Google Calendar – A great productivity tool

I mentioned Google Mail not so long ago and explained how it has really helped me out. Checking all my email accounts from one central place wherever I am is immensely useful. On the same theme, I just have to mention Google Calendars. This is a very simple, easy to use calendar program and I think it can really help anyone.

It is full integrated with your Google account, so you do not need another password or anything like that. By default it sets up a personal calendar for you. Planning your own day and making notes of appointment times, travel plans etc is great. This is nothing new to calendars. The true potential for this lies in the ability to create a number of different calendars and share them.

Keep organised

You can create a different calendar for each project you are involved in. This calendar can be shared with everyone involved in the project. You can even give other people the access level to invite more people, edit events etc. Already this is useful. By having a system like this, any conflicting schedules should stand out instantly!

Keeping different calendars for different projects prevents you from getting too involved with any one project. It allows you to step back and see how much time something is taking up. The world revolves around compromise, and this tool should help you decide where you can compromise.

Shared Calendars

On a more personal note, having your own schedule planned in, and shared amongst your friends makes arranging a get together so much easier. You can instantly see who is in town. Another great use could be to create a calendar with all your family’s birthdays entered. Share this amongst your family and I am sure they would appreciate it. Do the same again for your friends.

Public Calendars

There are loads of different public calendars you might want to add. I am terrible for knowing when public holidays, mother’s day and that type of thing are. So I added a UK public holidays calendar. Now I should be able to keep on top of things. Other popular calendars involve film releases, TV show releases, musicians and bands gig schedules, politicians public appearances (This has to be hot right now following the presidential candidates) and many many more.

There you have it – another great productivity tool that I highly recommend. Give it a shot and let me know what you think. For those who use outlook, I believe it synchronises really well with outlook, but I have not experimented. Let me know if your a Google Calendars fan, and any tips or tricks you have. If you prefer something else, let me know what!

What is SEO continued – Off Page SEO

First of all we introduced SEO and explained what it was all about. Then we covered On Page SEO

which involved everything you can do to your own website to increase it’s visibility to search engines. Now we need to cover Off Page SEO. There is really only one thing to do when we talk about Off Page SEO and that is link building. It sounds simple and it is simple, but there is a lot more to it than simply amassing a load of incoming links.

Quantity versus Quality

Quantity is of course good. You need a large number of incoming links in order to rank higher. However, links carry authority and because of this, a single link from a respected site with a high authority will provide considerably more benefit than a hundred links from new sites with little authority. At this point things might be sounding a little abstract but fear not, we will discuss this in more detail.

How is quality measured?

As Google is by far the largest search engine at this point, we will focus on them. Google gives each page a rating between 0 and 10 where 10 is the highest value. The higher the value the more authority your site has. This value is known as the PageRank. Your PageRank is different for every page in your website. For all intents and purposes when you link to someone it is seen as you giving a vote of confidence to that page. PageRank is calculated by looking at the number and quality of the incoming links to a page. Google does not disclose the exact mechanism used in order to avoid people cheating the system. The algorithm changes constantly too, in order to keep up to date with any changes.

The system is more complex than this though. It also looks at the anchor text used in links and the relevance of the two websites. If a website in a specific niche links to a website in the same niche, it is worth more than a recommendation from a totally different niche. Google provide only hints and guidelines on how the system works, no actual details.

Your PageRank is important because it dictates your ranking on search engine results pages. We all know that when we search for anything, we tend to only visit the top few sites because they are in theory the most relevant to our search terms. As a rule Google is pretty good at getting this right, hence it has just a huge market share. As people using the Google search engine, we trust their judgment.

Not all links pass authority

As awareness of how to improve search rankings becomes more popular, and the search engines results pages become more competitive, link spam became a problem. A popular example would be where someone posts a comment on your blog with a link to their’s. They are doing this merely to improve their own rankings as opposed to adding value to your discussion. In order to combat this type of issue Google introduced the NoFollow tag. To use it you simply put rel=”nofollow” inside your hyperlink tags. This then tells the search engines not to pass on any authority. Google says this is not a negative vote, just a way to combat spam.

Buying links

A common practice to rapidly build up a large number of links is to buy them. The morals of this are discussed endlessly but the bottom line is that Google finds it unacceptable and penalises any website found to be buying links or selling paid links. They are pretty good at detecting who is buying links too. Many SEO firms will use the link buying technique to get results for their customers. Is this short sighted though? SEO firms need results now that they can show their customers in order to validate the bill they are about to give them.

As far as I am concerned it is a much better use of your time to develop good long term links than taking any risk buy buying links. The problem is that so many people still do buy links, and with competition in many industries being so fierce, if you do not, the chances are your page will be nowhere to be seen on the search engine results pages. Gyutae Park over at Winning the Web had an interesting discussion about whether buying links is worth it or not after he posted about the pros and cons of link buying . It seems to me the buy your way to the top mentality is very much rooted in the old school way of doing business. The problem is that online we are heading towards a more community and collaborative based approach.

Selling links

For a good while now selling text ads has been a good money maker online. Many bloggers make good money each month from selling ads. The problem however was that those buying the ads were buying them for the SEO reasons as opposed to for the actual advertising benefit in many instances. This is no longer permitted by Google and those found selling links get punished. The solution has been to add the NoFollow tag to all paid adverts. For those buying the links for the advertising purposes, this is a minor downside, but for those buying the links for SEO purposes, it has pretty much made text ads redundant. The market for text ads has been hurt badly by this change, as has many webmasters income. If your website is big enough, you may choose to ignore Google, and live without them. Whilst possible, this is not advisable.

Building links organically and Linkbaiting

Building links organically is a fairly passive process. You create your content and develop your readership in the hope that people will find it of interest and link to it. Discussion does happen between websites, and people frequently post lists of links to items they recommend reading. It is a slow process to build links naturally and because of this marketers have developed techniques to speed it up. Linkbait is content created with the purpose of attracting a large number of incoming links. People who master the technique can really benefit with great search engine rankings, and ultimately traffic which is the key to making money online.

Linkbaiting

Linkbait is designed to gain many backlinks. To do this it needs to be something that people will find useful or interesting, and want to share. Typically most linkbait involves creating resource lists, data, breaking news, an application or tool, something funny or quirky, something controversial, or simply an amazing piece of writing. Lets examine these in more detail.

Resource lists

These are very popular nowadays as they are a great way of doing well in search engines. In order to impress you will need to create something special and it will unfortunately take a lot of hard work and effort. A year ago a top ten list might have worked, but now people create resource lists with hundreds of items on them. The reason they do well is that people can see the value and bookmark them for future reference, then recommend their readers do so too.

Data

Tests and experiments with detailed write ups and data can perform well. It is key that it is unique and new research which covers a topic many people are interested in. The generic example is testing a number of spam protection systems a number of times and providing detailed reviews and data.

Breaking news

If you are the first to break some news then you will be referenced by everyone else. The bigger the story the more links you will receive. This technique works especially well for time sensitive subject matters so performs well with political and celebrity blogs and news sites where breaking a scandal before anyone else can result in thousands of backlinks and overnight success.

An application or tool

Create a new tool that thousands or better yet millions of people will find useful and you will get a lot of traffic. We all love tools which make our life easier and are willing to give anyone who creates one a massive shout out. This type of linkbait can be the defining feature of your blog and bring a constant stream of traffic everyday for a long time to come.

Something quirky or funny

This type of thing is hard to create. You never know what will do well and go viral or what will be a total non event. Think of the star wars kid, or any other of the hundreds of emails you get with funny pictures in. If you start one of these trends that go viral you can gain an enormous amount of backlinks and traffic. Like I said though, this is a very hit and miss technique.

Something controversial

The web is laced with controversy so you are going to have to pull something special out of the bag here. The right subject matter, marketed in the right way can be very beneficial to your website. Controversy has a unique way of bringing people out of silence to put forth their opinion. There will be people both attacking and defending the subject feeding off each other. The chances are in most cases people will just dismiss it as yet another person just trying to be controversial.

An amazing piece of writing

Probably by far the hardest type of linkbait. Writing something that most people will find to be amazing takes some talent. I do not believe that this is something that you can really just do. Instead you should try to always aim to make your work amazing and valuable then one day you might just nail it.

Enough for now

I think that is enough to get you started and thinking about what you need to do. Let me know how you get on and if you feel something needs adding or editing – do not hesitate, just drop me an email or comment here. If you feel this is of value, then help me out by giving it at stumble, digg, tweet, or whatever social network you use. The share this option below has links to all the main ones.

The importance of analytics

We all want our website to be working hard for us. We talk about SEO and the importance of it. We spend money on advertising campaigns. We spend hours generating content. Despite all of this we may see no evidence of progress. We may not be getting any more sales or even leads than normal but whilst that lets us know something is not right, it does not allow us to drill down any further. The solution is tracking our site statistics, known as analytics.

How do we track?

If we are asking this sort of basic question, then I would suggest we look at some basic solutions. The first option is to use the statistics provided by your web host. These are typically part of a package such as Awstats or Webalizer and can be found under Web/FTP Stats on your hosting control panel. Different packages will provide more or less detailed reports and some will be more graphic than others. Most people prefer the simple, prettier, more graphic option as it is easier on the eyes. One thing about analytics is that it can be as detailed and complex as you are willing to go. More about that later.

Another great option for tracking stats is using Google’s free tool called Google Analytics. This is my choice. It works by placing a small piece of JavaScript on the bottom of your page then it produces very pretty stats. This tool can be used to monitor basic stats with very little effort, but it also has the power to monitor more complex stats. It can be used to see conversion rates and also integrates with Google Adwords. There are many different analytics packages out there, some are free some are not.

What to track – the basics

Visits – This is the total number of visits
Visitors – This is the number of unique visitors. It is the number of visits adjusted for repeat visitors.
Page views – This is the total number of pages your visitors have viewed. In advertising terms, this would be the number of impressions.
Pages/Visit – This is how many pages the average visitor looks at. If this is close to one, it means people are not exploring your site much. It is the number ofpage views divided by the number of visits.
Bounce rate – The percentage of visitors who leave without visiting another page.
Average time on site – Pretty self explanatory. If this is low then maybe you need to rework your site design. Make it easier for visitors to find something of interest in order to keep them on your site.
% new visits – This one is an interesting one. On the one hand, new visits represents growth, and new people discovering you, on the other hand, you want a loyal number of repeat visitors.
Traffic sources – Where is your traffic from. This is great for seeing which advertising campaigns or links are providing you with the most traffic. If your paying for a campaign and getting little or no traffic, you need to work out what is wrong.
Content overview – What is popular? Some content fairs a lot better than others. Can you see any patterns? If you are working with social media, finding a format which works well, then replicating it can be a very powerful way of gaining traffic.

What else can we do?

Analytics can provide you with a lot of data which may be useful or useless depending on your site. It is possible to see the country of origin, the operating system and the Internet browser your visitors are using. The country of origin is useful for determining what kind of adverts would work on your website. If your readership is from the US, adverts targeted towards Americans will do better than those targeted towards your home country. If your website is about cooking and recipe sharing, information on browsers and operating systems is of no use whatsoever.

For more complex uses of Google Analytics I suggest you read Patrick Altoft’s guide to Advanced Analytics . Here he explains how to track exit clicks, downloads, sales and other valuable data. You can see how these things would be beneficial.

Conclusion

Businesses love measuring performance and in many cases it is hard to create useful data which can measure performance in a meaningful way. Online we do not have this problem. The only problem is the limited knowledge of the power of analytics and how to use them. A little time invested in setting up these systems could result in great benefits.

Think how hard it must be for companies to measure the response to an advert in a traditional medium such as print, radio or event TV. Online we have easy access to this data. Take advantage of it!

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