Google Analytics is a website tracking service that you can install for free on your website, this service when installed will monitor your visitors providing you with vital information on how many visitors your website is getting. The information collected is anonymous and you have no way of tracking down individual users however the data the service collects is still incredibly useful and can help you tailor your efforts to ensure your website performs as well as it can.

With the data being anonymous you do not need to worry about data protection and securing the data as this is all handled by Google you can get on with looking at the trends in the data collected and improving your website. To get started you will need to have a Google account to sign into the analytics service you can do this by visiting www.google.com/analytics

Installing Google Analytics

Installing analytics on your website is easy if you know basic HTML, if not i would suggest getting a website development company or website developer to install the code for you to ensure it is set up correctly. To install the code you first need to add a new profile to your analytics account, each account can have up to 100 different websites per account but most people will only need to keep track of a handful of websites – web developers however should be keeping tabs on every single website they create and these can require more then one account.

To add a new website to your profile click on the admin button in the top right of the screen, you will then be taken to the admin area of the site, this area will then give you the option of adding a new website profile – you need to click on ‘ + New Account’ this will then bring up the page that lets you add a new website to your profile. Fill in the fields as requested and press next / accept.

On this next page you will be shown some java script code, this section of code is unique to your website and is how we will install the analytics service on your website, you need to copy this code and paste it into your websites head section just before the closing head tag. Make sure to install this snippet of code on every single page on your website or it will not track your visitors accurately, if your website is running on a CMS such as WordPress you may be able to insert the code into the template files and the CMS will install the code on all of your pages automatically for you. With WordPress the template file you require is the header (header.php) template file, if you paste in the code to this file all pages on your WordPress website will be covered by the analytics service including all pages created after installing the code.

What information can i get from Google Analytics?

With the tracking code installed your website will start feeding information on your visitors to the analytics service,  the data on the analytics service will always be 24 hours out of date so visitors on your website now wont show until tomorrow. With the data coming in we will be able to look at some very useful statistics they key one being number of visitors – knowing how many people are looking at your website is fundamental to knowing if your website is successful or not. No matter what your website is for from a shopping site to an information website if its not being visited then its not a successful websites knowing the visitor numbers will let you know if you need to make improvements or not.

Simply logging into the analytics service will show you the visitor numbers for the past month, you can change the time period by clicking in the top right and adjusting the settings. You can use this information to look at visitor numbers and how they change over a period of time, for example if you introduce a new service or run an advert you will be able to look back on the visitor numbers to see what the effect was on the number of visitors your website received.

Other useful information that you can get from the tracking is the devices that people are accessing your website from, this includes how many people are viewing your website on a mobile device. This information can be used to see if your website is being accessed by lots of mobile visitors and if so give you an indication to if you should look into responsive website design to cater for your mobile visitors.

With all of the pages that visitors are viewing being recorded there is another useful bit of information we can get from the recorded statistics, by looking at which pages are the most popular on your website you will know the content that is attracting the visitors. With this knowledge you will be able to tailor the content of your website to target your activities to maximize the usefulness of the website to the users which in turn will increase the number of visitors your website gets.

or put more simply it will let you know which topics to blog about – whats the point in blogging about topics no one wants to read?

Blog post by Alex Wells
Working as a Website developer I love nothing more then working waist deep in code, I have specific interests in PHP and WordPress development but mostly working with local businesses to provide them with a website that meets their needs. Contact me if you have a project in mind and would like to get an input from an experienced website developer.

If you have a website or are in the process of starting a website development project you will probably of read or heard about keywords, especially when it comes to the websites SEO strategy but what are they and why are they important?

Put simply keywords refer to the search terms people enter into Google (or other search engines), but how does this affect you? By optimizing your website for a specific key word lets say – website development Harlow – you increase the likelihood of your website appearing in the search results and the better your website is optimized the higher in the search results your website will be.

It goes without saying that the higher up in the Google search results your website appears the more visitors it will get and the more money / interest it will generate, so it is vital you get your keywords in place and your website optimized for them want some figures? take a look at the chart below.

A chart showing the benefits of high ranks in Google source

So now you can see what keywords are and their benefits lets look at keywords and how we should choose them for a website project.

The first step in the process is to come up with a list of keywords you want your website to come up in the search results for when people enter them into Google, this list is just a starting point and in the next few steps we will add and remove keywords so don’t worry if your list looks totally different at the end of the process! It is important however that you try and cover all areas of your website from the start – I find it easier to take the keywords through the processes at the same time rather then having to go back and repeat the process to include newly added keywords.

Lets use this website as an example, it covers website development and anything to do with running and maintaining a website. It also acts as a ‘portfolio’ keeping people up to date with everything i am up to as a website developer. So now lets look at possible keywords for this website:

• website development
• website developer
• WordPress
• Bishop’s Stortford website development
• search engine optimization

I am keeping things simple but would suggest you start with 25 – 30 main keywords that you are going to actively target, put any others on a secondary list that you can use as a filler when your main keywords dont fit the page you are working on.

With the keywords in place the next step is to look at how many people are searching for those keywords, a keyword that no one is searching for is not going to gain your website any visitors and will be a waste of time optimizing your website for – that’s why keyword research is so important it lets us know which of the keywords people are actually using when they make searches. Another benefit of this step is that people may be using search terms you might not have thought of and running your keywords through the research steps you will identify these keywords and add them to your list.

The first step of this process is to make a note of your keywords in a program such as excel, simply list them all in the first column as shown.

The next step in the process is to run the keywords through a very useful and free tool that comes part of the Google Adwords system, if you have not already done so sign up for a Google account and then visit this website: http://adwords.google.com

When the page loads select the ‘Tools and Analysis’ menu option and then the ‘Keyword Tool’ option. copy and paste your keywords into the ‘Word or Phase’ box at the top of the page and press search, Google will then give you back some information on your chosen keywords containing the estimate on competition (this is for Google Adwords) and the number of global and local monthly searches. Global is world wide searches and local refers to your country.

From the screen shot you can see that the tool is also suggesting some alternative keywords this is useful for identifying alternative search terms that you may not have thought of, its worth adding them to our list but make sure they are relevant to not only your website but also your target audience for example ‘real estate’ is an American term and not relevant for UK based websites (unless you are targeting Americans but you get the idea).

What we need to record is the information on local searches – if your targeting your website world wide its beneficial to record the global searches as well but for this exercise we will only take the local searches.

From the results we can see that there is some issues with our keywords, to start with Bishop’s Stortford website development is not showing any results – this means that no one is searching for that phrase in Google – or the search volumes are so low Google does not record them. This is normal caused by a to specific keyword you may get someone using it every now and then but there is no value in optimising the website for it.

The other keyword that’s an issue is WordPress with such high levels of searches this keyword is likely to have allot of competition for it which will make ranking well for it much more difficult, we will leave it in for now as we will be exploring the issue in more detail next. But first i am going to make my other problematic keyword less specific to do this look through the suggested kewords the tool provided for us and select another one that does have people searching for it i am going to replace it with WordPress blog because its something else I want to rank well for.

Now we have our list of refined keywords the next step is to look at the number of other people trying to rank well for the search terms, there is no sure fire way of defining this but this method gives us a good indication, what we will be doing is asking Google to search for all websites that contain the keyword within the title of any of the pages on that site. This method gives a good indication because if websites are trying to rank for a keyword one of the best methods is to have the keyword as part of the title on your site, its not perfect but it will do.

To run this type of search open google and in the search box type allintitle: followed by your key word – for example allintitle: website development Google will then return only websites that have that specific keyword in the titles of the website.

The information we are interested in is the number of search results that Google return, this is shown just under the search box and above the first results in this case it is 69 results. repeat this for all of the keywords on your list making a note of the results in another column. What we are looking for is keywords with large volumes of searches but with low numbers of websites optimised for it, these keywords will be easier to rank well for due to less competition and as a result you will get a better return on your investment.

Looking at our results the keyword Website Developer is a good one because it has a decent number of monthly searches but the amount of competition is relatively low, on the other hand the keyword WordPress may have a large number of searches but due to the high level of competition ranking for that keyword is going to be harder and require more time / investment.

With larger lists it is a good idea to order them by highest to lowest and identify the valuable keywords by highlighting them in different colours – I use green for good keywords orange and hen red for bad.

Now we are at the end of the process we should have a list of keywords that identifies the valuable keywords that we want to use on our website to maximise the effect of our SEO efforts, With all things SEO this is an ongoing process and you may have to repeat it several times to filter down the list to the best possible keywords.

Blog post by Alex Wells
Working as a Website developer I love nothing more then working waist deep in code, I have specific interests in PHP and WordPress development but mostly working with local businesses to provide them with a website that meets their needs. Contact me if you have a project in mind and would like to get an input from an experienced website developer.

An example of a QR code

This blog post is going to look at the uses of QR codes on websites, firstly what is a QR code? QR codes are small squares of smaller boxes that users can scan using their smart phones (iPhone, Blackberry and android for example), when they scan the QR code they are given some information – this can be anything from a URL (website link) to a phone number. QR codes work in much the same way as bar codes which are on the back of just about every product we buy.

In recent years the QR code has become increasingly popular as public awareness grows, at Simpsons Creative (a creative agency based in Bishop’s Stortford where i work) more and more of our clients are asking for them on business cards and on posters and other printed media. This is a trend that is being repeated across the country with QR codes popping up all over the place from Tesco on their fruit and veg stalls to 3 Mobiles window display.

But what about using QR codes on a website? with QR codes on printed media such as business cards the objective is clear to get people to visit your website but when they are already on your site what benefits will a QR code have?

Example of a business card with a QR code on (example is from Simpsons Creative)

Using a QR code on website print outs

The first use of QR codes on your website we will be looking at is using a QR code on any printed pages from your website. This means that when a user prints out a page from your website the website will automatically insert a QR code into the printed page. the benefits to the user is the fact that they can locate the page again quickly using their mobile phones or even a webcam using a laptop or desktop computer. This means that users can get back to the original source of a print out quickly and easily – without needing to type in a long URL, this would be ideal for students and others doing allot of research.

Another benefit of this QR code implementation is that if one person prints out an article they can share the source easily with others, taking a student at university as an example if one student or even the teacher locates a useful resource they can share it with their fellow students by letting them scan in the QR code.

Implementing this is as simple as inserting a QR code inside a div tag that has a class set up (lets call it .printonly) this class is then set to be hidden so that when users visit the website normally they do not see the QR code, however in the print style sheet of a website this class can then be set to visible so that the QR code only appears when users print out a page from the website.

A tip for WordPress users out there is that you can automatically generate QR codes for your posts using this bit of template code: http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-automatically-generate-a-qr-code-for-your-posts

Using QR codes to let users share content

This use of QR codes links back to the first, letting users share content via a QR codes is another valid reason for implementing QR codes on a website, taking the student example again one student (or teacher) can share links to resources with their students by simply letting them scan a QR code. We could set a class in the same way as print but this time to only show QR codes when users are visiting the website on a mobile device – for example on a smart phone while in class. If one student locates the page with the QR code on they can then share it with the others quickly and easily without needing to know their phone numbers or email addresses (and without needing to let the person they are sharing with know any personal details).

Sharing content does not need to be between two different users, if a user starts reading your website article on a desktop computer or laptop they can scan the QR code and transfer over to their mobile device quickly and easily – if for example they wanted to continue reading on their phone on the way home from work or school.

Using QR codes to let users contact you

An example of using a phone number to generate a QR code

QR codes can link to more then just a URL, you can generate QR codes to contain text information such as email addresses or phone numbers. This means that you could insert a QR code into your website that when users scan it on a mobile device it would let users call you without needing to input a phone number, this will make it easier and faster for users to contact you which will mean they are more likely to do so.

Another possible use of this type of QR code is to link users through to your social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn letting them keep updated with your websites social media – or even an RSS feed to keep update with blog posts and news.

This is going to be beneficial because smart phones are used for more then simply texts, phone calls and browsing the internet, users are managing their content from their smart phones – using it as a central resource or control point for all of their online activity. For example they manage their social media, shop, email, find information and keep up to date with news from anywhere with a mobile signal.

This means that when a user is at say work, school, library, shopping, on a night out or even on holiday they will have their smart phone with them connected to their digital world and will be able to add your website to their subscriptions without a second thought. They could do it by logging into their accounts on a computer but with growing awareness of security and the effects compromised computers can have it is less likely users will log into their accounts on ‘public’ computers meaning they wont follow your website!

With the above examples it is possible to see uses of QR codes on your website and with more and more users accessing the internet via smart phones the benefits of QR codes online is only going to increase! if you have any other ideas for uses of QR codes online please leave a comment below i would love to hear your ideas!

If you are interested in learning more about QR codes and implementing them on your website or on printed material contact me for more information or get in touch with Simpsons Creative a creative agency who can implement QR codes on any form of printed media and can even create QR codes that we can redirect after they have been printed! (perfect if you run seasonal offers)

Blog post by Alex Wells
Working as a Website developer I love nothing more then working waist deep in code, I have specific interests in PHP and WordPress development but mostly working with local businesses to provide them with a website that meets their needs. Contact me if you have a project in mind and would like to get an input from an experienced website developer.