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.

We’ve been talking about RSS feeds and what it can do for your website. We know that incorporating RSS feeds into your site results in more frequent visits from search engine spiders and thus leads to faster indexing.

Have you realized however that by syndicating your RSS feeds successfully you can achieve the same results? How so?

If you have subscribers when a search engine spider crawls your subscriber’s site (assuming that your subscriber incorporated YOUR feed into his own website) the feeds will of course contain a link back to your website. Once the spider follows the link it will notice your website and so index your site as well. Now if you have a lot of subscribers the chances of being crawled through back links are much greater. In addition to this the spider will of course notice the plentiful back links, which will result not only in faster indexing but in a higher page rank.

To get noticed fast one thing you can do is to subscribe to your own feed using Google Reader, MyYahoo, and MyMsn accounts. Surely the three search engines will at least pay attention to their own services.

The reason for this is that according to Advertising Age, a consulting group, “moms control $4.3 trillion of the $5.9 trillion U.S. consumer spending total, or 73% of household spend[ing].” Ruth Nightengale of Searchviews then expounded on what this means for internet marketers, including search and social media marketers, since moms are very much active in the internet.

According to Ms Nightengale this means that search marketers should learn target moms by paying attention to long tail search terms. She then discusses the various search habits of moms (read her article for the full discussion) including not going beyond the landing page (so make sure your landing pages have the info they need!) and not looking below the top results on the very first page of SERPs (so you need to get your ranking up!).

For those who still hasn’t made it to the top of SERPs the good news is that moms are also very much active in social sites such as Facebook and targeted social mom sites such as BabyCenter. Because of this ad placement for moms can be very much effective, especially if you offer coupons online. In fact according to Ms. Nightengale moms look for coupons online all the time and “are discovering new brands and products this way with 71% saying that they will buy a brand twice after trying it once with an online coupon.”

So remember, this year aim for the moms and hopefully you’ll see results in conversion and not just traffic.

Make yourself popular by making connections
Whether you like it or not, the blogosphere can sometimes be akin to high school, where popularity is something important. The more people like you (or your blog, rather), the more visits you will get. The more visits you get, the more word will get around about your blog and the more popular you will become. It’s a cycle – like the chicken and the egg. How do you make yourself popular? Write great content in your blog and network. (We will talk more about networking in the future.)

Interact with your readers
This is actually related to the previous tip. You need to make your readers feel that they are wanted and appreciated. You can do this by creating all sorts of venues to interact with them. Reply to your comments all the time. Use a chat box. Leave comments in their blogs.

Happy link baiting!

Put yourself in your readers’ shoes…
…and think about what will make them want to share your blog post. It is much like the news, really. You have to find something that will encourage talk, talk, and more talk. I like to think about this as something similar to what goes on at my office. We do tend to talk a lot and when we do, we find stories that we like to share and that others would like to hear AND share with other people as well. That is how you should approach your post. Think about making your readers want to talk about your post and share it with their readers.

Market your posts
Sometimes, your link bait success just might need a little push. You can do this by targeting particular blogs that you think will be interested in your post. You can send the bloggers a short e-mail letting them know about what you have written and saying that they might be interested in sharing it with their own readers. I know that this very much like shameless plugging but hey, as long as you do not do it all the time (once a month or even less would be acceptable in my eyes), it should be alright.

Bloglines is useful for both ordinary bloggers and the more technical web developers.

Ordinary Bloggers

For ordinary bloggers we have already mentioned the uses of Bloglines in the previous two posts especially when we spelled out the key features. Blogger who use bloglines to publish their own blogs will find that they also don’t need to worry about generating their own feeds. Bloglines automatically does this IN MULTIPLE SYNDICATION FORMATS so that whether your users prefer using RSS 2.0 or OPML you won’t need to worry about supporting these formats since it is automatically done for you. And lastly, as I’ve mentioned in the Introduction to Bloglines, one of the nicest perks it gives is that it helps increase traffic to your blog by allowing other users to search for your blog and by helping market your blog through subscription recommendations.

Many people have blogged through repetition, a mediocre way of trying to boost their ratings in search engines. Pathetic practice as it may, it still stands that people will forever look for the best sites to visit and patronize. There are many talented bloggers out there who do blog sensible content. Unfortunately a large chunk of them could care less about being at the top as they are too busy composing useful content for people to reflect upon once they are found.

We’ve been talking about how incorporating RSS feeds into your website can help your SEO efforts. However, generating your own RSS feeds is also equally important. RSS feeds after all were meant to get YOUR content out to your readers on a regular basis. Sure incorporating an RSS feed to your website is pretty nifty and very useful but you also need to syndicate your own content. After all you can’t live on other site’s feeds alone.

Generating an RSS feed will of course make life a lot easier for your readers who will of course then become your subscribers. Marketing and promotion-wise though RSS feeds also make plenty of sense since

1. It makes it so much easier for readers to get hold of your content without the hassle of checking back with your website.

2. It makes syndication easier by especially if you submit your RSS feeds automatically.

3. A lot of people post RSS feeds on their own site, which could lead to incoming links if they do use your feeds.