The above screenshot from the Weberz’s Google Analytics shows that we had 28 visitors from Google organic search results, however now we have no way of knowing which phrase they typed in to find us. This makes it impossible to find out what keywords the users typed into the search results to find your site. Probably more important than that, it makes it impossible to figure out which important keywords or phrases your website might not be ranking for. 

What happened? Why the change?
A few weeks ago Google changed their services to providing secure, via SSL/HTTPs, search results to their users who are logged in to Google services. When making that change from non-secure to secure browsing for each results for those users, they also made the decision to remove this keyword data from the search results presumably to provide more privacy to those logged in users. Many website owners would argue that those users wouldn’t care about that data, or even know what it is, but Google is determined not to share the information.

So why did Google make this change? It comes down to two reasons.  The first is obvious, by adding secure browsing to search results Google can claim that they are providing a better, more secure, service to those users. They certainly are. The second reason is so Google can keep that data and only share it with businesses, and website owners, who participate in their advertising programs. That’s right, Google still shares this information with their advertisers. If Google really wants to be protecting their user’s privacy, they wouldn’t be sharing the information with their advertisers.. but that’s a different story for a different article.

So where do we go from here? How do we monitor this data?
As site owners we will need to figure out how to work around this problem to continue getting the information we need to make our sites better. To track whether or not our keywords and phrases are ranking well we’re going to have to go back to using tools that check the search results pages for links to our site.  Tools like SeoMoz Pro Tools and the SEO Book Rank Checker check the Google result pages to find out where you rank for keywords you provide.

Otherwise we will have to do exactly what Google suggests website owner do… Create and optimize our websites for visitors and let GoogleBot, Google’s search engine spider, rank us based on how good our site is. The idea is that if you optimize your site for visitors, and not GoogleBot, then you will provide a better user experience, higher conversion ratio, and more people will like and link to your site.  All of these should cause you to get better search engine rankings and result in more website traffic.

Conclusion
Mainly the purpose of this post is to inform our web hosting users of why they are seeing this lack of data in their stats programs now, however this change has caused quite the uproar among webmasters and SEO professionals. So I guess the real question of the day is.. Does it really matter that this data is missing?

Leave us a comment below and let us know what you think about Google taking away the keyword data!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Google keyword data “not provided” in stats" rel="external" target="_blank">Google keyword data “not provided” in stats

Note: Bing and Yahoo also provide webmaster toolboxes for you to use, but Google owns the largest market share of search and they are who we are going to focus on. Do not let that stop you from registering with Bing’s Webmaster Toolbox or Yahoo’s Site Explorer though, each has their own unique set of tools and all three should be used.

Registration for these services is free and simple. Register for an account with Google, Sign Up for Webmaster Tools, and let them know which website on the Internet is yours. Typically this is done by specifying the domain name and verifying your ownership/rights to the site by uploading a file to the site with a unique name. The file that needs to be uploaded can be created using Notepad in Windows or TextEdit on a Mac. Once created the file simply needs to be uploaded using FTP which is available with any web hosting provider (including Weberz).

Once you are logged in and all setup, you should see a “Home” screen that lists off any messages Google might send you and a list of sites you own at the bottom.

Messages
The messages that Google might send you work a lot like emails. Google will notify you here if they find something wrong with one of your websites, such as malware or hacked files. This can be a great tool to detect such problems should the unfortunate happen. Google will also send you messages when important changes are made to your site’s configuration.

Sites
Simply a list of sites that your Google account has access to. Many web designers will list all of their client sites here so they can resolve problems and help with SEO. If you only have one, that’s not a big deal. Clicking on a particular site name will take you to the Dashboard of the Webmaster Tools for that site.

Dashboard
The Webmaster Tools Dashboard, pictured above, gives you a quick overview of what is going on with this particular domain. It includes search queries, crawling errors, links to your website, keywords, and sitemaps. We are going to go over each of these in detail as we go along.

On your left you should have a menu that shows “Dashboard”, “Messages”, “Site Configuration”, and so on. Lets go through some of these sections and get an idea of what Google thinks of our site.

Site Configuration

The site configuration section allows us to inform Google of our preferences when dealing with our site. It also provides a method of telling Google about all the pages on our site and which ones they shouldn’t be visiting or sharing with visitors.

Sitemaps
Sitemaps are an XML file that can be used to tell Google about which pages exist on our website and how important we feel they are. They provide an excellent resource to point Google in the right direction when it visits your website and also to tell Google about new pages on your site. No longer do we have to wait for Google to find the pages on its own.

We aren’t going to go into generating Sitemap files yet, that will be another post, but know that this is where they get setup and submitted to Google. Here you can also see how many pages are in your Sitemap vs the number of pages Google includes in search results.

Crawler Access
Crawler Access allows us to see and build our robots.txt file. These are instructional files for search engines to tell them what they should and shouldn’t be viewing on our site. By not specifying a robots.txt it is assumed that everything should be allowed, however for proper search engine optimization one should always be specified. We will learn more about these files later. This section also includes a spot to remove a page from the Google index. This can be useful if Google ever finds a file on your site that you didn’t want it to have access to.

Sitelinks
These are links provided to websites by Google when it thinks it has found important sections of a website that visitors will find useful. You have probably seen them before when using Google and not realized it, they are featured in the picture below. Unfortunately Google is the one who decides which sites get sitelinks and which sitelinks they get. The only power we have here is to block a particular site link from being viewed by the public.

Change of Address
This section of Webmaster Tools allows you to change your web address, domain name, for your entire site. While this probably isn’t the best idea for any number of reasons, Google still allows you to perform such an action here. The process for changing your domain is clearly spelled out in the instructions and can be done by anyone who has access to your Webmaster Tools account & data.

Settings
The settings page allows you to customize how Google reacts to your site and gives you a little control over Googlebot. Googlebot is the automated system that Google uses to find and read pages on the Internet. Here’s a quick run down of the options available to you:

• Geographical Target
  Unless there is a very good reason to change this, I wouldn’t worry about it. The geographical target allows you to specify which visitors, by country, your website is targeted at. If this is not specified Google will automatically determine this based on your domain name. Domains ending in .com, .net, and .org are normally considered globally targeted and country specific domains such as .us, .uk, or .au are specific to their respective countries.
• Preferred Domain
  Most sites on the net are available via at least two variations of their domain. These variations are with, and without, the www prefix such as weberz.com and www.weberz.com. This option allows you to specify which of these variations you want Google to use when displaying your domain name. I always opt to use the www version of the domain for multiple reasons, the largest of which is that the www prefix was specifically designed for websites. You should definitely specify which one you prefer so Google is consistent on how it displays your domain. This should cause less confusion for search users because it will always be the same.
• Crawl Rate
  Google automatically determines the Googlebot crawl rate when it finds a new site. Normally this is based on the sites importance and how often it is updated by the website owner or maintainer. This option will allow you to temporarily, for around 90 days, override Googlebot’s crawl rate to make it go faster or slower. Normally you would think the faster the crawl rate the better, however not if it causes you to use more website traffic than is allowed by your web hosting plan.
• Parameter Handling
  If by chance you have a website that uses address parameters then you can use this option to tell Google which ones to ignore. Address parameters are normally used for website code options given to the users who browse your website, they are displayed in the URL of the page address after the question mark, ?, symbol.

A common use for parameters, and one you would want Google to ignore, is a parameter used on an e-commerce site to change the sorting order of products in a list. Most website programmers will use a URL parameter to specify the users preference when a sort type is clicked. We wouldn’t want Google to use that parameter because it will simply cause duplicate content issues by having the exact same product listing available at multiple website URL’s.

Your Site on the Web

This section of Webmaster Tools lets you know what information Google has about your site. Information such as which search queries you rank for and what keywords Google thinks your site is about are available here. One of the main things to keep in mind while using this section of the site is that the data is always out of date. Google simply has too many sites to keep track of on the internet so it only updates this section of data periodically, however it’s still a good rough guideline as to what Google is thinking.

Search Queries
The search queries section shows you which searches your site returns in the results for. It provides you with an average position in the search results that you ranked and how many users clicked on your link.

Links to your site
This lists the other sites on the Internet that link to you the most ranked by the number of links. Since links are the currency of the web, this can be very valuable data. On the right the screen displays which of your pages are linked to the most. The bottom of the page shows you what text is used in the links that go to your site.

An important piece of SEO is getting quality links from other websites. The links you want the most are the links will all the following:

• Links from important sites that are about your websites topic
• Links that contain keywords or phrases that describe your site and content
• Links that go directly to a page that are about the keyword/phrase used above.

Keywords
The keywords page shows you the keywords that Google thinks are what you site is about. They are ranked in order of significance in the eyes of Google. This means that Google thinks the keywords at the top of the list are most relevant to your site than the keywords at the bottom of the list. If this list does not accurately describe your site then it’s time to work on the content on your site and the links you get getting from other websites.

Internal Links
This list of links shows you the pages on your site and how many other pages on your site link to them. Google believes that the pages you link to the most from inside of your own website are likely to be the most important pages on your site. If the list isn’t in the order that you think it should be then you should work on manipulating your on site links to make the list more accurate.

Subscriber Stats
If your site has an RSS feed, this section will show you how many users are subscribed to the RSS feed using Google tools. It’s a nice little statistic to monitor over time, however in the grand scheme it’s really not that important. This doesn’t take into account how many users aren’t using Google’s RSS tools or how many people actually read the stories/articles in the RSS feeds.

Diagnostics

The diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools lets you see where Google has found problems with your site. The problems range from malware, malicious software, being found by Googlebot on your site to simple SEO related errors that Google wants you to know about. Web designers and site owners should ensure they look at every entry in the diagnostics section to make sure there hasn’t been a mistake made when building the site.

Malware
This section is very straight forward. If Google detects any malicious software on your site, it will provide information about it here. Some web browsers like FireFox will use Google’s malware database and block user access to a site with a warning if malware was found. The only words you ever want to read on this page are “Google has not detected any malware on this site”.

Crawl Errors
This page lists off all the errors that were found when Googlebot was trying to fetch information from your site. It will list off directories which Googlebot could not access, pages that are no longer found or available, and URL’s that are blocked due to your robots.txt configuration. Site owners will want to go through every entry in the crawl errors section and make sure that the entries are supposed to be listed. A web designer doing an action as simple as renaming a page without a redirect can cause a crawl error to show up.

Hint: Never rename a page without setting up a redirect. This can cause you to loose traffic because of users who bookmarked the old page or search engines failing to remove the old page from the index.

Crawl Stats
The crawl stats section shows you what Googlebot has been up to while it was playing around on your site. It provides graphs for how many pages per day Googlebot crawls on your site, how much bandwidth it has used up while crawling, and how long it takes Googlebot to download the pages on average.

HTML Suggestions
This page can give you some slight insight to minor SEO mistakes that Googlebot has found on your site. It can list duplicate or missing Meta descriptions for pages and invalid title tag information. Since these are key on page SEO indicators, you will want to get these fixed.

That’s about it for Google Webmaster Tools. As you can see this is a invaluable tool to see information about your site in the eyes of the Google machine. Make sure to check on your Webmaster Tools data regularly to see if your SEO efforts are working in your favor. Since most of the data provided by Webmaster Tools is historical then spending an average of 30 minutes to an hour a month reviewing it should be more than sufficient.

Have you been using the search engines webmaster tools to review your site’s information already? Are you going to start now? Let us know in the comments below!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Google Webmaster Tools: An information resource for all site owners" rel="external" target="_blank">Google Webmaster Tools: An information resource for all site owners

Every website on the Internet has a job to do. It could be selling products, sharing information, or getting consumers into a brick and mortar store. It really doesn’t matter what the job is, just that there is a job to be done. To get this job completed successfully, websites need visitors and typically the more of them the better. This is where search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing can help.

Search Engines are friends, not foes!
Search engines are not big scary monsters that should be ignored. Instead, they are more like big friendly monsters. In fact they should be any website owner’s most important friend on the Internet. Website owners should share information with search engines and do everything they can to allow search engines to find and share their content. Why? They have visitors to share and you want them to share those visitors with you. We need those visitors so our website can do its job.

Everyone has used a search engine, so we all know how they work. You type in what you’re looking for and it returns a list of pages that you might be interested in. It’s a pretty simple concept to wrap your head around. Now think about the same concept as a website owner. Those search engines are pre-qualifying traffic for those sites that it’s returning in the listings. It does so by matching what the user is looking for against the information and relevancy of the sites that the search engine knows about. Choosing to work with search engines can be huge for a website owner. If you choose to ignore them, then someone else will be getting that traffic and the sales/conversions that go along with it.

Search Engine Optimization
SEO, or search engine marketing if you prefer, is the art of modifying your site and working with the search engines to better your rankings in the search results. To be clear it’s not cheating, evil or bad in any way. Google even publishes webmaster guidelines to help you do it properly. It is simply optimizing your site to better work with search engines, hence the name. By implementing SEO techniques on your site you can make your site easier to work with for search engines. In most cases the search engines will in turn reward you with better rankings and more traffic.

Here are a few things that every website owner should keep in mind when getting started with SEO:

• SEO Requires Site Changes
  To do proper SEO on your site, it’s likely to require some changes to your content or code. It’s almost always a necessary evil. We know you like the site the way it is. However, if some changes can positively impact your visitor numbers and conversions, wouldn’t that be worth it? Since SEO will require changes to code you’ll either have to know HTML, learn HTML, or hire someone who does. There are plenty of good SEO firms out there to help you.
• It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint!
  SEO is going to take time. Results rarely happen overnight and can take months to see real positive impact. Be patient. Keep this rule in mind if your looking to hire an SEO firm. Nobody should guarantee results over night. If you’re implementing SEO yourself, take your time and get it right the first time. SEO is a long term plan.
• There is NO Quick Fix
  This one is very straight forward, there is no one thing that will fix all your SEO problems. No one can guarantee something will work. If your hiring an SEO firm to help you, they should NEVER guarantee results like a “#1″ or “Top Ten” position in the Google results. If they do, find someone else.
• Always Keep Your Visitors in Mind
  This is probably the most important of them all. As a site owner, your loyalty should always be to your website visitors. Always build your site and content with your visitors in mind first, then optimize it for search engines. Never the other way around.

Now you should understand why ignoring search engines is a bad idea and if you don’t ignore them, instead actually optimize for them, how they can help you meet the goals of your website. You have a basic understanding of what SEO is and should be ready to get started. If you’re going to hire an SEO firm to help, start by doing a Google search for “SEO Firm” or “SEO Consulting” and give a few of them a call. If your going make the SEO changes yourself, then we will be posting some good optimization techniques over the next few weeks. For those of you who are eager to get started right away, here’s a quick one for you:

HTML Title Tags:

Every page on your site should have a <title> tag in the <head> section of your website code. The contents between the <title> and </title> tags are what displays in the browser tab when visitors visit that page. The same tag contents are also used as the title of the search engine results listing when the page comes up in a visitor’s search results. Each page on your site should have a unique title specified and in a uniform format throughout the site. For example a contact us page might say “Contact Us – Website Name” and an about us page would say “About Us – Website Name”.

It should also be noted that only the first 70 characters of the title tag show up in the search results listings. Try to limit your titles to under that limit so they display properly in a visitors search results.

Do you currently implement any SEO on your website? Let us know in the comments below!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Don’t Ignore The Search Engines" rel="external" target="_blank">Don’t Ignore The Search Engines

Thankfully the company that is the Google machine has taken the time to provide us with some quality tools that are not only legitimate but also actually provide value to webmasters. Google has plenty of applications, most of them free of charge, available to the online community to perform various activities in their personal and professional lives. Today we are going to focus on five of them that are specifically helpful to people who run websites and/or businesses.

1. Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
   Google Alerts allows users to be notified by Google when a particular word or phrase is used on a website. As Google spiders websites on the internet it checks the contents of the pages for matches to the alerts that users have setup. Once a match is found the user can be emailed with a link to the page that contains the term. This becomes especially helpful for small business owners that want to be notified any time they are mentioned on the web. This gives those users a chance to go find out what people are saying about them and possibly get involved in a conversation about their company.
2. Local Business Center – http://www.google.com/local/add
   Google’s local business center allows large and small businesses to create listings in the search results for geo-targeted phrases. An example of a geo-targeted phrase would be “LA car wash” or “Seattle internet cafe”. This works as a great opportunity for businesses to get another listing in the results pages for free. After all having more then one result on a search term results page gives you a higher percentage of getting your listing clicked. Local business listings normally show up above the standard results like this:
3. Adwords – http://adwords.google.com
   Adwords is a pay per click, PPC, advertising program designed and run by Google. The general problem with traditional online advertising programs such as banners is that normally business owners pay on a per impression basis. This means that users have to pay every time their ad is shown whether the user clicks on their ad or not. Adwords being PPC means that business owners only pay when someone clicks your ad and gets sent to your website. Google adwords places your ads on keyword specific results pages and are normally displayed on the top and right side of the results. As I previously mentioned its a great way to get more traffic but can be costly depending on the keywords you target.
4. Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics
   Most hosting companies, including Weberz, provide some sort of website statistics package for webmasters and business owners to gain information about the traffic visiting their sites. Google’s analytics program takes that concept and expands on it tremendously. Analytics will not only allow users to get the basic stats information about visitors but also allows webmasters to track conversion goals, create custom traffic reports and even view traffic patterns on your site. All of this is done by entering a small snippet of code on your site that Google provides after signing up for the program.
5. Webmaster Tools – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
   This one has to be the best tool that the Google machine has ever come up with. Webmaster tools allows users to help influence the way Google displays your results in the search engine results pages, SERPs. It also allows webmasters to upload a sitemap file in XML format to help the Google robots find all the pages on their websites. Webmaster tools also provides additional reporting about errors and mistakes Google finds while checking those pages that relate to search engine optimization, SEO, type problems. In my opinion this is one Google tool that no business should ignore.

These tools can certainly help make any business webmasters life a little easier and provide them with some excellent data on their websites and how it relates to search engines, specifically Google. Can anyone think of any other Google tools that the business webmaster can’t live without? Leave a comment below and let us know.

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: 5 Google Tools Every Business Webmaster Can Use" rel="external" target="_blank">5 Google Tools Every Business Webmaster Can Use