Times have changed and the meaning of what is classified as “a hard day at work” has changed as well. I just read a great post by Seth Godin about the true meaning of hard work these days. Times have definitely changed in the work environment. It used to be that hard work meant plowing the farmland in the hot sun for 12 hours a day, or working at a factory producing machinery parts. Nowadays, hard work for a lot of people means taking creative and personal career risks to get ahead. Can you compare taking a risk at your job to a 12 hour day of plowing the fields? I think it’s probably comparing apples to oranges. It’s not that we don’t work hard these days…just in a different way.

I find this kind of insight fascinating as I grow my company. I’m so glad that I decided to take risks in my career. Starting my own business has been one of the hardest jobs I have ever had but I love what I do and I know that I’m helping my clients grow in the process which makes my job so rewarding. The one thing I have learned is no matter what your job is, unless you take some kind of action, you won’t get anywhere.

I’d like to leave you all with a little quote.

“In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing,
the next best thing is the wrong thing,
and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
26th president of the United States

Happy Labor Day Folks!

Arguably one of the most important things to an online marketing campaign is to have some goals in place. I think that figuring out what goals to focus on can be the hardest part sometimes. Tracking them is the easy part. Here are a few ways you can start tracking some of your goals using Google Analytics.

Goal Funnels and Funnel Visualization:
Setting up funnels for goals and watching the visitor patterns in those funnels can help us see if people are doing what we would like them to do on the site.

Three examples of funnels we can track are:
1. How many people are going to the “join our newsletter” page and joining the newsletter vs. how many of them are leaving the page.
2. How many people are going to your “contact us” page and filling it out vs. how many of them are leaving?
3. How many people are going to your “shopping cart” page and actually checking out?

Setting up the funnels is pretty easy but it depends on what kind of URL’s you’re dealing with and whether they are dynamic or static. You can read more about setting up goals in google analytics here.

Important Metrics and What they mean:
Another thing we can keep track of are the metrics for the important pages on the site which are usually the homepage and you main category pages. Here are the main metrics on those page and the explanations for each.

• Pageviews – Amount of pageviews (includes people that left and came back)
• Unique Views (only counts unique visits)
• Time on Page (average time a visitor spent on that page before they left to a different page)
• Bounce Rate (clicked the back button or exited the website)
• % Exit (exited the website from this page)

So for example, if you notice that the amount of Pageviews go down on the homepage then you know there is a problem. If you notice that the bounce rate is really high on one of your category pages for example, you might want to think about ways to improve the page or figure out where the traffic is coming from since so many people are bouncing.

Search Engine Traffic & Goals:
Last but not least, another valuable metric for us to track would be the amount of search engine traffic that the site receives broken down by search engine (In Google Analytics this is the search engine traffic and goals report). This report shows the amount of traffic that each search engine sends us as well as how much of that traffic completed the goals we have set up above. This report can also be broken down by keyword for each search engine so you can track exactly which keywords brought you how much traffic and whether or not those keywords completed your goals on your site.

These are just some of the ways you can begin to track your goals. If you’re not tracking anything right now then you are missing out on one of the most effective ways of improving your conversion rate and your site overall.

Okay, the title of this post is a bit harsh but it got your attention didn’t it? This is the first in a series of posts answering some relatively basic SEO questions that people typically get confused by. The questions are actually not that stupid, they are common misconceptions about how search engines work.

Today’s question is: What’s worse…duplicate content from within your own site or duplicate content from other sites?

The person asking this question wants to know if having duplicate content on pages within your own site is better or worse than stealing content from other sites and putting it on your site. This is like asking, what’s worse, a broken radiator or a broken transmission? Obviously, both are equally as bad, in different ways.

Duplicate content within your own site:
If two pages within your own site have the same content or a very high ratio of duplicate content, search engines will typically pick one of the pages and devalue the rest that are duplicate. This type of duplicate internal content is very common.

Duplicate content from other sites:
If you use content from other sites, search engines will penalize your site by devaluing the page on your site that has the duplicate content. But what if I had the content on my site and somebody stole it from me you ask? Search engines will typically know who had the content first because they look at the cache dates of both pages. Whichever site was first to be cached will usually be awarded as the original content owner. There are some exceptions to this rule but this is how it is generally decided.

A question that I get asked a lot is, how do I know if my content is unique enough? Basically, it comes down to ratios and percentages. If a large percentage of your content is duplicate, search engines will either devalue the whole page or the whole site. This is not always noticeable. For example, your site might have 30% duplicate content that has been copied from other sites compared to 70% of high quality unique content. If this is the case, search engines don’t want to throw out the 70% of your Unique content that is valuable to their users. Therefore, the solution is to just devalue the pages that have the duplicate content so that they don’t necessarily rank as high for competitive searches but would still rank for longer tail searches. This might be happening right now to a lot of your pages and you don’t even know it. While its great to rank for long tail searches, you don’t want your pages devalued if you can avoid it, so let’s get working on that duplicate content people!

Every once in a while, you come across a business name that just leaves your head shaking. Whether the name chosen is a really poor play on words, really hard to spell and thusly, find, or infringes on someone else’s trademarked name, bad decisions are made all the time when naming businesses.

This all took on new meaning in the 90’s when domain names started to pick up popularity and you had another issue to worry about, how well your business name translates online. Take for example, a local Chicago favorite, George’s Hot Dogs. They are celebrating 60 years this year, so they have definitely done something right, but with their new website, George’s Hot Dogs (www.georgeshotdogs.com) looks a lot like George Shot Dogs when you look at the domain name!

Obviously this one is tough to plan ahead for when you’ve been in business that long, but without a doubt something you want to keep in mind for future business endeavors.

What types of business names have you seen lately that have made you laugh or think twice?