So why do people really leave your site? What can you do to lower your bounce rate?

The top reason for immediately leaving a site is lack of relevance of a site’s content in the search user’s eyes. This can simply be because the user entered a very vague/generic term and you rank really well for some generic keywords. Or it can be because you knowingly opt to squeeze your way into ranking well for terms that you are not at expert on (Sounds familiar?). This can also mean that your site may have in depth and good content about the search term but instead of landing on the relevant page you redirect them to a single landing “homepage” where, at a glance, people won’t realize that the info they need is just a few clicks away.

If you know why people are leaving your site you will be able to make necessary changes. So remember – make sure users land on pages with content relevant to their query because in the internet where there are millions of choices no one will be giving you a second glance nor a second chance.

Just like “Contact Us” pages, the “About Us” sections on many websites are often treated like unloved stepchildren. However, you are neglecting “About Us” pages at your own peril – in many cases, the information contained on your about us pages may be a dealmaker or dealbreaker for you.

If a prospective customer wants to find out more about your company, the “About Us” page is the most likely place he or she will turn to. So make sure your prospects find information that will answer their questions about who you are and why they should choose to do business with your company.

What kind of information do you look for when you are investigating a company? If you haven’t come across them before in your career, you definitely want to make sure that the company is legitimate, that they know what they are doing, that they have a track record of successfully serving their customers and how they go about doing business.

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Some of the features of Google Analytics are given below.

Firstly, it is much easier to use. With the special AdWords feature, Google provides more flexibility with the keywords and also provides you immediate ROI results. It also provides good suggestions as to which keywords can make the site or product more attractive. Nextly, it focuses on only those modifications (in your website) which will gain you profits. As the service is available in many languages (English, German, Spanish, Korean, etc.) there is a wider scope for improvement of the site along with the marketing campaign.

As Analytics is powered by the same server which runs Google, it can be reliably used for even top corporate projects. Also, it is very much easy to use. For e.g. instead of purchasing or downloading some software or script, just pasting the tracking code in the web pages directly begins the tracking. Google Analytics also provides Executive summaries of the conversions, traffic directly to you so that you don?t have to hunt for the reports. You can then comfortably compare keywords, revenue & basically, the performance of the website. It also provides you the comparative reports of the performance, for e.g. if you need to compare this weeks performance with last week?s you can very well get the entire tabular data. This service extends so much that you can tally this winter?s reports with last summer?s reports. Google Analytics can also be used for e-commerce websites, as you can compare revenues, arrange & modify campaigns & get a whole view of the metrics.

Another special feature of Google Analytics is the Funnel visualization. Sometimes it so happens that a visitor starts exploring your site but quits in the middle. Mostly, it is due to puzzling or maze-like data or irrelevant information on the site that confuses the visitor. Google tracks the positions of the quitting & hence provides you the opportunity of modifying that particular area of the site. Google also provides you the segmented visitor report, which includes sorting of visitor information by location, by action, by new versus returning visitor, making it easier to compare the keywords and the traffic. Geotargeting helps in tracking the location of the visitor and also gives your information about markets in various areas & their potentials.

Hence, it provides you a better option of the market analysis & gives you more options of setting up or modifying your campaign in order to increase the market value of your website.

According to data and research by Web Side Story, most searchers looking for items on the web enter one- or two-word queries.On average, one- and two-word searched constituted 83 percent of searches; on e-commerce sites, that figure was 91 percent.

Moreover, nearly 12 percent of searches lead to no results – a lost opportunity for marketers; among commerce sites, 8.5 percent of searches led to no results.

The studies examined more than 34 million searches on the sites of 42 Web Side Story customers: 15 e-commerce sites, 13 lead-generation sites and 14 media sites.

Nowadays, with much attention going to social media marketing it is important for SEO companies to offer related services. Google Social Search is one of the ways you can help in your client’s audience analysis and targeting. With social search you can get information on the existing network (customers) of your client. You will be able to find out what really interests these people with their public content (from tweets to blog posts) as well as get leads from the name of the friends in their social circle.

If you haven’t been using social search make sure you update your Google profile (and your clients’ as well) and activate the social search feature. Things you will see as part of search results due to social search would be publicly available web content from your social circle such as blog posts, status updates, tweets, and pictures.

To active Google social search:

1. Make a Google Profile
2. Add links to Twitter, FriendFeed, your blog, etc…
3. Opt-in to the Social Search experiment at google.com/experimental/
4. Search while signed in

Remember you need to be signed in while searching to actually see results from your social circle!

One of the things I like about SEO is that just like life there’s always room for improvement. Change is the constant thing and there’ll always be something to tweak. This year here are some of the things you can include in your SEO resolution list, but before that remember that each resolution must be actionable, measurable and attainable.

Suggested SEO goals for the year:

Focus on analysis – Get stats and study analyze them. Get to REALLY know what works and what doesn’t. If you haven’t been using a stats tracker then you resolution can be something as simple as finally installing one!

Focus on on-page SEO – Before you even write down your on-page SEO goals you will need to evaluate your site for needed improvements. Some common on-page SEO factors overlooked include: broken links, meta descriptions, deep links, etc. What you can do for your new years resolution is to make it your goal to fix these things. Be specific when writing each on-page factor you want to focus on. If you have a very large site you might want to just resolve to add meta descriptions to a certain number of items. This is to keep things measurable and attainable.

Focus on link-building – Don’t just come up with a certain number of incoming links you want to get but start from the very basic. Resolve to get a certain number of leads, resolve to contact and get replies from at least a certain (again be realistic) percentage of the leads. Note that I didn’t say get this number of yeses but just replies since that is out of your control.

To make sure we devote the right amount of effort on the right factors what is needed is the knowledge of the order of importance of each factor. An illustration I find to be very useful is Virginia Nussey’s SEO Hierarchy of Needs (shown above). As you can see broke the factors down into 5 categories: Analytics and Web Intelligence, Keywords and Content, Site Architecture and On-Page Elements, Usability and Web Design, and Link Development.

According to Nussey , analytics implementation and analysis was not included in her pyramid because “as the backdrop for all your Internet marketing efforts. Without data that tracks visitor engagement on the site, there’s no baseline from which to measure the effect of SEO efforts.” This means that before, during, and after the planning and implementation of all your SEO efforts you should constantly monitor and analyze your web stats.

As for the other factors the base of the pyramid only shows that Nussey, like all SEOs still agree that “CONTENT IS KING” but that your content, to be effective SEO-wise should contain necessary keywords. As you can see link development is the least concern, which doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t exert effort to do link building, but that you should only concern yourself with it once the other factors have been taken care of.

1. Number of Technorati Links (0.74)
2. SEOmoz Page Strength (0.60)
3. Number of Links to the Blog URL via Yahoo! Site Explorer (0.56)
4. Number of Links to the Domain via Yahoo! Site Explorer (0.54)
5. Bloglines Subscriptions (0.49)
6. Technorati Rank (0.49)
7. Alexa Rank (0.49)
8. Netcraft Rank (0.43)
9. Newsgator Subscribers (0.39)
10. Compete.com Rank (0.38)
11. Ranking.com Rank (0.36)
12. Google PageRank (0.21)

Results are based on visitor tracking data and other external metrics used from 25 really popular blogs.

So what does this mean for you? Simple. If you want to increase your blog’s traffic work on your Technorati links more than your Google page rank! And oh…get people to subscribe to you blog too.

Last time we talked about how you can find out your SEOmoz Page Strength. Today we’ll be talking about what the results really mean and how SEOmoz came up with it.

First of all according to the SEOmoz website what the tool really does for you are give you:
* The Relative Importance and Visibility of a Webpage
* The Potential Strength and Ability of a Page to Rank in the Search Engines
* Data on Popularity, Links & Mentions of the Page Across the Web

This simply means that they gauge your blog in relation to other blogs and look at the number of your inbound links (just like in Technorati) as well as you page rank in other search engines (like your Google page rank).

This is why we can say that even though SEOmoz came up with the article on traffic prediction the results aren’t biased since as you see their Page Strength Tool is really good in that it rates your blog in a very thorough manner.