From Bangkok to Boston the E-Commerce business model is gaining mass popularity on a global level. For an online business, a company’s website is the only link between the owner and the client and overall success depends entirely on web traffic. Given this business model, knowing everything you can about visitors behavior is crucial. By developing a website traffic analysis strategy, you can learn to use web traffic data to make smart business decisions and set strategic goals.

Many knowledgeable small business owners rely on search engine optimization (SEO) companies for evaluating their website traffic. SEO and analytics definitely intersect; however website traffic analysis is not just about tracking clicks. An in-depth website traffic analysis should incorporate a traffic analysis strategy. A typical website traffic analysis strategy will include:

• business metrics
• custom reports
• actionable traffic analysis
• optimization recommendations

Such analysis is essential for any website as it lets the owners know the reason why, and how, people are coming to their website. With a good understanding of your marketing channel, owners can tie business metrics defined by their organization into their strategy.

In terms of reporting, of course reports are great but you must have someone on board to interpret the information into useful data. Also, it’s essential to share the custom reports with the team. Lastly, without optimization recommendations, a website traffic analysis is only part of the puzzle. It’s great to know that you have 200 visitors per day, but it’s even better to know that 10% of the 200 visitors made purchase after the second visit and viewed at 10 pages on your website.

AW Stats Web Traffic Analyzer Report number of “human” visits Report unique “human” visitors Report entry pages Report exit pages To see a complete list of features, visit AWstats on sourceforge.net

 

Focusing on the areas that require improvement, once your metrics data is analyzed, will permit you to transform your business and respond to market behavior. Even though, most hosting companies include web traffic tools, these tools will lack the ability to deliver in depth insight. Nevertheless, it’s including in your hosting package, so you can begin your web analytics venture here.

When you are ready to take your business to the next level and gain a better understanding of the customer experience, then move into website traffic analysis that includes more that just click data. Website traffic analysis is fundamental to online business and without it, your business is ultimately disadvantaged.

Over the years, the field of search engine optimization has had its ups and downs. In the early internet days an SEO services provider could simply add keywords to Meta tags and magically, the web page would move to the first page of the top search engine.  Even today some business owners still believe that optimizing a web site only requires keyword adjustments to be seen in search engines.  If you are a busy professional who wants to move up the search results pages, then here are five reasons to hire an SEO services provider.

#1 – Neither You nor Your Customers Can Find Your Web Site

How frustrating it must be to invest in a web site design, hosting and technical resources only to spend minutes looking for your site in Google and you simply can not find your web site in any search engine. The root cause of the missing web pages could be from thin content to site architecture challenges or a host of other reasons. A good search engine optimizer can resolve the “can’t find my site” quandary for you.
 

# 2 – A Site Redesign is in the Horizon

It’s been three years and your sales team is simply screaming for a web site make over.  Being a forward thinking entrepreneur, you enlist the resources of a savvy design firm and an in-house developer to handle all of the on going web site maintenance requests.  While the design firm may be well versed in the creative aspects, having professional SEO talent is a basic requirement. When you bring an SEO specialist on board they will advise the design firm on the appropriate file naming conventions, page titles, directory structure, navigation, content, and web page redirect tactics to build upon your current search history. 
 

#3 – Build a Solid Keyword List

One of the outcomes of an SEO plan created by a professional SEO service company is a keyword list that can be used on your web pages, marketing material, online advertisements, social bookmark entries, blog posts, profile pages and local directories.  Keyword research can be done using a variety of tools. In fact many of the tools are free such as an industry standard Wordtracker.  An SEO service provider will use a variety of resources to build your keyword list and help you to identify the low hanging fruit.
 

#4 – Too Many Irons in the Fire to SEO In-House

If you are busy professional, then a better use of your time might be to develop more business versus editing web pages.  Oftentimes one might think of SEO like completing a tax return. One could keep up with the tax code or one can hire a professional.   Tax forms change and search algorithms change. Now basic SEO can certainly be accomplished by anyone who is reasonably computer knowledgeable. It’s just a matter of one question: is this a good use of your time?  By hiring an expert, you’ll save time and money; further, a professional optimizer will be able to take on the more advanced topics that a novice may not want to handle.

#5 – Missing Content Strategies

Writing SEO content is not about repeating keywords words on your web pages.  At the same time, keyword phrases will be used along with call to actions to direct visitors to make purchase, download a file or sign up to receive your newsletter. It’s been said that each web page should have a call to action.  A search engine optimizer can create a content strategy that aligns with your marketing plan. Site visitors are asking, what’s in it for me? With a content strategy in place, you’ll get great content that appeals to your target audience and is properly indexed by the search engines; thereby improving your marketing reach and generating sales.

Regardless of the size of your business, search engine optimization (SEO)  can be a meaningful component of an online marketing plan. While SEO includes a variety of actions, an anchor text check up for SEO is one action that can be implemented within a short term basis.  I bet you are thinking, how can an SEO anchor text check up benefit my website? I am glad you asked.

First, let’s revisit the definition of anchor text. According to Wikipedia Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.  Anchor text can be found in your static or dynamic web pages, product pages, blog posts, PDF files, directory submissions, web forms or any piece of hyperlinked content.

Since the hyperlinked text helps search engine spiders to understand what your page is about, your anchor text is a way telling the search engine spiders to  “pay particular attention to this content – it’s important”.

An anchor text check up has one distinct outcome,  you will uncover new opportunities to spice up your anchor text and thereby improve your visibility in search engines. When your anchor text is carefully written, you can see an increase in organic search engine traffic. Organic traffic is the free search engine traffic. Even better, when you combine an external link building program with an SEO anchor text check up, can look forward to improve placement within the leading search engines.

Anchor text is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO). Anchor text is the clickable text which introduces a linked page to your audience.  Your web page will have at least two audiences. The first audience is your visitor who will click the anchor text and the second audience is the search engine who evaluates the anchor text in conjunction with the text on the page, the web page address, page Meta description tag and other factors.

When you create your page, always focus on your visitor and recall that a search engine wants to understand your web page. Therefore, if you use “click here” for anchor text, then you have missed the opportunity to demonstrate that your web site is related to keywords pertaining to your business.  The following article covers seven powerful tips for using anchor text.

Sink or Swim with Keyword Research – Tip 1

Before you can identify which keywords to use in your anchor text, you really need to invest some time into keyword research. Just imagine if you knew how competitive a search term is then you will understand that ranking for the core search time may take a bit longer. Conversely, if you add an adjective or modifier to your core term, then you can potentially rank for the long tail term in less time. For example, ranking for the keyword “toys” will take some time but ranking for a specific toy brand, part number, model number or color is doable.

Keywords are Essential to Inbound Links – Tip 2

Inbound links are links that live on a third party website which link to your web site. For better visibility in the search engines, you want many inbound links. To be the most effective, these inbound links should include keywords in the anchor text.  An example of anchor text might be Contact Vertronics Media for SEO consulting and small business web sites. In this example my focus is SEO consulting, hence SEO consulting is my anchor text. Since you want a variety of inbound links, you will want to vary the anchor text. In some cases I might promote, web site design, SEO auditing, SEO tune up or a variety of other keywords and phrases related to my business.

Internal Links Count Too – Tip 3

One of the most confusing parts to SEO is the nomenclature. Inbound links, internal links, external links, back links, hyperlink, and hidden links are all links to a web page. While there are several types of links, the focus here is internal links.  Internal links reside on your web pages. Regardless of the link type, all links use anchor text. In the case of internal links you want to follow the same methodology and choose anchor text for your internal links that inform the reader about the content on the page and introduce the topic to the search engines. When the reader clicks the link fine china tea sets, he expects to see content about the same topic.  Search engines operate in a similar manner. When your web page is added to the search engine database, your internal links are also captured. If you have internal links using fine china as anchor text, then it stands to reason that your site might be related to fine China and related terms. Rather than using generic text to click from one internal page to another, use your keyword research to choose the best anchor text for your page.

Savvy Anchor Text Includes a Call to Action – Tip 4

In short, a call to action is used by marketers to get the visitor to take action. After all, if you are selling online, ultimately you want the visitor to do something.    Here is where you can be savvy and add a call to action in your anchor text.  Instead of using buy now for your linked text, use “buy affordable SEO services” as the anchor text.

Are you hiding your Links? – Tip 5

When working with your website designer, be certain to request visible linked text using an underscore for your web pages. Most web designers will use cascading style sheets (CSS) to format your web pages. One of the nice features of CSS is that you can create links without the underscore.  While links without the underscore may be pretty, non underscored links are not user friendly.  Remember, web visitors scan pages; if your goal is to get the visitor to click on your linked text, then do not make him look for the anchor text.

Short Anchor Text is Brief – Tip 6

Based upon the importance of the message you want to communicate, you may be tempted to display the entire sentence or paragraph as linked text.  I say to you, resist the temptation.  Remember anchor text is used to introduce the visitor or search engine to a page.  Cleary, key information can be used as anchor text; however, you only need to link the important words that will encourage the visitor to click the link.

Use a Backlink Analyzer  – it’s Free! – Tip 7

Now that you understand the importance of choosing keyword rich anchor text, how can you evaluate your existing anchor text?  The concept here pertains to both inbound links and internal links. In the case of inbound links a.k.a. backlinks, perform a search using your favorite search engine and search for a backlink analyzer.  A backlink analyzer will give you insight to type of domains that link to your web site. Also, you can see the anchor text used in your inbound links. Two of my favorite back link analyzers are Back Link Analyzer by Aaron Wall and Webconfs’s Anchor Text Analysis.

As a reminder, conduct keyword research to target the right keywords.  If your site is using CSS which is a good practice,  you may want to check with your designer to enable underscores for your anchor text. Underscores help do differentiate plain text from clickable text. With these powerful tips on using anchor text, you can begin to take ownership of optimizing your web pages for search engines.

SEO is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization. The core of SEO is to structure your web pages so that search engines can easily find the pages and understand what your web site is about.  If you choose a web site design firm that understands SEO, then you benefit by having a great looking web site that has the potential to generate online leads and sales.  Here are some of the steps that lead to a successful search engine optimization program: