Let’s start with the basics: Google Analytics offers users a chance to see detailed traffic reports of their site.

How does it work and why should we use it?

It is vital that you can see how well your marketing strategy is working in order to know whether or not you should carry on along the same lines or change your style. Google Analytics analyze your website data with very easy to use features that anyone can learn to understand. Your ads can be improved with the feedback offered from Google Analytics and your marketing strategies can be improved dramatically if you use the data Google Analytics provides you with.

Google Analytics Goals

The beauty of using Google Analytics is that it is suitable for all business sizes and people with all levels of web knowledge can make use of the information on offer from specialists through to novices. The goals of using Google Analytics are simple – to track the success of your online sales, web marketing campaigns, or just simply understanding your web traffic. It is extremely important to constantly check out your sales conversions and track how well you are doing and this is simple to do with Analytics.

What Can They Track?

Google Analytics can track just about anything that works online!

Some of the more popular uses are the following:

• Email Campaigns
• Newsletters
• Offline Ads
• Banner Ads
• Mobile Websites
• Mobile Apps
• Mobile Devices
• Blogs

Google Analytics Features

You can see how successful you are with your search, display, offline advertising methods and new media.You can also see what the industry average is in your particular sector and you can look at everything from video and Flash through to apps and social media.

You can checkout what patterns are emerging from your data as well as see the latest trends and this allows you to make comparisons by using maps and motion charts that set out all of this data in a clear and easy-to-see fashion.

Shock, horror – News Flash! The entire world does not always operate in the English language!

Many people work within a small mind frame where they think that everyone worth aiming their business at knows English but this is a really bad mistake to make. While many people do speak and read English, there are many people that don’t and many more who don’t speak or read it as their first language and optimizing a website for these people gives you a really wide spectrum of possible customers!

Popular Languages…

Many people in the US speak Spanish as their number one language especially in areas such as Miami and LA. Almost the entire South American continent primarily speak Spanish along with some countries in the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico and of course – Spain itself!

In Belgium and some parts of Switzerland as well as France, Canada and the majority of Africa, French is the most common language. Germany is another popular language as residents of Switzerland and Austria speak German as well as Germany itself.

Italian and Portuguese are also commonly spoken around the world and with all of these different languages widely spoken all over the globe; why does everyone focus their SEO mainly on English? While many people who speak other languages do also speak English, as English is not their primary language it makes sense that you would want to optimize a website to people using their mother tongue.

Non-English Optimization

Optimizing for a non-English website is done in exactly the same way as you would optimize an English website. The keyword research is the same and the application of links and keywords/phrases is identical. However, you don’t simply translate the English version of a keyword into Spanish or French. Popular keywords in English may come in three or four different terms but in French just in one or there may be several search terms in German but just one in English. This is what makes multilingual SEO tricky!

Search sample sizes are also far smaller for any language other than English and this makes the task even more testing. Where there is little data to go on, webpages must be optimized for various words and phrases in order to cover all angles. Once a website has been optimized for the keywords, just as with an English website it is time to begin building up the links. This can also be problematic as there are far fewer non-English websites to swap links with as well as fewer directories and article banks. However, to counter balance this problem, you need fewer links in your SEO as there is less competition!

The best way to get a website optimized in another language is to firstly use a professional translation service so that you can be sure that your website reads properly in the target language. Many marketing companies offer a translation service as part of their multilingual SEO services, which should be made full use of!

How did you do your multilingual SEO?

One of the most important parts of search engine optimization is knowing how to correctly choose and use keywords. Target keywords can be found by researching keywords and phrases that are related to your sector and these will then be used throughout your content in order to optimize your copy.

Where Do The Keywords Go?

The keywords are placed with the text/content/copy of your website. This should include all of the following:

• Articles
• Title tags
• Meta tags
• Blogs

But How Do I Choose My Keywords?

There are many ways that you can research for keywords and getting this bit right is vital as using the wrong keywords throughout your content will be completely pointless!

Finding keywords is about more than just optimizing for the most common phrases that will appear all over your competitor’s websites. Sure, competing with them is great and you should use these primary keywords but it is also important to use less-obvious keywords; you will get top rankings with ease!

Sponsored pay per click ads will also usually feature the most obvious keywords so when you optimize for the less obvious words and phrases you will again be at the top of the list.

Keyword Tools…

There are many keyword tools that can be used for finding and researching words and phrases and all you generally have to do is enter a word or phrases that relates to your business and search through the suggestions that the tool spits out. These suggested words and phrases will be accompanied by a range of stats that show you which ones are used by competitors, which ones have a high monthly search volume and these stats help you to choose which keywords are best to use.

Three keyword tools to consider:

1. Google Keyword Tool (free)
2. SEM Rush
3. Word Tracker

Targeted keywords are the key to success but you ave to find the phrases that have a high search volume.

Basic Mistakes To Avoid

One of the most common mistakes when using keywords is to over-stuff your pages with them! Too many keywords placed in text looks spammy and the search engines will notice and penalize your ranking for it. Never use keywords where they don’t fit as this will also be picked up – they have to look  natural wherever you place them!

There is always a difference when you are choosing keywords when you are bidding on sponsored links and when you are choosing keywords for optimization. For optimization purposes, keywords need to appear in the body of the content, in tags and meta data and the keywords need to be a good mixture of all of the most popular keywords. Follow these up with a sprinkling of secondary keywords that are more specifically aimed at your particular company rather than just the sector.

How do you hunt for keywords?

SEO is one of those things that you just can’t live without–it can make content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software.

“But why is this important to me?” you say. Would it be important to you if customers were unable to find your telephone number, email contact or find the address of your business? If this was the case, not many businesses would have happy customers–if any at all.

So the question is, can potential customers find your web site easily? Traffic to your web site could be extremely low, and you would have no idea. Potential customers might not even know that your site exists in the world wide web.

“Hold up, one second there, sir!” you say. “We have a fantastic web site, and we include the web site address in all advertising campaigns. Why would people be unable to find our site?”

Of course, your current customers and people who already have heard about your company would find your site no problem. Wouldn’t they?

Are you absolutely positive that your advertising has reached enough potential customers? Did you consider that some people simply do not read the newspapers? How about people who didn’t get the issue of the magazine where you placed an expensive ad?

Did they see the huge billboard you spent a fortune on by that one section of the highway? Did they see that ad you placed on that website ? Were they on the mail list for which you paid thousands of dollars?

So, how about we take a different approach. Why not use the tool that everyone around the world can see–the internet. More specifically, search engines. Potential customers will type a word or two into the box, hit ’Enter’, and immediately find your company’s web site. One more click and you have another visitor. Beats hoping people will pass your billboard on the highway, huh?

“Ok, so what about if I need to reach a well rounded base of customers? Teenagers don’t spend the day going through pages of google for fun”

That’s exactly right. For us, SEO doesn’t stop at google–we take it many steps ahead. Some of those steps include:

• Email Marketing
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Youtube
• Linkedin
• Blogging (WordPress, blogger…)

Email Marketing

Lucky for you, our sister company is www.EmailMarketing.Net, an Email Marketing service. Whether you like email or not, it remains to be the number one choice of online communication.

• An example of an email marketing campaign created at EmailMarketing.Net

This makes email marketing a must have when it comes to communicating with your clientele. Everyone looking to better their business should be building a list of leads while you grow your base and reach.

Building your email lists in various verticals is key to your success, not only are you gaining targeted data but you are also giving yourself a tool that will allow you to keep your customers happy & informed, which in the end means keeping your company alive.

Facebook & Twitter

Matt Cutts, who works for Google stated that Google’s algorithm is adjusted to take social media into account as of last December. Google has always used links from sites like Twitter and Facebook as they used links from any other website in their algorithm.

On Twitter, the amount of tweets, followers and mentions someone has and the number of times their profile is listed shows how credible they are.

• On our twitter, we communicate with not only our followers but with events, news and other people in our industry as well.

On Facebook, there are different factors that influence how credible Google will judge a profile of people linking to you; like take fan pages for example.

Here are two examples of different ways you can use your FB account:

• Incorporating your fan page to direct people mainly to your site

• Using your facebook to promote your blog

Youtube

It’s agreed across the Seo community that the enormity of YouTube’s size – content, traffic, viral presence – make it much more than a video site. It should be treated as a major search engine all by itself. According to a comScore Media Metrix, October 2008 had over 100 million YouTube video viewers, for a total of 2.5 billion searches. Imagine, if 1% of that traffic was directed to your channel–that’d be over 25,000 potential views!

Blogging

Blogs aren’t just for Starbucks-loving-freelance-starving artists. It’s a great way to give your customers relevant information and just all around cool information. It’s guaranteed to get you traffic. Hey, look–you’re on our blog now!

At Constant Click, we’re dedicated to get your company exposure. And exposure is guaranteed.

However, online success doesn’t happen without a little work. Search Engine Optimization is that work.