, if there are sites less than desirable linking to yours, Google does offer some reassurance by stating that they have 200 factors when it comes to determining relevancy in the search results. I don’t recommend investing time towards contacting site owners requesting the removal of links. Instead, I suggest investing time towards increasing the number of higher quality links pointing to your site.
Controllable things are another thing that should be taken into consideration. Once again, Google points focus on their design, content, technical, and quality guidelines. Google implies that they understand that certain things fall outside your control. With that, explain that emphasis is given things that webmasters can control such as having a well maintained site with high quality and original content with an excellent linking structure. And I agree. I can’t think of a single popular site that I would consider to be a terrible site. I am sure they exist, and I am sure you can leave a comment pointing me to a few; but all in all, in my opinion, all popular sites I have seen, fall within these guidelines.
My advice to site owners is to maintain a clean, high quality, and organized site that genuinely interests people. Don’t invest time into removing low quality backlinks and only invest some time into high quality backlink molding. I think it’s more important to spread awareness about your site, instead. If people like what they see, then they’ll come back many times over, and also they’ll link to it as well. Additionally, encouraging people to share information is very helpful too.
So what do you think? Do you think that it’s worth your time to remove low quality backlinks? What about spending time towards backlink molding? And what about time spent marketing and promoting your site? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
