PPC What is important? - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 9

Hi, welcome to the eWebStyle Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Yes, thanks for joining us again for another fun-filled edition of our podcast. How did you like that addition to the title, Paul? I think that was a good addition to the title. I like it. Well, we decided that was the title of the podcast that we wanted to put on iTunes, so here we are on our ninth podcast, and we thought, hey, why don't we use the title, the actual title of our podcast, when we're introducing our podcast. Well, today, we always have a theme. Today is the Soulless Smile Podcast. Whip out your soulless smiles, everybody, because today is the day. Why are we having a soulless smile podcast? Well, you guys may remember a while back we had a shoeless podcast. I remember that one. Anyone was in the podcast area and they had some shoes and they wanted to throw them at us. I remember that guy threw that shoe at President Bush, right? Exactly. A former President Bush, okay. Well, when he threw that shoe, of course, we are all wondering, why did he throw that shoe at the President? Why did he throw that shoe? That's correct. And it turns out that he just saw the soulless, bloodless smile of the President and was compelled to lob his shoe in his general direction. I mean, I do that every time. I see a soulless smile. That's just common. Everyone does that. And then, whack, you got to throw those shoes. So, to recognize our brilliant shoe-dodging President, that is the one thing we're sure he's good at. Can I give him a lot of credit for that? I really was impressed. I really was impressed that he dodged those shoes. Go President Bush. We will all be mimicking the soulless, bloodless smile today during the podcast. Well, what's on the agenda today? Well, first, we want to cover what we did last time, really briefly, of course. Otherwise, it's the same podcast. We keep mentioning that. We talked about pay-per-click, and

we went into quite some details. We talked about if you're going to do, when you're going to do a pay-per-click campaign, that you should have a strategy to begin with that you should define the purpose of your online marketing campaign. Yes, before you actually start your online marketing campaign. Part of that strategy, of course, should be what are my short-term goals, what are my long-term goals, excuse me. We also want to talk about set a realistic budget for yourself, something that is actually going to show results, but is not going to shoot you in the foot. And there's a phrase that we use, that we hear often, and we want to convince you not to buy into, which is, let me throw a couple of dollars at this and see what happens. Yeah. On the wall and see what sticks. Yeah, we'll throw it against the wall and see what sticks. The next thing is, if you are going to spend money on pay-per-click, you really need to spend some time, effort, possibly money, preparing your website, making sure that it looks good, that it's got calls to actions. We talked about the design using Flash. We also talked about when you start your pay-per-click campaign, start small. One search engine, then go into the others. Of course, go ahead and start with Google. Google is the machine. And then we just said, you know, afterwards, when you've got that up and running, you need to do five things to monitor, to focus on. You really want to spend about an hour a day. An hour a day. And you want to spend on five things. Number one, you want to focus on your keywords. Yes, that's right. Number two, you want to spend time on your pay-per-click manager. Yes, number three, you want to spend more time on your keywords. Almost forgot that one. Next, spend time with your analytic software. And we're going to be talking about that today. And the last one, we're going to mix it up a little bit. You

need to pay attention to your keywords again. So we've got keywords, pay-per-click manager, analytic software, keywords, and I missed keywords. Keywords, yeah. There we go. Because you missed it the first time. Excellent. So today we're going to talk about web statistics. We have often used, we now more use Google Analytics. But I wanted to take the time to go through, you know how when you're taking math classes and they teach you the old school way and then you get to learn the new school way, which is much easier. So you really have a good, clear understanding from the old school way. And so we're going to talk about WebLizer. Given the power of Google Analytics, it really is old school. But there's a lot of very useful information in it that we can cover and that we will be covering. So by the end of this podcast, you will understand WebLizer. You'll understand what you can find on WebLizer. And you'll actually understand how and where you can find it. So are you ready to get started, Paul? Let's get started with WebLizer. So WebLizer is free. You can actually go out on the web, type in WebLizer. You can download it, put it on your server. Or in our case, for our customers, we offer WebLizer at a small fee because it does take some CPU time. So anybody who wants to, we don't just let anybody run WebLizer because, you know, it actually does create a load for our CPU. So I think it's a dollar a month or something like that if they want to have WebLizer statistics. Well, what is it? What exactly is, for someone that has no idea, just got their website built, what exactly is a, what is WebLizer? So here's the example that I'll give you. We just finished your website. Okay. What do you do? I am a plumber. You're a plumber. And Joe the plumber. Excellent. Man, we haven't seen you in a while. You've been missing out of pocket. I've been trying to survive

in these tough economic times. Exactly. Which we can help you with, by the way. So Joe the plumber, I just finished your website and you've had it up and running for three months. And you typically, we find, will come back to me and say, so am I getting any hits? You know, my phone rang once or twice. I don't know what's going on because you just did my website. You didn't start my SEO campaign. Did I get any hits? Well, how do you find out? And what happens is, anytime somebody does hit Joe's website, there's a log entry on the computer, on the server, that actually is hosting that webpage. And so what you have, Webalyzer, is a piece of software that will analyze those logs so that you can understand when did people, when and if people came to your website. And then it does a whole lot more than what I just described, and we're going to go over that right now, actually. So did that answer your question, what is the stats and logs? That perfectly answers my question of what Webalyzer is. It is, how do I find out information about people who are coming to my website? By the way, the fact that stats exist and that you can track them is one of the reasons that search engine optimization and search engine marketing is such a powerful tool. Again, if your company doesn't have in place a policy for when they answer the phone and somebody's calling, hey, how did you find us? If you don't have that in place or if they're not so diligent about it or people don't answer the question, you just don't know how they found you. When it comes to your website, we can tell you how they found you, and that's really valuable. So you can focus on those areas that people are already finding you to improve on them and to adjust your sales process for the keywords they may have typed when they were searching for your website and ultimately

ended up on your website. Yes. I think I'm giving away a little bit more of the stats there. And it's all about, we've said this before, it's all about ROI, return on investment. You want to make sure that what you invested in, you're seeing a return on it, and that's just, you know, you want to make sure, hey, are people going to the site? You know, how are they finding me? Are they finding me through my website? What keywords? And all that good stuff. So this is just another thing, focus, to help you focus on your ROI. Exactly, exactly. So you've gone out, you've downloaded WebLyzer, you've installed it, you maybe had a couple problems, but you were able to Google and get them solved, and you've got WebLyzer up and running. Or with our service, you clicked a button and it's on. So now you have access to it. With our service, you actually would just type in your domain slash WebLyzer, and that would get you to the WebLyzer screen. We can password protect that if you want to. We've had customers who want that protected because they don't want to share that information. And you can leave it open because maybe you're really proud of all the traffic that you're getting. The very first page that comes up is a really nice summary, and it's a summary of the last 12 months, depending on when you started it. It's a summary of the last 12 months of traffic, and it has a couple of very interesting things. It talks about daily average and monthly totals of hits, files, pages, and visits. Now, here's where it gets interesting because we had a discussion already in one of our podcasts that somebody probably had WebLyzer and was telling us that they were getting tons of hits. Well, a hit is just any time your server was hit in that domain. So JoeThePlumber.com, any time somebody needed an image off of JoeThePlumber.com, including on his own WebPage. Let's say his homepage is the text of

the homepage, a CSS file, and two images. So when one person goes to the first page, that counts as four hits. Now, we all can agree, really, from the perspective of me trying to figure out how many people have visited my website, that's one hit. That's one visit. But what WebLyzer says is each hit is each time your web server was hit. And there's some value to that because I don't think there may not be another time to talk about this. We have our logo on most of the client websites that we work with. That logo is typically on their website. If we wanted to track how many times people were hitting their website, we could actually put and host our logo on our website, but display it on their page. Then any time somebody opened up their page, our server would get a hit. It would get a hit because our server needed to be asked to provide the image. And so there's a situation where you might want actually to track that. In fact, email services that track whether you've opened an email or not, you know, with Outlook, you've got a receipt, right? Send a receipt. There are email services that they'll actually put like a blank image, and the image will be called 19565.gif. Okay. And so when somebody views that page, they need to see that image, and when it requests from their server that image, they know that their email, 195, whatever I just said, was received by somebody and viewed. Okay. So that's not even a receipt process. That's, okay, I know that this page was requested. The only time I sent it was in this one email message, so I know that that email message has been viewed. So that's how that process works, and that's how it can be, you know, hits can be beneficial. The next thing is files, how many files were tagged. There's a number of files involved in displaying something, so that is also more along the lines of hits. Then you've

got pages, which is actually web pages, like HTML pages, .php pages, .asp pages. Those would be pages that were actually hit. And then visits is the thing that we're really interested in, which is how many people actually came. So I'm actually looking at one client right now, and they had 177 visits. They're in February so far. They're not doing SEO. And they had 394 pages viewed. So you can see that a couple of visitors, or it looks like approximately each visitor went to two pages. And actually that information is a little bit lower. So once you're on the first page of Weblyzer, you actually click the month. So I'm going to click February 2009, and we get a whole bunch of information here. Monthly statistics for February 2009. Again, it's going to show you the total hits, total files, total pages, total visits, and then kilobytes, which is the total amount of space actually uploaded. It also talks about total unique sites, total unique URLs, total unique referrers, and total unique user agents. So a unique site is a website that sent traffic to you. A total unique referrers is somebody who also sent traffic to you. And then you've got a total unique user agent. A user agent is, were they using IE? Were they using Chrome? Were they using Firefox? Those are user agents. And the total unique URLs is actually the URLs on your website that people visited. I actually have a blog entry that doesn't really know that, and I just figured it out right now. So I'll be updating that blog entry. We have a blog entry called Weblyzer Statistics Explained, and it just improved. Then we've got things like hits per hour, hits per day, files per day. These are all really obvious, and we don't use those very much when we're kind of analyzing what's going on with a website. We do like to follow, you know, how many visits, total visits, average visits, et cetera. And we do like to, some of the stuff we're about to

talk to, we really focus on. Now, you may be interested in what are the hits by response code. There's a couple of codes that come up. A code 200 says that the page was requested and your server responded, no problem. That means the page was viewed properly. A 206, it says partial content. That says the page requested some of the page was sent. And this would happen if the user requests a page and then presses stop before the whole page is displayed on his computer. So that might be an example of a 206 code situation. 301 is, these have to do with pages that have been moved on the site. And so if the page is moved permanently, then it would give a 301 code. 304 says that it was not modified. What's the explanation did I give? This is when a user requests the same page and is displayed to the user from a cache. And the computer not resent from the web server. So I don't know if you guys are aware, but there's a thing called cache. And any time you're viewing a web page, it actually gets stored. It can get stored in a couple of places on the way from the server to your web browser. One of them is with your ISP. Some ISPs will do that. Typically, that's going to be the dial-up ISPs because they can save some time in trying to get you that image again if you request it. Or if somebody else requests it. Another place it can be stored is actually on your computer in your cache. So if you request that page again and that page is not specifically designed not to be cached, then your browser will just show you that page that you have on your system. So that would be what the 304 is. 401 is an unauthorized view. This is when a user is requesting to view a directory and they don't have the ability. 404 is probably an error that we're all used to. You go to

a website and you click something and they say, oh, this page is not found. And I'm looking here. I'm going to have to give this customer a call because they have 7,690 pages that were not found. This is a good customer of ours. Again, they're not doing ongoing service with us, but I can point that out to them. Probably what that is is they've changed the name of a page. That page is still in Google with the old name. So you click it from Google and your web server can't find it. So we typically do not, if we are going to change a name, and we will change page names for search engine optimization reasons, but when we do that, we leave the old page out there just because for that reason. If somebody is going to come from Google, that's going to stay in the Google database for quite some time. So any question about code? Was there anything? No, it all makes sense, but I learned something myself. I didn't know that's why we actually did that for that reason. Oh, why we left stuff out there? Why we still left there. I never, never knew that. So I guess I learned something new today. Yeah, so again, just to reiterate that, whenever you're changing a name, and there is value in changing names, both from the customer user experience perspective and from search engine optimization, remember that you may have been indexed by Google. That page may have been indexed, and if it has been, then somebody could search and try and find that page, and the last thing you want them to get is, at a minimum, have a structured 404 page, which is that error page, so that it at least says, hey, this page wasn't found. It's got your logo, so they don't look like it's just a, you know, like you guys don't know what you're doing. You've just changed the name. So even the code of that could say, we may have changed the name of this

file. Click here to get to our main page and search for it or whatever. So that's where we're at there. Then if you look at WebLizer, we've got some nice daily statistics. You can look at hits per day, files, again, pages, visits, sites, and kilobytes on a per day basis. So you might be able to find out, you know, what days are the best. In fact, the bar graph is kind of neat because it'll usually, with most websites, it'll show you a Saturday-Sunday effect. And it can be different for different customers because some websites are hit more often on the weekends when people aren't at work, and other websites are hit more often during working hours. So you can at least see your statistics and understand a little bit about your customers. We tend not to use that very much. Here's a nice graph of the hourly usage for, again, in this case it's for February 2009. And here you can see, in this case, you can see that from the hours of, I don't know, midnight to 7 a.m., this website doesn't get much hit traffic. Its peak is around 10 or 11 a.m. So you would imagine that that's when people are at work. That's not a weekend thing. That's when people are at work and they're at work. That's when they're at work surfing on the Internet. Yes. On somebody's clock. Because that's when people do the majority of their searching. You know, that's the nice thing about working at a web company, isn't it? Yeah. You can be searching on it. What are you doing? Research? Can you believe the sales process on Amazon is amazing? Wow. We need to get that for all of our clients. That's a good point. I was just testing. Everyone out there listening is like, oh, man, they do it too. Okay. So then we go down and we look at the next area section is top 30 of 217 total URLs. So, again, that's what I mentioned earlier that we'll be updating in our

blog entry, that the total URLs are the URLs that were hit on the website. And basically this tells you what is the, this is, in Google Analytics, there is a section called content. And that's, you know, what are people doing with your content? What happens to them when they're on a specific page of content? This is kind of that equivalent. It's saying, in this case, most people visited the sports page. Not surprising that that's happening during work. Yeah, of course. So, and as we go down, the least is, you know, dining or some particular article in an announcement. So, again, that's pretty straightforward. One of the interesting things on this page you'll notice is in this case we've got 943 hits for the sports page, 2,500, 2 million, a lot of kilobytes. And right next to the hits, it has a percentage, which is 0.61%. And if you were to add it up in this section, that number doesn't make any sense. What that is talking about is that 943 hits, this point that occurred on the sports page, is 0.61% of the total hits. So, you know that 0.61% of all the hits that come from this particular website are occurring because of the sports page. Sounds like a low number. At the end of the day, the numbers do work out. So, the next is top 10 of 217 total URLs. So, that's just reducing it down to the top 10 again. So, it's kind of pretty much similar. The next is top 10 of 26 total entry pages. So, first off, your Webalyzer stats probably is not going to say 26 entry pages. Entry pages are how people got into your website. And that's whether they actually typed in a particular URL or they Googled and Google sent them to these pages. In the case of this particular customer, there were 26 separate pages, which were the entry or doorway pages for this website. And we're looking at the top 10. Why would this be of any value? I was

going to ask you that. Well, this entry page has so much value because it says how they're finding you. And it actually can give you some insight about how to do your landing pages and things like that. But if people are like this particular client, they're finding them from the sports page. So, if they may want to focus on, if they want to bring in more clients that way, they could focus on the sports page or tweaking the sports page to attract that particular clientele. And more sports content. Yeah, it may put some more sports content. If they're finding you from, most of the people are going to, most of your visitors, I would say, will visit you or find you from your home page. And I think that's true for most particular businesses. But there may be an instance where you may find that they're finding you from your contact us page. And I'm sure there's websites out there where that happens. And if I'm searching for sports information, and every time I go to you, I'm going to your contact page, there's a problem. I can give you an example of how you might end up on a contact us page. For instance, Joe the Plumber, if your website was designed without search engine optimization in mind, and the contact us page had your address, and your address is in Houston, and then I search for plumbing Houston, your contact us page may be the only page that has Houston, the word Houston. So that could come up. So you could look at the statistic and say, wow, everybody's coming to my website from the contact us page. Two things, call eWebStyle and find out why, and get it fixed. And something that you can do yourself is make sure that your contact us page is compelling. So, you know, work with what you got. Turn this lemon into lemonade and say, okay, well, if everyone is going to come in on this page, let's redesign the page, let's make sure the graphics

are nicer because, you know, contact us pages usually aren't that sweet, and let's make that page pop and get a call to action and make sure our phone number is on it. Maybe we didn't have the phone number on it before, now we do. And make sure you've got a testimonial on there because people really enjoy it and are engaged by testimonials. So that's an example of where entry pages could be of real benefit. Now there's also exit pages. We talked about entry pages. Now how do they leave your website and why that's important to know how people leave your website? Well, it would be for the converse. You know, in what I just described and the tweaks that you might make to the contact us page, you know, if somebody gets to the contact us page and there's no way to contact you, it's just a blank page, then they may bounce. And if they bounce, then that's going to be their exit page. And so the number one exit page, you want to visit that page. Now this is an interesting situation because with this particular client, the sports page is also the entry and exit page. The number one entry page and number one exit page. And that may not be a bad thing. It just may be, you know, this is a local kind of directory that has local sports, local high school and junior high sports. So, you know, this is probably just, you know, fathers waking up and coming in and want to see how his son's school district is doing. And he reads, he gets his information and he's done and he goes on somewhere else. So it's not necessarily a bad thing, but you definitely want to be visiting the number one exit pages so that you can understand, you know, maybe there's something on there that's offensive. Maybe there's something that's not clear. Maybe there's a big exit button. Leave my website. Click here. Yeah. And that's the only thing there. So that would create a

significant exit page. You know, I also think an exit page is a good opportunity to, like you said, you can make tweaks to it. It's a good opportunity to find out why people are leaving, fix it, and you might be able to keep them there a little bit longer. You might be able to tweak a little something here and keep the people interested in your information or your products and services. Right, right, exactly. So the next section is top 30, in this case, of 2,846 total sites. And really what that is is they're calling a site somebody who visited you. So if you're with Comcast and a specific area of Comcast, you have a specific identifier and you're visiting that web page, then that's defined as a site visit. And so that's different from what we just covered earlier, like IE or someone visiting me from Mozilla or Google's Chrome. Correct. And that's a user agent. Yes, it is different from the user agent. Let's see. So the next is top 10 of total size. So here, and this is by sites. So, again, we don't use that that much. It can be interesting. And maybe you're in Houston and you find out mostly people in Dallas are finding you. Or I can see right here there's ConocoPhillips. So somebody at ConocoPhillips visits this website regularly. Get to work. Yeah, I can get to work. I can almost guarantee you're not in web development and you're not doing work-related research on this local directory page. Exactly. The next one is really important and it is the top 30 referrers. And those are the web pages that referred people to you. Now, this typically we find... Go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to ask, is that similar to a link? It's the answer. It's the result in terms of statistics of a link to your web page. What I was going to say is typically our customers, especially our SEO customers, their biggest referrers are the search engines. But that doesn't have to be true.

If you're Joe the Plumber and you really haven't done any optimization and you have a couple buddies who have some links to your website and maybe they've got links to, you know, the time you cracked your skull video that you have on your website and you get a lot of referring traffic from your buddies, well, then those would be the number one referrers. So a referrer can be a search engine. It can be any other website. And remember, that's different than host or user. But any other website that links to your web page and actually sends you traffic. And it's only when they send you traffic that it shows up on these reports. Okay, so you can link to someone, but if no one actually clicks on that link, that does not count as a referrer. Exactly. I got you now. Exactly. The next one is something we really like here because we do search engine optimization. And this is, in this case, it says top 20 of 1,505 search strings. And we're going to have to pick up this podcast next time, but let me finish this one. So this gives the top 20 search strings that were used on a search engine to get traffic to your site. Okay. And, I mean, you should, by now you should understand there's a lot of value in knowing what search strings people are using to find you. Because that's, I mean, that's pretty much how you want to start your PPC and your SEO, by going over your keywords. Or one of the first things you're going to do is go over your search strings or keywords. And how people are already finding you is really valuable. And then as you start doing search engine optimization, you want to be checking them and making sure that, actually making sure that we're doing our job. So you can check those statistics yourself. And the other value, and again, we sit down with our clients on a three or six month basis and we say, okay, here's

your top search terms. When I go, and they're coming from Google. When I go to Google and I type in Joe the Plumber Houston. And I come, Google shows me this one page and I come to this page and, whoa, it's your Contact Us page. Well, we look at that Contact Us page. We know how they got there. If they got there by Joe the Plumber, we better make sure it says Joe the Plumber somewhere so they know they're at the right spot. Again, back to the testimonials, make that page look good. So really follow the process of your top keywords and make that target website, that doorway webpage, the right instrument for the way that customers got to you. And we talked a little bit about that in the last podcast with Patrick Wanus and how people arriving at the website were probably not looking for a CD. They were actually looking for a hypnotherapist to work with one-on-one. And so we removed the CD title from the first section of the page so that people would stay longer. Because his CDs are valuable and can work better than an actual hypnotherapist. And so we want them to stay on the page long enough to read a little bit of information and make that decision for themselves. So that's an example of where this is good. So we're going to stop there. Next time we'll finish off this. We're almost done, but we'll finish off the final couple of details of WebElyzer. And we're going to get into Google Analytics Secrets. So today, just to recap, we went over WebElyzer. We went over the details of WebElyzer. So we really explained what everything means on WebElyzer. We even learned a little bit today, both you and I, Paul. We covered all the details of WebElyzer and how they can be of benefit to you and to your website and to your search engine optimization campaign. So we hope you learned a lot. We hope you join us next time. Remember, if you've got any

e-mail comments, if you're really excited that we learned something today or happy that we're going to be updating our blog with correct information, send us that information. You can send that to podcast at e-webstyle.com. Until the next podcast, I'm Chris Burrus. And this is Paul Hanson. And we'll see you next time.