Singapore Web Hosting Blog

google launched google analytics a while ago, now new account signup is suspended due to high demand. it’s a web site traffic analysis service, free of charge, known as Urchin before it’s bought by google. Urchin had been popular, useful traffic tracking and analyzing software for long time, but rather expensive if i recall correctly. now google bought over urchin and make it free to all webmasters.

Simply paste the Google Analytics tracking code into each of your website pages and tracking begins immediately.

Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.

that’s great, a sophisticated, comprehensive, complete, traffic analysis tool, for free, and from a trusted source. if you’ve leant e-commerce ABC, you should have known how important these information is to the site owner, therefore appreciate google analytics very much.

but wait a minute.

i signed up for the account once they launched however i have not inserted the tracking code, maybe will never do so.

lets go back to the basics. what’s the ultimate purpose of all search engines? the answer is, return most useful, relevant web pages to the surfers. no matter how google, yahoo, msn, and all other search engines change their algorithm, this would remain true, for a long time, if not forever.

so how do search engines decide which web page is the most useful relevant result that should be ranked at no. 1 spot? there’re tons of articles, totorials, blog posts, forum posts, ebooks, email courses… discussing what are the elements that search engines look for and how they calculate rankings, therefore how web site owners should optimize their sites.

we can devide these SEO techniques into 2 groups, onsite and offsite.

onsite factors includes site structure, navigation, link structure, copywriting, title tags, meta tags, , keyword desity, keyword position, font face, font size, heading, size of web page, size of web site, outgoing links… in short, elements that are in site owner’s control, stuffs on the web site itself.

offsite factors includes number of incoming links, anchor text of links, where is the link from, how relevant is the linking page, surrounding text, page rank… elements are that are on other people’s site and not under site owner’s control.

from another point of view, we can consider onsite SEO as “what the site owner says about the site”. if your providing SEO service, natually you optimize your site for this keyword.

likewise, offsite elements can be considered as “what other web site owners say about your web site”. the more people think your important and relevant, the more people would link to your site from their sites, the higher your ranking.

but, one thing is mssing so far, one critical thing.

“what visitors say about your site?”

do surfers or visitors think your site is actually relevant, helpful? this is the missing piece search engines are trying hard to get but getting little success. they have tried toolbar (is it interesting that all big three, google, yahoo, msn has one?), local search, personalized search, providing free email services, desktop search, etc. all these aim to collect user information.

how many pages surfers visit, which pages, how long they stay on the site, on each page, what’s their navigation pattern, do they go to order page, do they complete order process… these information tells a lots about your web site, but difficult to get for all search engines.

now, by using google analytics on your web site, google would have full access to all these critical information.

I have to warn you first, real SEO services done by specialists is not cheap. Successful, full scale SEO most likely won’t be in the range of several hundred dollars. Think of it this way. If someone can bring you high rankings for keywords with reasonable amount of searches at a couple of hundred dollars, why don’t he do it on his own site?

I can assure you, web sites can make money as long as you can attract traffic. If 500 bucks or 3 days can push a site to the top, SEOs would rather keep creating and optimizing sites for themselves instead of for clients.

The fact is, it costs more time therefore more money, which makes serving clients worth the work.

Now talk about the actual cost. It greatly depends on your target market. If you’re just targeting at a not-too-competitive market, then your costs are usually in the range of $1,500-2,000.

If you’re targeting something like “sex” then it would take much more work to achieve top rankings and traffic, and thus the prices would also be higher. These highly competitive markets usually start at $1,000 monthly.

Any semi-competitive market that you’d be targeting will have costs starting from $2,000.

The above costs are for sites with 20-30 pages. Naturally, the bigger your site is, the more pages you want to optimize, the higher the cost will be.

Is it worth it? You might be asking now. To answer this question, you have to ask yourself another question: can your site make sales once visitors come? If you have good products or services, proven sales copy, excellent customer service, competitive price… everything that makes visitors click the buy button, then SEO is definitely worth it. It provides you the most wanted element, visitors.

Think of the sales you will make. Sometimes I feel it strange to be honest. Few people question the importance of advertising and marketing in offline world. Marketing staffs are the most highly paid group in any company. Without marketing, there’s no business.

Yet people hesitate to invest in marketing in the cyberworld. In essence, SEO is the same as offline advertising – reach your target audience. It doesn’t come cheap. Think of the price of TV commercial, newspaper ads…

There is a difference however: your TV commercial will not continue when you stop paying, while your search engine listings have a much better chance to stay there for quite a long time once you get there.

the good news is, google has updated visible Page Rank PR that’s displayed in google toolbar. one of my sites got a PR7, which is rather hard to get. take a look at singtel web site, theirs is also a PR7. achieved from years of hard work.

although the visible google PR is not up to date, still looking at the green little bar is enjoying. according to google, PR is calculated and updated constantly and is factored into ranking algorithm constantly, it’s kind of ongoing process. however the PR value shown in google toolbar is only updated once every 2-4 months.

so if you see a google ranking jump, at the same time you find your PR increased, the PR improvement might not be the reason of the ranking jump, because your real PR most likely was updated some time before.

some people conclude that PR is dead, no point to monitor, follow, improve, etc. i do not agree with this. will talk about it later when i have time.

back to latest google update, which is still in process at this very moment.

this google update, named Jagger, is quite unique. the result is bad, at least for me, till today. very bad. many of my sites dropped rankings under major keywords or key phrases, sometimes dropped to nowhere, often from top listings. 60-70% of traffic are gone.

not only my sites, many many webmasters are reporting the same. no, we’re not using blackhat seo tricks, all my sites are clean, whitehat, useful to visitors. it’s not something personal, there’s a pattern, many good sites are buried deep in google at this moment.

some webmasters noticed massive google ranking movements as early as 22th sep, announcement of google update was made by webmasterworld, however goolge then said it’s not an update. but from last weekend, around 15th oct, more and more webmasters see more and more ranking movements in google. that’s the time i saw many of my sites dropped. webmasterworld decided to name it Jagger, and google says, ok, lets name it Jagger.

it’s the most lengthy google update so far, considering it might have started from 22th sep, and it’s still going on. best part is, google said, we’re still on stage 1 of Jagger update, 2 more stages are coming over the next 2 weeks.

good thing is, it’s not settled yet, i/we have good opptunities to recover. i’ve gone through many google updates, with no problem. every time my sites go stronger after updates. the reason is very simple, we do not use spammy dirty tricks.

bad thing is, it might be like this for at least 2 weeks, 70% of total traffic is a lot, and it affects our business seriously. it may become worse: current results may stick. although we’re confident that our sites are clean, but we are not google, they can do anything they want. sometimes good honest web sites may become victims in google’s battle with spammers.

if you too suffer in this update, the best thing to do now is, wait and see.

fingers crossed.