Authority Hub

The keyphrases visitors use when they search your site are gold.

They:
• let you know what visitors are looking for,
• indicate what visitors may be looking for and cannot find easily
• identify possible problems with navigation labeling or content

Knowing what visitors are looking for can also give you ideas for new content, if you have a lot of searches for a keyphrase then this is obviously something your visitors are interested in. This information is therefore very useful.
Ok, some of you may have access to search reporting depending on the search engine you use on you site but I long ago forgot how to access these and anyway I wanted to view them in my Google Analytics account because, I want all my web stats intelligence in the one place - it’s just easier, isn’t it?

So…this is how you link your web search to your GA account:
1. Login into your account and click ‘edit’
2. You should now be in your ‘profile settings’, click on ‘edit’ in the top right-hand corner
3. Scroll down to ‘Site Search’
4. Make sure ‘Do Track Site Search’ is selected
5. Open up your website, enter any search term in the search box and press return
6. Enter your ‘Query Parameter’ in the field provided. Please enter only the word or words that designate an internal query parameter such as “term,search,query”. Sometimes the word is just a letter, such as “s” or “q”. You may provide up to five parameters, separated by a comma
7. Select whether or not you want Google Analytics to strip out the query parameter from your URL. Please note that this will only strip out the parameters you provided, and not any other parameters in the same URL.

Google Analytics is simply the tool that collects the data for analysis, it can provide you with very useful answers but here’s the catch… first YOU must identify what you want to know – if you don’t you will spend a lot of time roaming aimlessly looking at pretty graphs.

Believe me, and i’ve rolled this out for a lot of people and watched them use it, GA has the ooh ah factor; nice interface, offers a lot of information, you can slice and dice this info in lots of ways and pull off reports in txt, excel and pdf - my goodness. GA impresses people so much that they seem to forget that its a tool to help them analyse their visitor activity. Time and time again i’ve watched people spend hours wondering around it aimlessly ooh ahing without extracting anything useful. When they go back for a second visit they’ve also forgotten how they found what was useful the last time.

Key to using GA is knowing what you want from it and knowing how to use what it
provides.

To help get the most from using GA, and before you login, write down answers to these 3 questions:

1. I want web stats for…
Today - Last 7 days - Last month - Year to date - A defined timeframe?
2. I want to know…
3. I want to know this because…

Answering these 3 questions will keep you on track and help you get value from GA.

Also, if you find something you know is useful when using GA keep a note of what it is, why it’s useful, how to find it again (believe me you’ll be happy you did this when you visit next time).

Google Analytics (GA) is a free web software programme that generates detailed metrics about how visitors find and interact with a website.

It’s as easy as going to http://www.google.com/analytics/indexu.html , signing up for a free account, entering your website details, copying the code they supply and pasting it in to the correct place on every page you want to track user activity. I put the code on all my pages, but it’s up to you. GA will track what you want it to. And, it’s free! Big bonus.

Also known as web stats, GA at a basic level provides information on number of site visits, unique visitors, geographic origin, keywords used by visitors accessing your site via search engine, bounce rates etc. At a more sophisticated level, it provides the ability for you to view some user activity visually with Site Overlay and allows you to setup Goals so that you can track visitor progression though a task you define.

I’ve been using GA for almost a year and a half now and I find it great, it’s easy to implement, it’s flexible and if you can dedicate the time it provides some valuable intelligence about your visitors, how they found your site and what they do when they visit.

I’ll be sharing my experience with GA over the coming posts.

Well first up, an Authority Hub is a beautiful thing.

When you become an Authority Hub its time to breakout that champagne that’s been waiting for THAT moment - it IS that moment.

An authority hub is a website that is considered by Google to be the authoritive source of high quality information on a given topic, keyword or keyword phrase.

Andy Jenkins from Stompernet (fantastic programme) fame sparked my interest in becoming one and last month one of my sites become an Authority Hub.

The best thing about becoming an authority hub is the extra traffic it brings you. Instead of taking up the space of one search engine result the listing takes up two spaces because of the extra information provided in the listing - people’s experieces will differ but this listing has doubled my traffic for a specific keyword.

As a bonus my site also takes up the search engine result following the authority hub listing, effectively my site takes up the first three search engine results for this specific keyword - how good is that!

For those of you now shouting “What’s an Authority Hub!” well, a picture paints a thousand words:

1. Authority Hub for keyword: Fab City

2. Authority Hub for the keyword fabcity:

3. Authrity Hub for the keyword phrase: fab city hyderabad