Many marketers and site managers don’t make it past the dashboard page in their Google Analytics account. A few minutes and only a handful of clicks reveals that there is so much more information to gain by taking a deeper dive into Google Analytics.

The dashboard provides basic metrics related to site use and traffic sources — Number of Visits, Time on Site, Bounce Rate, amount of Traffic From Search Engines and Referring Sites, etc. But very little of what you can learn from that first page is actionable on its own. In order to gain any insights and understand what to do with the data, one needs to go further than the dashboard.

The beauty of Google Analytics isn’t just that anyone can get robust site analytics for free, but that the platform empowers you to uncover crucial information that can be analyzed and acted upon to dramatically enhance the performance of your site and improve ROI.

Below are some metrics to examine that can reveal site trends and inspire simple changes to your site that can lead to measurable rewards.

Referring Keywords

You may be surprised to learn exactly which keywords are working for your site. You may discover that the keywords you thought your content was positioned to capture traffic from aren’t bringing the number of visitors you expected. Use the Referring Keyword report to identify which keywords to place more emphasis on in your content. Use the same report to find keywords that you have unexpectedly strong exposure for and develop content to further solidify your hold on those terms.

Time on Page and Bounce Rate

The site average Bounce Rate on Google Analytics’ Dashboard is only so helpful. Since every page is included in this number (i.e., an average,) the outliers will inflate and deflate your results. Therefore, Time on Page and Bounce Rate should be analyzed on a page-by-page basis. Some pages just don’t have the right content or provide a compelling reason to retain a visitor for very long. Identify your underperforming pages and test solutions to improve your visitors’ on-page behavior.

Exit Pages

Examining Exit Page reports will show you if your site is retaining traffic and if users leaving your site before they complete a goal. If the Exit Page results are particularly high for a page, consider developing new copy that is better tailored to the keywords that are delivering visitors to that page.

Navigation Summary

The Navigation Summary reveals which pages your visitors visited before and after visiting a particular page. This is especially helpful to know as it reveals which information that visitor has already absorbed which can give you a clue as to the best content to offer next. These results can provide you with the information necessary to identify a page that best serves as a logical next step for visitors. Leading your users to a page with complimentary content extends the visit in a meaningful way and increases the likelihood of producing a conversion.

Dig Into Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information that enables marketers to learn how visitors interact with their website. This information goes to waste if it isn’t explored to its fullest and acted on to position your website to reach its potential.

Web crawlers are the “bots” sent out by search engines to review web sites in order to rank them.

Many sites and their videos simply don’t get reviewed (“crawled”) because there are technical problems preventing the crawlers from being able to review their pages. But what if you could use video sitemaps to help the Web crawlers do their jobs more efficiently and easily? Could that result in better search engine rankings? The answer is an emphatic yes, and here’s how you can help those crawlers to boost your rankings.

Mapping the Web

The way to instruct search engines to give you better rankings is to create an XML sitemap.

Google came up with the XML sitemap to allow site owners to create a sort of “menu” for the crawlers, and make their reviews of a site’s pages quicker and more accurate.

With the increasing use of video online, it was clear that similar instructions needed to be given to Web crawlers about where to find and index a site’s video content.

Enter the Video Sitemap

Google created the Video sitemap protocol as an extension to the XML sitemap protocol, finally allowing text and meta data for each video to be indexed, and allowing those videos to be returned for relevant searches. These XML formats have been adopted by both Bing and Yahoo!

The Uphill Battle in Hosting Video Anywhere but YouTube

Sample search results page showing embedded YouTube video thumb (click for larger image)

Frequently, Google results pages contain YouTube videos – they just started showing up about a year ago, with video thumbnails being displayed fairly high up on the search results pages. It’s obvious that Google’s ownership of YouTube has given that video service a clear advantage, because their search results pages are set up to recognize and embed the video URLs. Sites that embed them have videos appearing in search results without needing to create a video sitemap.

If you have videos that are hosted on your own server, or on another streaming hosted service, such as Vbrick, Vzaar, Brightcove, or SproutVideo, it is absolutely critical that you create an XML video sitemap to allow your video content to be reviewed and ranked by the crawlers. Otherwise, you may not be getting the full value from your video-hosting budget.

XML – Tagging the Web

An XML sitemap gives the crawler a few simple pieces of information, each tagged with an opening and closing tag that describes what it is.

For example, here’s a typical XML sitemap entry:

<url>
<loc>http://www.strategicdomain.com/blog/</loc>
<lastmod>2011-04-26T10:29:01+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>
</url>

Understanding XML Entries

There are four basic parts to each URL entry:

1. Location
2. Last Modification Date
3. Change Frequency
4. Priority

You can see that a URL entry (“Uniform Resource Locator”) is made up of

1. <loc> – “location” – Where is the page?
2. <lastmod> – “Last Modification Date” – When was the page last updated
3. <changefreq> – “Change Frequency” – how often is the page updated?
4. <priority> – How important is this page in your site? If the crawler only has a few brief seconds for your site, you need to let it know that a “1″ means most important (usually your homepage), and a”0.1″ means that it’s not critical (Privacy Policy)

Google’s Video sitemap specification uses those XML tags, and adds some important enhancements unique to video.

XML Video Sitemap

The Video Sitemap now ups the ante with the following entries:

1. Play page URL
2. Title
3. Description
4. Thumbnail image URL
5. Tags

Let’s see how it will now look:

<url>
<loc>http://www.mysite.com/videos/1haha1-video-page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:title>San Diego Zoo Panda Bears at Play</video:title>
<video:description>Getting a good laugh out of the cute panda bears at play at the San Diego Zoo</video:description>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.mysite.com/thumbs/1haha1.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:tag>panda bears</video:tag>
<video:tag>san diego zoo</video:tag>
<video:tag>cute animal videos</video:tag>
</video:video>
</url>

So we still have <url> and <loc>, but we now have a few other items:

<video:video>

Obviously, this tells the crawler that it’s dealing with a video.

The rest are all fairly self-explanatory:

<video:title>
<video:description>

Both of these should be written with target keyword phrases in mind.

<video:thumbnail_loc> (thumbnail location – this allows people to see an image in search results to click on to view the video)

Tags are separated each with their own <tag> opening and </tag> closing statement – ideally, these tags will echo and support (but not overly repeat!) the keywords/phrases introduced in the title and description.

Putting these tags in correctly, and formatting the video sitemap will go to great lengths to boost the search engine transparency and findability not just of your videos, but for your entire site. Keep in mind, if you have a large number of videos, it is a great deal of work. It’s also more of an art than a science, in that the titles, descriptions, and keyword tags have to be crafted uniquely for each page and each video individually.

It’s well worth the effort, however. The crawlers will now know that your site has videos, and where they are. If you’ve tagged them properly, and set up your video sitemap correctly, your videos can now be considered “search engine optimized,” and will finally start appearing in search results for the right keywords.

Are you using hosted video on your site? Are you looking to boost your viewership? Leave a comment below.

A synched, search engine optimized page theme harmonizes your page's content, title and Meta data

As search engine bots become more intelligent and algorithms are tweaked more frequently, it is more important than ever to have the right SEO plan in place. You want to be sure that your site offers the right combination of code and content so search engines can most effectively index and rank your site.

Keywords have long been one of the most basic elements to install as part of a successful SEO campaign, but keywords have not played an important role in search engine algorithms for some time. Ranking algorithms are designed to scan content and interpret a page’s target user without using Meta data keywords as a guide.

Today, when it comes to affecting your site’s ranking, your site’s content is king.

Advanced search engine algorithms are allowing search engines to place less emphasis on Meta data and more on page content. This means marketers need to focus on calibrating each page correctly to give search engines a clear theme, concept or phrase to focus on for optimal rank. SEO practitioners refer to this part of the craft as “Page Theming.”

Instead of idiosyncratic code and keywords, Page Theming communicates with the search engine algorithm in a more holistic way. The algorithm analyzes each site page’s Title tag, H1 tag and published content. A page’s content, title and Meta data have to be in sync to effectively communicate the key terms and phrases you want to rank for.

Understanding how leading search engines continue shift emphasis in their algorithms is important for anyone who wants their website to rank high. The search engines, and Google in particular, want to be sure that a search engine visitor is highly satisfied with their results. The search engines know that their success relies on satisfied customers. To achieve this, they will continue to improve their algorithms so that their top ranking sites effectively reflect the search queries. Matching search queries to Meta data keywords no longer meets that need. Page themes reflecting the holistic nature of the page’s content accomplishes this goal.

And while getting other, external sites to link back to your content is not always certain, and doing so abusively can get you banned from Google’s index, there is one important SEO technique you can use that’s completely within your control – it’s linking, internally, within your own site’s relevant posts, pages, and content.

There are three important reasons to do this:

• Usability - Linking relevant content internally allows people to get more information, particularly to linked words and concepts that are better explained at greater length on other pages
• Passing Page “Authority“ – Google sees pages that are older, more established, and more linked to as having more equity, and therefore, as worthy of ranking higher for certain keywords. You can pass that “authority” from one page in your site to another by linking to it
• Anchor Linking Keywords for Equity - In Google’s eyes, the specific keywords that are linked, and the page they link to, will also play a large role in how well those pages rank for those keyword phrases

For these reasons and more, an internal (also known as “deep”) site linking strategy is a key fundamental tool that any site owner/manager should spend time on a regular basis doing.

A Basic Internal Linking Strategy for Sites

As noted above, when linking internally within your site, your goal will be to link specific keywords to relevant content. This will reinforce those pages as having value and authority for the keywords represented.

Anchor Link Text is Crucial

In our experience with working with clients, we’ve found the most linked-to words throughout the Web are “click here.” Beginners and most corporate people typically relegate the link text itself to a generic “click here,” unaware of the critical importance of the linked “anchor” words.

For example, clients often come to us with page links that look like this:

To read a complete breakdown of content marketing ideas sure to bring large amounts of traffic and recognition, click here.

While Google can read and index your text, the only link authority and clear ranking signal that’s being passed from the current page to the linked page is the text labeled “click here.”

The difference in the value of this anchor link text should be immediately apparent:

Click here to read a complete breakdown of content marketing ideas sure to bring large amounts of traffic and recognition.

The search engines now have a chance to understand that the keywords “breakdown, content marketing, ideas, traffic” are associated with the linked page.

As with most tools and techniques, it requires balance- you don’t want to link every word. We’ve come up with a rough estimate of around one link per 100 words, or five per 500 words, will improve both your users’ experience, and your search engine optimization. And don’t “spam” by repeatedly linking the same word to the same location many times. Once is enough.

Key takeaway: Internal site linking is one of the main on-site techniques to build internal SEO value. Whenever linking, put some thought into what a user might want more information about, and then crafting a relevant phrase to link from.

Do you regularly go back and link your new pages and posts back to relevant older material? Have you done this, and had success? Let me know in the comments below…

Image: Oslo, Norway subway map via Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/magnetbox/4575030/

Is your PPC campaign making or costing you money?

We often see paid keyword campaigns (PPC) not delivering leads that marketers expect. Using well managed keyword campaigns, ROI can be dismal even with many clicks being generated. A quick check of your website analytics could help uncover the problem.

First marketing issue is your PPC bounce rate. We like to work in the below 20% bounce rate range. Higher rates indicate that the destination page does not connect with what enticed them to click in the first place. If the arrival page does not quickly connect with the just seen and clicked on text ad, the prospect will quickly click away from your site (i.e., “bounce”). The most common error we see with our clients’ unoptimized PPC campaigns is that they direct all clicks back to their site’s homepage. Few homepages connect the arrival page with the clicked-on keyword message. You will need to set up conversion tracking to monitor keyword clicks to the site. If the bounce rates are too high, it means that you’re not connecting the dots for your readers, and your marketing expenses and opportunity are lost.

Solving the problem can be as easy as either linking the PPC ad to more relevant pages within the site’s existing structure, or specifically creating landing pages that more closely connect to your keyword ad messages in your visitor’s minds. Really great landing pages can convert business by themselves. They deliver the clear “call to action” about your product or service and build excitement, provide more information, outline benefits or features and close the sale. Optimizing these landing pages can generate organic search traffic, increase quality score, and drive more ROI to search marketing.

Marketers who have failed or have limited PPC results should re-examine their programs and go beyond keyword selection to address the entire PPC conversion cycle and all its marketing points. Understanding the entire PPC process can take a paid keyword program from an expense to a ROI superstar.

Google Analytics – One great tool for better SEO

The best place to start a search engine optimization program is with a comprehensive review of your website analytics. For Strategic Domain, knowing the search terms that delivered visitors to your site and what information they were looking for are the hidden jewels for SEO among all the data points.

Reviewing information from services like Google Analytics can provide SEO insights about what keywords and which search engines bring visitors to your website. It helps you understand the value of each keyword by how productive they are in generating traffic, achieving goals or generating acquisitions. You can use these words as the basis for development of related keyword phrases for content development, search engine optimization and paid keyword campaigns.

As part of your analysis, you need to determine what happened once these keywords have been used to reach your website. The largest driver of visits could also produce the highest bounce rates. The analytics should be reviewed for time on site, content that was viewed, and related pages or links that were accessed. These keywords can also help determine the need to have long tail keywords in your search engine optimization and marketing mix.

Just as important to search engine optimization is your internal site search. This provides clues to what people are searching for on your Web site. By reviewing these terms you can determine what keyword phrases to target and generate additional site visits. Equally important is learning if your visitors are finding the information they seek or is that content missing from your website.

This is a first step for SEO that is filled with valuable knowledge about your website and how it is interacting with search engine visitors. Strategic Domain’s blog will provide more in future posts about how website analytics are your best friend in helping to plan and understand search engine optimization.