I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t have an interest in increasing traffic to their web site or blog. In this article I am going to show you how you can increase traffic using Google Analytics This is a free tool that Google provides to anyone who wants to track web site traffic data. There is no cost to sign up and only the only requirment is that you to register for an account, which is free too.

Gaining traffic to your web site or blog is probably the single most difficult element to achieve. Building a web site or blog indeed has its own share of challenges; however, what commonly happens to many people is that they do finally build a very nice site but fail to get traffic to it. I don’t want this to continue happening to you. So today, I am going to show you a very simple trick that will make a world of difference for you. If all this sounds wonderful to you, then let’s continue on.

How To Prepare Data Using Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics is very simple and this system produces some amazing statistics. Today what we are going to do is discover which individual pages of your blog or web site are scoring the most traffic. The goal in this tutorial is to show you how to find out which pages are hot and how to improve them to make them even HOTTER! But, is that possible, you may ask? Yes! This is very much a possibility and this is exactly what I do. So today, in this article, I am indeed revealing one of my own “personal secrets” in my success with search engine marketing.

Log into your Google Analytics Account. Click on the “Content Tab” found on the left sidebar. By default, the screen will show you results from the last 30 days. That is fine, you can work with this. However, sometimes because I deal in more “seasonal” type of keywords — holiday shopping deals to be specific — I tend to narrow my results by the previous week, as well as the same 30 day period from last year. However, for sake of simplicity, let’s just leave this set to default for now. Later you can experiment with this on your own to figure out which blend is best for you and your site. Please see the above screen shot for example. You can click on this to view it in full size.

Now what we have here is a simple snap shot of the individual pages that have received the most traffic within the last 30 days. You can see this section circled in red in the screen shot above. The next step I do is click on “View Full Report.” If you are following along with me, please do this now. After you click on view full report, you should see a screen that looks like this:

Once again, please click the screen shot above to view in full size. Now this screen shot is called the Google Analytics Top Content Performance Report. It will show you exactly which individual page(s) are receiving the most traffic and why. If you look closely you’ll see little “Arrow” icons to the left of each web page listing. You can click on these and a new page or tab will open up direct to the page that is scoring all the traffic.

You can do that now, if you’d like; however what I would like to do is actually click on the blue underlined text of each page. In this example, I am going to click on the /wal-mart-photo-center-vs-walgreens-photo-center.html listing. At this time, please follow with me and click your #1 most visited web page on your site. When you do, your current web page will update to a new screen. This screen will look something like this:

Once again, please click the above image to view in full size. This is called your Google Analytics Individual Page Content Detail Report. This report will give you quite a bit of information about this paticular web page. The element that we are concerned with is where the traffic is coming come (i.e. social network, search engine, direct referral, etc.).

Now at this time, please click “Entrance Sources.” By doing this, we will then discover where majority of the traffic is coming from. This is VITAL to know, because depending on where the traffic is coming from will dictate how we go about using strategy towards modifying the page to allow us even more traffic in the future. And real quick, what I mean by that is this. If more traffic is coming from the StumbleUpon.com social networks, it would be better for us to promote our StumbleUpon social network profile. If traffic is coming direct from Google, it would be better to promote a mailing list option or a RSS feed subscription sign up form. Please click “Entrance Sources” and you will see a page that looks like this:

Once again, please click the above screen shot to view full size. In this example above, you will see the StumbleUpon.com delievering the most traffic to this page. Second place is Reddit.com, third place is Google. Now, real quick… I want to talk to you about Social Network Traffic. This is VERY temperaory traffic. Meaning you will indeed only get a few days of “Burst Fire” Traffic from social networks. Social network traffic has a very SHORT shelf life.

Depending one how much time you want to invest on each of your individual pages, you very well may want to modify these pages twice. Once, to capialize on the social networking traffic and then once again about a week later to finalize your final edit towards a very fine tuned search engine marketing campaign towards increasing traffic.

With that said, in this example, I am going to bypass doing anything with the “Burst Fire” traffic I am getting to this page and focus on Google. As you can see, Google is the 3rd most popular source of traffic and quickly this will soon become #1.

At this time, please click “BACK” on your browser. What I would like to do now, is show you HOW GOOGLE IS SENDING ME TRAFFIC TO THIS PAGE. Please stay focused becausee this next step is CRUCIAL towards the goal at hand. After clicking back on your browser, click on “ENTRANCE KEYWORDS”. Here is a screen shot of what this page looks like:

Now, once again, please click the above screen shot to view in full size. Ok, folks… this is where the money is at. We have now hit jackpot. What we have in front of us is the “Answers” to HOW GOOGLE IS GIVING US FREE TRAFFIC. This report gives you a complete list of exact phrase keywords that people search for in order to find your web page. There NOW is absolutely ZERO mystery!

What Can We Do With This Data?

This data is worth more than gold! The reason being is the fact that you have totally UNLOCKED keywords and phrases that are delievering you free traffic to your web site. I have said this once, and I will say it again many times, in order for you to be highly successful in the business of search engine marketing, you have GOT to have skills or software that allow you to predict which keywords and phrases are HOT. It is all about keyword predictibility. Nothing less and nothing more.

With this list of keywords and phrases, I can then go back to my web page and better optimize, add to and rebuild the content on this page. Further research of these keywords may show my page being listed on page 3 or page 4 of Google and by going back and enhancing the content and improving my keyword saturation, I can then achieve page 1 on many of these popular search terms.

In my previous post, I mentioned how it is very important is it for a business to start a blog. If you have a blog, you could then add these keyword phrases as tags. Tags are additional pages that can be built with the snap of your fingers and instantly you have additional pages that get indexed in the search engines and are automatically optimized for the keyword or phrase you are trying to target.

I hope that you enjoyed this tip today. Stay tuned as I am going to do it again and show you how you can use Google Insights, yet another free tool by Google, that will once again, give you yet another blend in discovering and predicting keywords and phrases that you can use towards increasing traffic to your web site or blog.

For now, please share your feedback with me by leaving me a comment using the form below. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to help answer them for you.

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I want to start off by saying that I am not an SEO guru and I never will consider myself to be.  I’d be telling a bold face lie if I said that I was. However, what I do consider myself to be is a very well rounded individual who has some very practical experience in search engine marketing. By default, SEO and SEM are two totally difference animals. However, you really can’t have a successful SEM without a successful SEO, unless of course you are paying for your search engine traffic using programs such as AdWords.

So really, for me being SEM savvy, I have to know the basics in SEO in order to find success in my own search engine marketing ventures, that really is just the tip of the iceberg here.  My business is primarily in making money online with Google AdSense. The way I see it, there is really only one way to do that and that is with successful search engine marketing to a web site or blog that has its content monetized with Google AdSense advertisements.

Think about it for a second, you can’t pay for traffic. If you did, the amount of money you’d spend on the traffic would exceed the amount of money you’d get per click. You can’t really drive traffic using social networking sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg, reason being is that these folks are blind to AdSense ads and don’t click. So really what is left? The last remaining option is in scoring free organic traffic in the search engines.

How Do You Score Free Organic Search Engine Traffic?

Ok. So all this makes sense up to this point, right? And I am sure a lot of this you might already understand. However, the missing ingredient that you may have been searching for but possibly failing to discover is in understanding how you can score all this free and wonderful organic search engine traffic that everyone says is so cool and amazing.

Many people talk about Google and how much traffic you can score by having your content ranked in their index. At times, the news can even get old and annoying. Really though, the overall frustration might not be caused from the people who communicate the message about search engines but rather in their inability to successfully provide you with a road map that leads you down a path of success with leaning how to rank better in the search engines.

Maybe I can help fix that for you. For me, as mentioned above, I am pretty much a SEM AdSense junkie. If you want to sum it up, I make quite a bit of money using Google AdSense. How I do that is in rounding up massive amounts of traffic to pages that are monetized with Google’s AdSense ads. They way I do that is in what I call, “doing a search engine market weather forecast.” In other words, part of my job is predicting what the weather will be like on search engines. Unlike a weather man who predicts rain, in my business I predict keywords.

What Is Keyword Prediction?

Pretty much as it states, keyword prediction is the process of attempting to predict certain keywords or keyword phrases that are going to be hot in the search engines. Within that comes a second element of having to also predict whether or not a predicted keyword can be targetable. What I mean to say by that is when you come to the realization that a certain phrase indeed will become hot in the search engines, will you be able to successfully compete and rank well above and beyond the existing as well as soon to be competition?

How Do You Predict The Weather?

Back in the day, a weather man would predict the weather based off sheer gut feeling and what some would call a 6th sense. In many ways a search engine marketer is the same. For me, I believe that I have a natural talent to predict weather patterns in search engines. Really though, my 6th sense is nothing more than just plain common sense. To predict traffic patterns in search engines you have to have awareness of events that are taking place in the real world. News, sales, commercials and practical questions are to name just a few.

From my generation, the Internet was coined as the Information Super Highway. Meaning that the primary use for the Internet was in seeking information. Today in this digital universe we call the Internet, it has evolved into so much more. The Internet today is combined with the desire to seek information mixed with the desire to reach out and expand with the world socially.

In the business of making money online, for me, I have to closely separate these two elements and focus on the old school information seeking aspect. Doing so gives me the predictability factor. It isn’t hard to predict the weather of search engines. Simply listen to the news, watch TV commercials, and typically listen to what the general population have as common and everyday problems. In doing that, you’ll likely increase your ability to target massive popular keywords to use towards targeting traffic by way of publishing content that provides information that people seek.

What About Keyword Prediction Software?

Yes, there is software available that can help you with this. However, with that you still need to acquire a 6th sense in predicting the weather. But indeed, there are tools available to people who want to target keywords that have a high search count while also yielding a very low level of competition. In fact, one of the great things about SEOHosting.com is that they provide the general public with some amazing and totally free tools towards helping you predict the weather of search engines.

If you visit, the SEO Tools section, you’ll see a banner advertisement for a program called WordTracker. This is a wonderful program that will give you many tools towards finding success in search engine marketing by finding and targeting very rich and popular search phrases and keywords that have a super low amount of competition.

WordTracker isn’t free, but SEOHosting.com is an offical affliate on WordTracker and you can score a 7 day free trial. I for one have used the 7 day free WordTracker trial and have fully evaluated their services. I like WordTracker and feel that it is an excellent option for those who depend on scoring free organic traffic from the search engines.