Google Analytics is a powerful, and free, analytics tool, but in many ways very limited out-of-the-box.  Often, I find myself wanting to get a better understanding of how users find a website, and referral URLs are a good way to do that.  So, if you’ve ever seen a referral come up in Google Analytics and thought “I wish I had the full string”, here’s a filter you can add to do just that!

How To Get A Full Referral URL In Google Analytics

First, you need to add an advanced filter to your profile.  To do this, you need to go to the “Filter Manager” on the bottom right corner of your “Analytics Settings” page:

This will show you all of your current filters for your website profiles.  To add a new filter, simply click “Add Filter” in the top right hand corner:

Here is where the fun begins!  What we’re going to do now is build a filter that catches all of the referring URLs (query strings and all) and drop it into the often unused “User Defined” report.  Keep in mind, if you are using custom User variables, you may want to make a copy of your current profile to apply this filter to, as it will overwrite any current reports!

So, first off, you’ll want to name your filter in the “Filter Name:” field.  I used “Full Referral URL”.  Then, in the “Filter Type” click the “Custom Filter” radio button.  At the very bottom of the filter types is a radio button that says “Advanced”.  Choose this one.  Below these radio buttons, you will see “Field A -> Extract A”, a dropdown menu and an empty field.  Here, you want to choose “Referral” from the dropdown menu, and you want to add (.*) to the field.  (.*) is a regular expression term that is a wildcard, and will capture everything after the Referral URL (Google Analytics truncates this by default).

Leave the “Field B -> Extract B” blank.  We’re not constructing two fields here.. just one.  Next, our filter requires an output type.  So, in the dropdown menu next to “Output To -> Constructor” choose “User Defined” and add $A1 to the empty field.  What this does is takes the Field A extraction we just did and assigns it to the “User Defined” report.  All that’s left is to require Field A and Override Output Field in the options below the constructors.  When you are done, the filter should look as follows:

Last step is to assign this filter to an available profile, then wait…

After Google has updated your analytics data (I’d recommend waiting 24hrs), you can go to Vistors, and under the User Defined report, you’ll find a report that outputs the full referral URL.  It’ll look something like this:

This report is a quick and handy way to find out the exact links users are finding your site with!

For expert consultation, business intelligence and analytics installation, contact Thirdi!

Mobile web browsing isn’t what it used to be!  As smartphones dominate the mobile marketplace, WML web pages no longer carry as much weight and significance as they once did, and with new iPhone and BlackBerry browsers displaying CSS and JavaScript, the landscape has changed.  What hasn’t changed, conversely, is what people use mobile browsers for, which is quick information retrieval while on the go.  Understanding mobile browsing limitations can help you optimize your pages, especially if you’re a brick and mortar store.  Optimization of the mobile version of your site can be a good method of catching this traffic.

First, if you’re say, a resturaunt or a flower shop, chances are people who navigate to your site on a mobile phone probably aren’t doing so to read the extensive history of your establishment, they’re trying to find your contact information.  Display it prominently in the header of your home page, ideally using the hCard microformat.  The <tel> tag on many mobile browsers also acts as a dial function, so a user can just click on the link and call your business immediately.  This is a powerful, and often overlooked conversion metric.

Second, remember that mobile users don’t have a mouse.  Make sure your navigation can be easily accessed via a scroll wheel or a touch screen.  And that 8pt font that you think looks so stylish on your desktop site?  Not so stylish on a small phone screen!

Lastly, you may be compelled to set up a redirect forcing anyone on a mobile device who navigates to your desktop page to your mobile site.  Don’t!  Forcing users anywhere is bad usability, and maybe they want to visit your desktop site to read the extensive history of your establishment.  Instead, consider adding a link to the mobile version of from your desktop site, ideally near the top of the page.

With the introduction of blended results in universal search in 2007, the result pages of Google have become less utilitarian and more like Yahoo or MSN (sorry… Bing). Today a user can expect to see news results, blog posts, video results, and images for any given query.  What this means for Search Engine Optimization is a result page in Google carries more than just blue links and a short description of your site, but also your image & video content.  So, it is important to know how to optimize for these results as well.

Today, we’ll be discussing image optimization.  Image optimization is often overlooked in most SEO strategies, which is unfortunate, as not only is image search an additional traffic stream, it is also another method in helping define the semantic understanding of a page.  If you have a page about different breeds of dogs, for example, you might want to include photos of each different breed.  If those images are optimized properly, it adds keyword weight to the page, and gives a visual representation of the supporting subject matter.  Here are some tips to optimize your images.

File Name Conventions

When naming an image file, the worst thing you can do is to keep the default name:

ie.  IMG00436.jpg

A better solution would be to rename the file to something more descriptive of the subject matter of the image.

ie.  two-dogs-running.jpg

Use dashes or underscores to separate the words (not: twodogsrunning.jpg), and keep the file names relatively short and concise.  Keyword stuffing a file name is very spammy (the-dog-q-tip-running-down-the-streets-of-vancouver.jpg = bad).

<img alt>

The image alternate text markup should always be implemented when displaying an image.  It helps define and describe what the image is for users who do not support images (via screen readers) and it also becomes the anchor text when an image is linked to a different page.  Again, be concise and descriptive with your alt tags, don’t be too spammy.

<img src=”two-dogs-running” alt=”photo of two dogs running” />

Captions and Supporting Content

Adding captions to an image is also useful, as it gives context to image when wrapped by surrounding text.  Newspapers have used this model for years, and its good practice.  Its also useful to ensure that the image is surrounded by content discussing the content of the image.  So, if your text is about poodle dogs, be sure your image is appropriately tagged and in or around your text.

Today we’ll be looking at a very basic, but very important, search engine ranking factor that sometimes gets overlooked: linking and anchor text.  Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.  Often, it appears highlighted or underlined and usually stands out from regular content in some useable fashion.  For example:

Software Company

In the HTML code, this link is written out like so:
<a href=”http://www.thirdi.com”>Software Company</a>

Anchor text is used as a signifier to a user to show where they will be taken to if they click on the link.  It also acts as a signifier to search engines the topic of the page it is pointing to, and thusly which keywords it should rank for.  When linking internally or when building a website’s navigation, it is important that the anchor text you use is indicative of the page it is pointing to.

Some Dos and Don’ts

DO use anchor text that is descriptive of the page it is pointing to:

Search Engine Marketing
<a href=”http://www.thirdi.com/what-we-do/search-engine-marketing”>Search Engine Marketing</a>

DO use targeted keywords in your anchor text:

Software Development & eCommerce
<a href=”http://www.thirdi.com/what-we-do”> Software Development & eCommerce </a>

DON’T dilute your keywords by using too many words in your anchor text:

Thirdi.com is a software development, eCommerce solutions and Internet Marketing company!
<a href=”http://www.thirdi.com”> Thirdi.com is a software development, eCommerce solutions and Internet Marketing company!</a>

DON’T have more outbound links than you have content to support it!

DON’T use “click here” as anchor text!

One of the greatest tools Google, Yahoo and MSN has offered to site owners is their Webmaster Tools, a somewhat comprehensive look at what a search engine knows about a website.  Out of the big three, Google has the best offering, showing nifty things like which pages are 404ing, redirect loops, top search queries, inbound links, and much more.  While Webmaster tools are aimed at the more technically minded, there is one overarching advantage I’ve seen that, I believe, a number of people seem to overlook.

Once upon a time, SEOs would have to submit their website to DMOZ and the Yahoo directory to let search engines know a site existed, but the real advantage to webmaster tools is the fact that it guarantees a spider visit, as you have to verify the site either by adding a line to the <head> field of the homepage, or by uploading a 1kb file to the root directory.  By going through this verification process, you’re basically telling a search engine “Here I am!”  I’ve seen sites get indexed, literally, within hours after completing a verification process!  Even if you don’t use the extremely useful suite of tools that you get for free, it’s worth the effort just to go through the verification process.

You can sign up for Google Webmaster Tools here.  Yahoo has Site Explorer, which is not as involved as Google’s WMTools, but still valuable.  Lastly, MSN Webmaster Tools can be found here.  All in all, Webmaster tools are the quickest, and cheapest method of guaranteeing your site will get indexed!

Quite often, well meaning webmasters will skim through an SEO primer document, or get some third hand information from a friend of a friend of an Internet Marketer, and go to town on optimizing their website.  While Search Engine Optimization techniques are the best ways to improve traffic and ranking, too much of good thing can be harmful!  Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at a couple examples of “over optimization” and save your site from being stamped with the dreaded “SPAM” moniker.

(The following story is true.  To protect the privacy of the individuals, names, places, and actual events that occurred in reality have been changed.)

Over Optimization Pitfall #1:  Keyword Stuffing

Consider the story of Bob.  Bob owns a website called “usedmotorcycles.com” which provides users direct referrals to used motorcycle shops in their city.  Bob’s SEO friend Terry tells him that if he wants to rank well in Google, he needs to target relevant keywords on his site.  Terry even offers his services to Bob at a recession friendly rate, but Bob thinks “I know HTML, I can do this myself”.  So, Bob starts with his Title tags:

<title>Used Motorcycles, Motorcycles Used, Buy Used Motorcycles,
Used Motorbikes,Used Motorbikes for Sale, Used Motorcycles
for Sale</title>

After reading a link Terry sent to him from SEOMoz, Bob reads a little blurb on localization, and decides he needs to build a page for every region in every town he can think of, even though his site is limited to major cities like New York, Chicago, and California.  So now Bob has 100+ pages, all basically the same, with shallow to no content, but such unique titles such as:

<title>Olympia Used Motorcycles, Olympia Motorcycles Used,
Olympia Buy Used Motorcycles,Olympia Used Motorbikes,
Olympia Used Motorbikes for Sale, Olympia Used Motorcycles for Sale</title>

and

<title>Springfield Used Motorcycles, Springfield
Motorcycles Used,Springfield Buy Used Motorcycles,
Springfield Used Motorbikes, Springfield Used
Motorbikes for Sale, Springfield Used Motorcycles for Sale</title>

Pleased with himself, Bob waits a couple of weeks, then checks his Google analytics, and is horrified to see his traffic from search referrals dropped dramatically.  Frantic, Bob phones Terry demanding to know what happened…

Over optimization is where Bob went wrong!

Keyword stuffing was a successful technique many years ago, when search engine algorithms were far less advanced, but today’s search algo’s are far more sophisticated.  They base their results on numerous factors, and keyword density is just one small aspect.  What Bob should’ve done was looked at his changes and thought “How is this change going to benefit my users?”  Obviously, a bunch of keywords that are differing variations of the same theme isn’t useful to anyone…  you only need to say “used motorcycles” once for a user to ascertain what may be on that page.

The key to search engine optimization is, in many ways, not to think of search engines at all, but to think about the real (or fictional) humans visiting your site.