Let's Do Website Analytics

Let’s do website analytics! Every good website developer, amateur or professional, needs a strategy for website analytics. One of the big topics that was covered during the recent Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2010 Conference dealt with making better use of analytics. It is amazing how much data can be overlooked by not taking time to dig deep into the information provided. It is also even more amazing how many websites use no analytics at all. Often, a simple look at the source code of a website will reveal no html code for analytics.
One level of doing good website analytics is to make note of the websites that are referring traffic. It is advisable to develop a spreadsheet of those websites, and make note of every time a referral happens. If a website is still small, it may be fine to do this monthly. Place the names of the month and year across the horizontal grid of the spreadsheet, and the website names on the vertical grid.
Another good tactic is to note the number of pages from within a specific website. Certain websites may be feeding traffic from multiple pages. Note the pages that produce the most traffic, and try to target material toward that specific page. In a kind of reverse fashion, the levels of pages on any website should also be watched, to see which pages are getting the traffic. Many people fail to look past the traffic that is hitting the home page.
These tactics can really help a website developer understand where traffic is coming from. However, there is still another layer in this social media era that needs to be considered, if one is to do good website analytics. The actual people that are sending traffic to a website also needs to be noted. Sometimes, on sites like Twitter, people are clicking on a link to a specific website that was placed on a particular User’s Twitter page by retweet, direct message etc. Good analytic software like Google Analytics will be able to show the specific User page that was used as the referral. Hence, you know the specific user, because the referral came from their User Twitter Page.
Once specific social media websites have been identified as referring sites, it becomes advantageous to do research on how wide a market those sites reach. A specific referral to any given website might have come from a Twitter User Page with only 40 or 50 followers. But another referring page might have 8000 followers. Finding ways to frequently target the large Twitter page can help drive traffic to websites. To get a start on this strategy, try a website like Klout.com. There are others as well. A strategy for website analytics needs to involve, as a minimum, these layers of analysis.
Raymond Province is an IT Programmer in the health care industry. He frequently writes about search engine optimization, website development, and writing good website content. You can reach him at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.

SEO Questions That Make Me Crazy

Slainte to all my readers here at Celtic Ozark Solutions. My name is Ray Province. I work here at Celtic Ozark Solutions, specializing in search engine optimization rich content for websites. But I am also passionate about doing good search engine optimization. I will, no doubt, be a life long student.
I want to focus this edition of my blog on some of the questions that still make me crazy. These can be hard questions to answer, but I will do my best. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
The first of these questions is why my website does not rank number one in search engine optimization. That’s a fair question to ask. First of all, my website has not aged enough yet. Second, I always put working on my website as a low priority anymore. I make sure I have my client’s work done first. Then, I come back and work on my site.
The biggest reason, though, has to do with the name of my company. Celtic Ozark Solutions. When you are searching for SEO related topics, you will typically expect to find those words in the name of the company. SEO Book is one of my favorites. To be frank, though, I don’t care. I have always wanted to own a company named Celtic Ozark Solutions. So, there ya go. The bottom line is, I am getting good business anyway, doing many other things right.
The second of the questions that make me crazy has to do with the fact that people think I should be working for Google, in order to understand how to do search engine optimization. That is simply not the case. I recently did an article on Design, Build, and Validate that talks about the process of how I manage to move people up the rankings with SEO. It is an experimental process that measures results. You can learn to do anything that way.
The other issue is that, if I worked for Google, I would not be allowed to have a company working on SEO. Pay per click is too big a money maker for them.
These are just a couple of those questions. When I am feeling philosophical again, I’ll write on some more. In the meantime, I need to go back to work.
Ray Province is an IT Programmer in the healthcare industry, and owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions, a company that specializes in SEO, SEO rich content, and website development. You can reach him at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.

8th Annual Celtic Heritage Festival 7 Highland Games

The 8th annual Celtic Heritage Festival & Highland Games will be held at Buffalo, MO on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 10th and 11th, 2010. It is one of the premier Celtic Hertiage events in the Ozarks every year. Here is the scoop on this year's festival.

The festivities will begin Friday evening at 6:00 PM with the Calling of the Clans. There will be plenty of entertainment to boot on the main stage that evening. There will be Clan tents, vendors, food, and entertainment all evening. The Friday night activities are a real deal. they are free to the public, and will give you a chance to purchase their advance tickets for Saturday's events.

Purchasing advance tickets will save you $2.00 at the gate, so take advantage of the free Friday night festivities also. There are some new activities and events this year. New is the Scottish Sword Show with cultural information about sword fighting, the archery group are returning also. There are also new vendors and clan tents too. Don't forget the Highland Games on Saturday, beginning at 9:00 AM It is always a pleasure to cheer on your favorite Highland athletic. We look forward to seeing you there.

Ozarks Weather Has Been Hot

The last month of Ozarks weather has been hot. Several summertime heat records have been broken. In Springfield, we have bumped along 100 degrees for several weeks. It sure makes me wish we had the summer weather of the last couple of years.

Today, we have yet another heat advisory and warning. So, there are several things to be on the look for today in the Ozarks. Try to confine outdoor work to the early morning and late evening. The temps are at least coooler then. Be on the look out for heat exhaustion, in yourself and others. Drink lots of water and little alcohol. (Sorry, even the Irish/Scots cut back on this hot a day!) Also, watch pets. Make sure they have water. We even put out an extra water dish for the animals that kind of roam our part of little Fair Grove, Missouri.

Please also, if you have older family members, check on them a lot. Many of these folks do not run air conditioning in the summer. They can dehydrate just as quickly. Ozarks weather has been hot, but we can beat the issues by sticking together.

Watch your gardens also. They really need water this time of year. We have been lucky to get a little rain the last two days. That really helps, cause plants love the warmer water temp. Cold water tends to shock vegetables.

Stay cool, fellow Ozarkians!

Ray Province, the Celtic Ozarkian
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