As a tribute to our hard-working, blue-collar neighborhood, we’ve spelled out our name on the wall in our reception area with letters that come from a different business in Nashville’s Melrose area.

Ah, but which businesses? Let us know what you think on our Facebook page.

Google Alerts is a great tool to help you stay up to date on the latest news, technologies and trends. Another great benefit is that it helps you monitor what your competition is doing along with monitoring what people are saying about your business. With Google Alerts, you get an instant email notification whenever something happens in your niche or topics that matter to you. Best of all it is very easy to set up!

To set it up simply go to http://www.google.com/alerts and enter the topic that you wish to monitor. Then select how often you want to be updated and where to send the email notification.

Your SEO keywords are the words and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site in search engines. It is important to do research on how people are looking for the products, services and information you offer so it is easy for them to find you. You can test out your keywords with Google and get statistics on their popularity that will help you figure out the best keywords to go for.

Developing a list of keywords is by far one of the most important steps in any search engine optimization process. Your keywords are then used for developing your content for your site so it is well worth the time to ensure your SEO keywords are highly relevant to your audience and their searches.

How to pick the right keywords

If your keyword strategy is only targeting the highly popular and competitive terms, your odds of success are small because you are competing with so many big companies for these words. The best keyword strategy would actually be to target keyword phrases that are more with medium popularity and where there is little competition. Here are a few tips on how to pick the best keywords for your site.

1. Use phrases not words— Let’s say your company sells dog collars. Instead of putting your keywords as dog and collars, group it together as one phrase. Keywords are meant to describe what you sell or offer, so your goal should be to describe them as best as possible.
2. Better description of content— The main thing you want to avoid is having keywords for products or content your site does not include. While people will come to your site they will quickly become frustrated because your site isn’t relevant and leave.
3. Use repetition but don’t overdo it— While you don’t want to repeat the same keywords over and over again—for example dog collars, puppy collars, pet collars— it doesn’t hurt if the phrase as a whole is varied. An example of varied phrases is dog collars and dog collar comparison. Remember though to have only keywords that are relevant to your content.

I have my keywords now what?

After you have researched and decided on your keywords, the next step is to implement them in your content. Here is a list of places you could put them:

• Using the keyword in the title of the page
• Using the keyword in the URL
• Using the keyword, and variations throughout the page copy
• Using the keyword in the meta tags, especially the meta description
• Using the keyword in any image file paths and in the images' alt text
• Using the keyword as the anchor text in links back to the page from elsewhere on the site

The main thing you want to remember with your keyword usage though is to not overdo it. “Keyword stuffing” is when you load your webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate your site’s ranking in Google. Google and other search engines actually penalize you for this overuse of keywords and can remove you from searches. As a general rule focus on creating useful content that your keywords fit appropriately into.

Knowing what your visitors do when they come to your site is equally important to knowing your website’s traffic and demographics. Here are some key features that Google Analytics tells you about your visitors behavior.

1. What pages do they view?— On the Dashboard, you can see the average amount of pages each visitor views. Also you can see which pages are the most viewed by going to “Content” then “Top Content” on your left-hand menu then viewing the full report. It’s always interesting to see which pages are seen the most and it can also help you structure your website correctly to make sure your key pages are featured the most.
2. What is their average time on your site?— Average time on your site is always important because the longer they stay on your site the more of a reputable source you appear to be as well as they are more likely to buy your products/services. View this statistic on your Dashboard.
3. Did they find the information they were looking for?— This can be a little tricky to figure out but your bounce rate comes into play a lot here. If your keywords don’t properly represent your site and your visitor comes in expecting something else they are likely to leave quickly. This increases your bounce rate so the less relevant your information is to your keywords the more likely you are to have a high bounce rate and low time on site amount. Check out this statistic as well on the Dashboard.

In my last post I broke down Analytics traffic. Now we are going to focus on demographics and what you can find out about your customer through your website’s analytics.

1. Who are the people coming to your site?— You can find out a lot about your customers by seeing what links they come in from, where they are located and what browser they are using. Find out about the first two in my previous post (link to previous post). To see what browser they are using, click on “Visitors” and then “Browser Capabilities” in the left-hand menu. It gives you a great breakdown of how many visits per browser and also has a pie chart to show you the information. Although it’s important to make sure your website works on every browser, it is very important to make sure it works properly on the top browsers your visitors use.
2. Are they buying your services/products?— Obviously your goal is not only to get the consumer to your site but also to carry out a certain action. You can set up a goal for your site by going to “Goals” in the left-hand menu. You can also set up a funnel. A funnel is a path to get them to reach your goal. So for example if your goal is to get them to buy a product, your funnel may be a thank-you page so you can monitor how many people complete the process with their shopping cart.
3. Are they new or returning customers?— With any business it’s great to have a balance of new vs returning customers. Keep up to date on your balance by clicking on “New vs Returning” in the “Visitors” panel.
4. How did they view your site?— Along with seeing what browser your visitors are using (see question 1), you can also see if they viewed your site on a mobile device. Go to “Visitors” then “Mobile” to see the statistics. Your site should be mobile-ready already but if your numbers of mobile users are high you especially should be thinking of catering toward this different platform.