Analytics360 integrates Google Analytics into WordPress
MailChimp has relesead Analytics360, a WordPress plugin which brings Google Analytics in your WordPress dashboard.
I recently came across this really useful wordpress plugins which basically integrates your Google Analytics account straight into your WordPress installation.
I’m quite of an analytics freak I must say, I spend way to much time flickering through browser tabs checking all the different analytics accounts I have.
This WordPress extension comes quite handy, especially when running multiple accounts on the same service (Google Analytics in this case).
360 Analytics does not reduce or modifiy the quality and quantity of information you usually get about your website when logging into your Google Analytics account.
The plugin comes straight from MailChimp and can be used in conjunction with their email marketing services to track the performance of your email campaigns on your site traffic.
By the way: I should start considering how effective are WordPress plugins in terms of marketing… this very extension is quite of an example)
Have you ever been working on a website and in need of a website map? Creating a visual sitemap can be extremely useful during development of websites.
Slickmap CSS is a visual sitemapping tool for web developers. It comes in a easy to modify html file and css, it shows up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links.
With Slickmap CSS there’s no need of additional software, it can be modified in no-time. The idea is to provide an easy-to-use tool to resume a website structure while being fully customizable on the fly.
Download SlickMap CSS or check out Slickmap Website.
Page loading time is a crucial factor when it comes to estimate page’s usability as well as search engine’s rankings and Google’s Adwords quality score.
according to this statement, Google is going to update its assessment policy . Page load time it is soon due to become an important factor requiring specific assessment and optimization from webmasters and SEOs.
In order to calculate page loading time, you might try Pingdom. Pingdom is an online utility which calculates pages text, images and scripts, giving you also some interesting suggestions about improvement.
However, besides any Google statement about quality score or rankings, it’s always good to think about you user’s experience on your website: nobody likes websites taking too long to load.
Considering both usability and rankings, this should be some general guidelines to be followed one assessing and optimizing page’s loading time:
Text and page structure should load and be completely visible within the first 3 seconds
Any other element of the page must be visible within the first 8 seconds
These are only thumb rules of course. Always cehck your page weight and loading times. Working on this side of on-page optimization can lead to interesting discoveries sometimes.
A new search engine has just been launched and it’s time to update our analytics software.
Google hasn’t released any major update to automatically recognize traffic coming from Bing into Google Analytics but I guess it is not gonna take too long.
In the meantime we can easily tweak Google Analytics just playing around with our tracking code.
In order to add Bing as a search engine we need to use the addOrganic function: _addOrganic[domain, search query]
AddOrganic Function: how it works
The addOrganic function has two parameters: domain and search query. It basically tells the Analytic engine to consider some referrals as proper search engines, hence appearing on keyword statistics.
This two parameters are embedded in every search query we forward to a search engine:
Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=[searchquery]
Yahoo:
http://us.search.yahoo.com/search?p=[search query]
So let’s take a look to a standard Bing query:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=[search query]
As you can see, the right AddOrganic sintaxy would be the following:
pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com", "q");
We just need to add this line right before the trackpageview() call into our Analytics code.
I think there’s an obvious update on the way but if you are already getting some decent organic traffic from Bing just add this line and see what happens.
We all know SEO is not science: most of SEO practices come from direct experience or reliable source but there’s som much uncertainity that makes everything blend into doubts.
That’s the reason why advices coming straight from Matt Cutts or the Google webmaster blog should be taken definetely seriously. We’ve already seen Matt getting into certain topics put into the spotlight of the SEO community and giving useful (altough sometimes ambigous) insight.
This time he realeased a bunch of slides he presented to the 2009 San Francisco Wordcamp
Following is a resume of the main points he discussed:
Crawlers and PageRank algorithm
- Google spiders go crowling pages in a pagerank order: highest pagerank pages get crawled before pages with a lower pagerank
- Being relevant and reputable is the actual criteria that works behind the Page Rank
Keywords and content optimization
- When it comes to keywords, put yourself into the user shoes: think about what he would type in his search string
- Do not think about stuffing your pages with keywords: write naturally.
- ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)
WordPress
- Set your permalink to domain.com/post-title (setting -> reading -> custom permalink structure /%postname%/)
- Modify your titles and file names (urls) acconrding to the content
This is the powerpoint format. Slides are also available from Google Docs.