Archive for December, 2009
Posted on December 30, 2009 by Jim Gianoglio
“If I use keywords in the link title attribute, will that help me rank higher?”
I recently had a client ask this question. They were under the impression that using keywords in the link title would help in terms of SEO. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily the case. There are several issues to consider, the big one being usability. Let’s take a look at this link title, shall we?
What is the link title attribute?
Put simply, the link title attribute gives additional information about the page being linked to. Here’s what the W3C has to say about it:
The title attribute is used to provide additional information to help clarify or further describe the purpose of a link. If the supplementary information provided through the title attribute is something the user should know before following the link, such as a warning, then it should be provided in the link text rather than in the title attribute.
When should I NOT use a link title?
You should not use a link title if you’re just repeating the anchor text. Not only does that not provide any additional information about that link and the page it goes to, but you could be annoying your visitors (if they’re anything like me). Have you ever scrolled over a link and the title pops up, covering surrounding text. Yeah, that’s what I mean by annoying.
When should I use a link title?
Use the title attribute for your links when you can provide additional information about that link and/or the page it goes to. For example, if your anchor text just says click here, give your users a better idea of what they’ll get if they click on the link (scroll over the “click here” link to see what I mean).
Of course, I’m not the first one to talk about this. If you want to find out more about the title attribute for links, here are some helpful resources:
How to Use Link TITLE Attribute Correctly
Supplementing Link Text with the Title Attribute
How to Customize Your Link Title Attribute
Do you use the title attribute on your links? If you do, let me know in the comments if you have any cool examples, or if you do it differently.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on December 18, 2009 by Jim Gianoglio
I was recently asked via Twitter (follow us @lunametrics) how to use Google Analytics to match landing pages with exact keywords sending traffic to those pages.
Simple enough, but first, let’s talk about why you would want to do this in the first place:
1. If you haven’t yet started optimizing a site, you can get an idea of which keywords the pages already get traffic from.
2. To check that the organic keywords sending traffic to a page are the keywords that you’re optimizing or link building for. It’s always good to measure your efforts.
To match your landing pages with the keywords used to get to those pages, it’s become much easier to do with the recent release of the new Google Analytics features – specifically Secondary Dimensions. Start off by going to the Traffic Sources report, and from there go to the Keywords report.
If you’re only interested in organic visits (which, for this example we are) then be sure to click non-paid.
Then, all you have to do is click the Secondary Dimension dropdown menu and choose Landing Page. It’s really that simple.
Tip: You’ll get a lot of branded keywords showing up at the top, mostly landing on the homepage. It helps to filter these out of your results using the keyword filter (Filter Keyword: excluding [insert branded term here]).
BONUS: For you analyst ninjas, the fun is just starting. Set it to show 500 rows and export your keyword/landing page report as a CSVfor Excel file. Now you can sort and organize the list any way you want.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Web Analytics
Posted on December 17, 2009 by Robbin Steif
Google Analytics does all sorts of cool things that are completely opaque to non-techies (like me). The “asynchronous ga.js snippet” is a great example of that. I wanted to understand this one in my usual tech-for-non-techies fashion, so here goes:
Before async, GA told us all to put our analytics code at the bottom of the page. There was a good reason for this. Web pages often load from top to bottom, so having the code at the bottom of the page enhances the user experience. This is web-person speak for, “Let’s keep users from twiddling their thumbs while waiting for the GA code to load.” Google Analytics isn’t all that “heavy” to start with, but I remember a day not too long ago when many Google servers went down. Not only couldn’t we read our gmail or our Google Docs, but web pages that had the Google Analytics code near the top of the page wouldn’t load.
The downside of the “bottom of the page” is that users who are in a hurry (and who isn’t?) may navigate away from a page before the code loads. When that happens, we no longer get to see the pageview, correct time on site, etc.
Enter the async code. Although Google Analytics uses the analogy of a separate lane for traffic, it still left me wondering, “now why exactly does this work?”
So here is how:
When the Google Analytics tracking code does its usual thing, it makes a request for ga.js. Then you execute all the tracking functions for your page, whether it’s just tracking the pageview, setting a custom variable, recording an ecommerce transaction, etc. With the old version, all those functions wait for the ga.js script to load. If you’ve put your code at the top of the page, the rest of your page will also be waiting. If you’ve put your code at the bottom, GA will be waiting on the rest of the page.
With the new async code, everything that you want your page to do — set those custom variables, or manage your ecommerce, or what have you — now gets queued up. The page makes the request for ga.js, but nobody waits for it except other GA functions that you have on the page.
When the server responds, all the other GA functions in the queue are then allowed to do their thing. Variables can get set, scripts can run, you name it. This way, you can have the code at the top of the page without holding up the rest of the content. And because it’s at the top, it’s likely to finish before the bottom of the page completes loading, so you’re less likely to lose data to visitors clicking off the page before it’s completely loaded.
You can read more about the asynchronous code at on the Google Analytics code site.
Robbin
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
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