The first is that keyword phrases do matter and will always matter, to an extent. Search engines will always need the ability to extract relevant and important information from the web. The text of your site makes up the content that must get judged, one way or the other. The last two truths are just as important. The first is that social networking also drives relevance. If you aren’t taking advantage of that, then you’re letting your site stagnate. The second is that links still matter as well.

Evaluating Your True SEO Ranking

With those three truths in mind, I’m going to help you judge your own site’s accurate SEO ranking. I did not call it “PR” ranking, or pagerank, because that is truly an artifact of the past. There is a new sort of “ranking” that you should use based on all factors that search engines take into account. In this article, I’m going to help you determine the true SEO value of your site.

Make Sure You List Highly For Important Keywords

You should already have a list of about 5 to 10 critical keywords that you want to perform well for in Google. They should be focused on the content of your site.

Take those keyword phrases and search the Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines for them. File through the listings and determine what position you land in. But beware of false rankings when you are logged in, such as shown here.

When I’m logged into Google, I rank #2 for the search term “secret societies”. That’s a false positive. If I log out, I find that I actually list somewhere around #10 for that term. However, when logged out of Google, conducting a search for “top secret cults” shows that I really do list second, so that’s an accurate result for that term.

Go through each of your keywords and then give it a score based on the following formula that I developed. (x is placement position)

(100/x) * .60 = Google score
(100/x) * .20 = Bing Score
(100/x) * .20 = Yahoo score

If you rank 10th in Google, 5th in Yahoo and 4th in Bing, then your “keyword” score is  6 + 4 + 5 = 15

Anything above 10 is good, 30 is very good, 50 is excellent and above 70 is top-tier.

Determining Your Incoming Links

There are countless tools that help you determine your number of backlinks. I’ve covered Traffic Travis previously, and a while back Linda covered a number of sites that will show you your incoming link count. A couple of my favorites are Domain-Pop, as shown here -

- or Backlink Watch, as shown below. This is one of my favorites for a quick overview of my most recent stats for incoming links.

By far, my favorite tool – because you can get the most accurate picture of incoming links to your site – is definitely Google Webmaster Tools.

Take a look at the “Total Links” and also pay attention to “How your data is linked“. Those links can show you what people value about your site and feel compelled to link to.

Judge Your Influence On Social Networks

Today, more than ever, social networks are playing a giant part in how search engines judge you. Only a year or so ago, only Twitter and Facebook were key. More recently, Google Plus is critical. So, to determine your value to search engines, you need to evaluate your site’s value on the social networks. Mahendra wrote a great article listing some great tools for this. My favorite is Klout.

I love Kout because it incorporates everything – Twitter, Facebook, Google + and more – add whatever networks you want to use, or leave any of them out.

You can use your Klout score as a baseline to work on improving your overall social networking score. The higher you can move this score, the higher you will rank in the search engines, guaranteed.

Of course, if you really love Facebook, you need to have a Facebook Page for your site, and so you should be using Facebook Insights.

It’s the best way to see what impact different posts have on how many people link or share your articles – so use it, study it, and learn from it.

Check The Number Of Broken Links

Once again, the single best tool to analyze your site links is Google Webmaster Tools. Just click on “Diagnostics” and “Crawl errors” to see a report of Google crawler errors. Most of these will be broken links – 404 not found errors. You should work hard to get this list to zero.

The number of broken links listed here is another factor for your overall “SEO Ranking”. For every broken link, you are hurting your search engine value significantly. A part of any good SEO regimen is going back constantly and removing or fixing broken links. Do this, and you’ll see your search engine placements skyrocket.

There are many issues that determine your value and relevance to search engines – far too many to list in this one article. However, the four factors that I’ve listed here are the four issues that will have the greatest affect on your SEO quality over any other factor out there. Just improve any one of these factors, and you’ll almost immediately notice results (or at least the next time your site gets crawled).

So give it a try and let us know if you were able to improve your standings in the search engines. Do you have any other tips for readers in addition to these? Share your own thoughts and insights in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

As Yaara recently described in a news update, Google has released a new and improved Google Analytics platform with a whole slew of brand new features. In this article, I’m going to dive more deeply into some of those new features.

New Features Of Google Analytics

At first, you’ll notice only very minor differences with the layout of the left navigation menu. For the most part, the overall traffic numbers and display looks the same as usual. To discover the differences, you need to start exploring the left menu by expanding each of the items. What you’ll notice is that not only are the choices simpler and more straightforward, there are also more choices available.

By expanding the Visitors area, you’ll notice a few interesting choices like demographics, behavior, and technology. I really like the behavior area, where you can get a closer look at visitor behaviors like new vs. returning visitors, how often visitors return and how much visitors engage with the site.

Clicking on “Frequency & Recency“, you’ll see a graphical layout of how many times your visitors have visited your page and how frequently.

Under “Engagement“, you can see another graphical layout of pageviews versus visit duration. This can show you some interesting things about how your visitors behave. For example, it might show that while a large majority of your visitors come to the site for a short visit, your return visitors (higher pageviews) actually come back and hang out quite a bit longer.

Under Visitor Technology, you can get a very detailed graphical breakdown of all of the browsers or networks that your visitors are using to visit your website. This lets you optimize your site for the best display in the browser family that the majority of your visitors use.

Click on Social Action under your Visitors section, and you’ll get a breakdown of how many people have been taking advantage of social network interactions on your website through services like Google +. As you can see, I’ve only just added Google + functionality to my own website, so activity has just started. If you’ve been using Google + on your site for a while, you’ll have a lot more information in your Google Analytics account for Social activity.

Under Visitors, there’s also a Mobile Devices area where you can see a breakdown of what mobile devices your visitors use to visit your site, and what percentage of your visitors come from mobile devices. Obviously, if you have a very big number here, you’re going to want to make sure that your site  is well optimized for mobile browsers, or that you offer a mobile-optimized version of your site.

One of the coolest new features can be found under Visitors, when you click on “Visitors Flow“. This display shows you an impressive graphical view of the traffic flow through your site. You can select starting traffic points from what geographic region visitors are from, the source of traffic, the browser visitors use and much more.

What’s amazing about this feature is that you can see how different types of people navigate through your site – you can see what topics and what pages matter more to people from different countries, people that come from Google search vs. Facebook, or people that are running Chrome vs. Firefox. You can pick up some fascinating patterns about your readership from this flowchart.

You can check out how well your search engine optimization is working by clicking on Traffic Sources, Search Engine Optimization, and then “Queries“.

Here, you can see exactly what search terms are drawing in the most traffic to your site. If you’ve done your SEO optimizing well, then you should see those targeted search terms showing up here. You’ll see how many impressions your site is getting from the search engine listings, which can be pretty impressive (pun intended) in many cases.

Other really cool areas of Analytics includes “Site Speed” under Content, where you can see the page load time for the bulk of your visitors.

You want to see most of your load falling under 0 to 6 seconds. If you’re seeing higher percentages with longer page loads, consider upgrading your web hosting.

The absolute coolest area of Analytics, in my opinion, is “In-Page Analytics” under “Content“. This will show you a display of your webpage with click-through rates placed on top of your webpage.

If you change the display to color-coded bubbles, you can see where the highest click-through rates are by looking for the red percentages. This can really help you see what types of content your visitors are most interested in, and what areas of your page do the best job getting your visitors to click and explore the site further.

The new Google Analytics does an excellent job giving you much more information about the behavior and the characteristics of your readership. This can serve to help you lay out your site and produce content that is more valuable and interesting for your visitors.

If you’re an existing Analytics user, check out the new features that are available in the new version. If you haven’t ever used Analytics, now may be an excellent time to try it out. Give it a roll and let us know what you think about the new improvements in the comments section below.

Image credit: Shutterstock

If you also care about the correctness of the code so that visitors can maintain their privacy, great open source solutions exist as well.

Grape Web Statistics

Grape Web Statistics is a fairly simple piece of analytics software. Grape is most appealing to those who find Google’s offering to be too much or overwhelming and would like to keep things simple. Grape doesn’t offer a whole lot out of the box, though if you are a good HTML and PHP developer you may be able to extend the software to meet your own unique needs.

Grape shows you some of the most commonly sought-after statistics for your site. This includes the number of visitors, the top referrers, and the operating system of each visitor. These statistics can be shown at hourly, daily, monthly, and annual levels. Specific dates can be chosen as well.

One negative side to Grape is that a new version hasn’t been released in over a year, though I suppose that isn’t so important if it wants to stay minimal in the amount of features it offers.

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics comes in spot number 2, although it isn’t far away from first place.  OWA, as the website calls it, packs a much more powerful punch compared to Grape simply by its massive feature set. The software also features a great user interface that organizes all the different statistics that can be shown. There are lots of different statistics that can be viewed, such as the browser type, geo-location, top pages, search terms, search engines, and ad performance.

OWA also offers some nice visual graphs to represent certain statistics. I found that on all pages, a graph of the current number of visitors for the past few days is shown. I’m not sure if this can be turned off or modified. However, one can tell that much effort was put into making the information visually pleasing and easy to understand. The graphs are also clean, aside from some random entries here and there, such as “Default Browser” when listing the browser types or “Not Set” for geo-location.

Piwik Web Analytics

So who took the top prize? That goes to Piwik, my personal favorite for open source web analytics tools. Piwik currently has the most extensive feature set out of the three, and is under heavy active development. One of the things Piwik is best at is integration with any site. There are many, many different frameworks such as WordPress and Joomla! that have plugins for Piwik, and for any other sites you can simply add a self-generated snippet of code to your footer.

Piwik also offers easy upgrade paths. It will notify you whenever there is an update, which can be installed with a single button, much like WordPress’s style of updating. This makes keeping up with the latest features and bugfixes super easy.

Even better, Piwik lets you set goals so you can actively try to reach those goals. There are many different parameters that you can set, so the sky’s the limit!

Conclusion

Indeed, there are some good choices available when it comes to open source web analytics tools. Which tool you choose is up to you and your needs. Either way, they are available and ready to make you more productive.

Do you like Google Analytics? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Laughing Squid

Today I’ll take a look at 3 possible systems for offering free stuff on Twitter: a WordPress plugin, a free web service, and a DIY jQuery method.

If you’re new to Twitter or just looking for some tips, you might also be interested in our excellent Complete Guide to Twitter, which you can download for free by simply signing up to our newsletter.

For WordPress: Tweet2Download

As an integrated solution, the Tweet2Download plugin is fairly simple. When uploading media, simply mark it as required to go through the Tweet2Download system. Then on the media insert page you’ll also find a new Tweet2Downloads tab from which your download items can be inserted in a page or post. Click to insert a link as you would with any file download normally, and it will automatically use the Tweet2Download interface.

To adjust the message, you can enter the text in the short code that get’s added to your post edit area.

Note: Like many of these systems, Tweet2Download requires that you create a Twitter account and obtain an API key. Head to this page to do this. Make sure the URL entered is that of your website. When you create one, click on the settings tab, and change the Application Type to be Read and Write (instead of the default Read only). The interface has changed a little since this plugin was created, so be aware that the Twitter app page no longer lists an actual API KEY, instead just use the CONSUMER KEY. Since the app asks for both an API key and a Consumer Key, just add the same key twice.

Non-WordPress Solution: Pay With a Tweet

If you’re looking for one-off solution for your HTML hand-coded website or think the WordPress plugin is overkill for your needs, PayWithATweet web service is probably your easiest option. Just fill in the simple form – though you’ll need to host your own file.

Embed the button on your site (make sure to add the code in HTML view if you’re using this with WordPress – adding any HTML codes to the Visual Editor will break them). When clicked, users will see a screen similar to this. This is the demo that the site uses to offer their own eBook about the effective use of PayWithATweet. Bear in mind that the service is ad-supported.

DIY Method with jQuery

By far this is my favorite solution. For further flexibility and those of you who are confident of editing theme files, might want to try the DIY approach described in this TutorialZine article. This method makes use of jQuery and the whole thing is around 100 lines of code for something that you can re-use on all future projects (or you can of course, just download the complete project files). The advantages of doing it this way are that you won’t be confined by the CSS and UI of the Tweet2Download plugin, and you’ll learn some useful JavaScript skills in the process. The code supplied already looks quite fantastic anyway.

If you’d like to utilise this DIY method in WordPress, you’ll need to create a custom template file by duplicating either page.php or single.php, then add the various codes there. For file download URL I suggest using a custom field attached to the post or page where the download will be attached. The advantage of doing it this way is that if you ever decide to change your methods or switch to a “Like this on Facebook to download system”, you’ll still be able to use the same custom fields and just change a single template file. If you’re unsure about custom fields, I have described them in this Product Database project for WordPress tutorial.

That’s it from me today. I do hope you choose to release something for free and share your talents so everyone can benefit. While we’re on the topic, be sure to check out all the fantastic eBooks we’ve shared at MakeUseOf – I think we’re currently releasing at the astonishing rate of two a month, which means there’s an extraordinary amount of free knowledge in the archives! Whatever the topic, we’ve got you covered!!

If you have any issues setting up a Twitter application or need help making it work within WordPress, do ask in the comments or the MakeUseOf Answers section, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

The basic site isn’t well optimized for mobile devices however, which can be frustrating for webmasters who want to keep tabs on sites without dragging around a laptop. Thankfully, some Android developers have come to the rescue with apps specifically designed to make Analytics easy to use on a smartphone.

gAnalytics [2.2+]

Free is always great, but sometimes it comes at the price of functionality. This is particularly true of apps that are compatible with Google Analytics. Several options (including Droid Analytics, below) are paid, and that isn’t going to be attractive to everyone.

Fortunately, the free price tag on gAnalytics doesn’t require much in the way of sacrifice from users. This app packs most of the information that you’ll need including visitors, popular keywords, referring sites, and more. Better yet, it does so with an interface which is actually more practical and professional than that of Droid Analytics.

The downside? Despite many interface advantages, switching between different timeframes when looking at site data is a pain in the butt, and Droid Analytics can provide more data at once. These are not massive flaws, however, and I suspect most users will be happy with what gAnalytics offers.

Droid Analytics [1.1+]

This rather clunky app receives isn’t hard to use, but receives no praise for its appearance. It looks and feels like a java program for a computer that’s been crammed on to a small screen, and while it’s as quick as any other app, it seems outdated.

If you can get over the appearance, however, you’ll find a wonderful app that provides a lot of Google Analytics data. What I most about this app is how easy it is to view data from different time periods. You can view the last seven days, the last 30 days, or any other time period by touching the clock icon. It’s also possible to break down data by different increments. For example, you can see the number of visitors you’ve received by day, by week, or by year.

Despite what I like about this app, and the fact I’ll probably use it instead of gAnalytics in the future, I think the current price of $3.47 is steep considering the lack of attention to detail. The developer really should slap a new coat of paint on it.

There is one advantage to be old and crusty, however – this app will work on Android versions as old as 1.1.

Simple Analytics Widget [2.1+]

Both of the above apps are suitable for most users, but they are missing one important feature. A widget. I mean, come on. Every Android app needs a widget!

Thankfully there are some available, and among them, I prefer Simple Analytics Widget. The reasons are quite simple. First, the widget is the best looking of the bunch, presenting information in simple but attractive bold font. Second, the widget can present several different types of data (such as visits a day, page views per day, or bounce rate).

To add icing to this tasty widget cake, you’ll find the widget is easy to use, as it connects straight to your selected Google account rather than asking for a specific username/password combination.

Conclusion

While there are other Google Analytics apps for Android available, I find these to be the best options, and the ones that I prefer using when I monitor the activity of my own blog. Do you think I’m wrong? Feel free to share your favorites in the comments!