As no doubt many of you are aware, there have been some big changes in Google Analytics lately, especially with the ways you can track how people interact with your site as well as the way you can structure your goal sets without having to create ridiculous numbers of profiles for you to track your 200+ goals! And yes, all of us here at Bloom are HOOGELY excited about it!

Google Analytics now lets you track up to 20 goals, all in the same profile! Each Profile is allocated 4 goal sets, each of these goal sets contain a set of five goals which make it really easy for you to now group similar goal types into one goal set:

Example:

Goal Set 1 – Registrations

Goal 1 – Party Registration

Goal 2 – Meeting Registration

Goal 3 – Conference Registration

Goal 4 – Charity Registration

Goal 5 – Seminar Registration

Goal Set 2 – Downloads

Goal 1 – Yearly Summary PDF Download

Goal 2 – Chairmans Statement PDF Download

Goal 3 – Widget Download

Goal 4 – Flash content Download

Goal 5 – Press Release Download

..and so it goes on.

Of course, you are not limited to the different types of goals that you can track; you can track just about anything! From completed ecommerce transactions to how many clicks you’ve had on your site “Follow us on Twitter” button, time on site, pages per visit, bounce rates, the possibilities are endless!

Engagement Goals

This is the thing which we Bloomers are especially excited about! Google Analytics has listened to the community and responded with a new type of goal called “Engagement Goals” which allows you to track how people are interacting with your website, and is an absolute must have if you are planning a new site launch and wanting to test the overall “stickiness” of the website, or even tweaking the website to improve its usability. This type of goal allows you to set thresholds for Time on Site or Pages per Visit.

Time on Site Goal

Google Analytics now allows you to set a greater than or less than value of time spent on the site for one of your goals.

For example, you can set a specific goal to track how many people spent less than 10 seconds on your site, then another goal to track how many people have spent 10 to 20 seconds, then another for 20 to 30 seconds, and so it goes on. This is particularly useful for when you are launching a new website, wanting to test some linkbait or how well people engage with a form or other facility that you’ve provided.

Pages Per Visit Goal

Google Analytics lets you create a goal that you can set to greater, equal to or less than value to a pages per visit.

For example you can set a specific goal to track how many people made less than 5, 10, 15 (the list goes on!) page views per session. As before, this is particularly useful when you are launching a new site, and you can gauge the success of it by seeing if the number of page views has improved, or God forbid, gone down!

And in case you’re wondering how you’re going to save all that historical data from your old goals, Kaushik tells you how to keep your old goal history in your new goal!

Advanced Table Filtering

A new addition to the reporting power of Google Analytics is the ability to filter the elements on a table based on the different metric conditions.

Example

If you only want to see your top pages that have an average session time of over one minute and received less than 100 pageviews, you can do that by performing the following action:

• Click Advanced Filter at the bottom of the report window:

• Click on “Add new condition” and select the metrics you want to set:

• Set the values you want to monitor:

• Create a new filter using the same process for the number of PageViews
• et Voila! Your Custom Report:

A very useful and powerful addition to the way you can report on your campaigns, I’m sure you’ll agree!

Google Analytics Intelligence Reports

This really is THE most useful new addition to the way Google Analytics reports your data. Google Analytics now tells YOU what’s happening on your website, your campaigns and much more!

Analytics Intelligence provides you with automatic alerts of significant changes that are happening to your website in terms of traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, and a whole lot more!

Example:

Google Analytics will alert you if you’ve seen a big spike in traffic on a particular day from a referring website or search engine, like your blog, Google, or just about anything. It would also alert you if you saw a drop in Time on Site with visitors from London for instance. So instead of you having to monitor reports constantly, Google Analytics now does it all for you!

You can also set up Custom Alerts which makes it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what trends to look out for. You can set daily, weekly or monthly triggers on different dimensions and metrics and be notified by email or on the interface when the changes actually occur. An extremely powerful addition to Google Analytics indeed!

Fin

And there you have it! It’s easy to see why Google Analytics is one of the top Analytics packages available! Keep the new features rolling!

Everything is in real-time so for instance you can see what your friend is typing in the instant messenger tool, character by character, and allows you to start typing your response even before your friend has finished his/her sentence!

It also allows you to collaborate and communicate with friends or work colleagues online whilst working together on a document, image, video or even working out directions on a map! The functionality is such that you can reply anywhere in a message, edit the content of a document and add participants anywhere in the process, which of course could bring major advantages and has the potential to TOTALLY REVOLUTIONIZE the way that the Digital Industry (and indeed other industries) work and interact with their clients!

An API facility has been provided for Google Wave which will allow developers to embed applications that will add to and improve the Google Wave experience.

At the moment, Google Wave is available to 100 000 invitees from around the world, each of whom can nominate 5 additional friends to “join the Wave”.

While Google Wave runs well in most browsers, it’s been reported that the big G is having problems making it work in IE (no surprise there eh, Richard!? but they are no doubt working hard to solve the problem.

Check it out for yourself on the Google Wave Homepage!

Following on from Stu’s most excellent post about “Crap SEO Tips” (come on, we’ve all heard em!), I have been inspired to write a post about some of the worst SEO disasters ever to befall our comrades in the SEO Community!
We’ve all been there at some point in our SEO careers…that SEO project that you’ve been working on so hard for so long and the BOOM! Your world comes shattering down around you.
I’ve gathered a short list here of those travesties that make us shake in our very boots!

SEO Apocalypse #5
Client relaunching website with +8.000 URLs, after two weeks they wonder why traffic drops – 301-redirects? What is that? (Thanks @GrosenFriis)

SEO Apocalypse #4
“Can you help us? Just launched new website on an old domain and our site has simply dropped off Google altogether! We’re looking for an SEO agency to help us” Say, those look like “noindex” commands in the meta robots tag on each page…DOH! (Anonymous)

SEO Apocalypse #3
“I’d just taken over SEO internally on one of our websites, and noticed that traffic had dropped quite dramatically a few weeks previously. It was my job to find out exactly what happened and fix it. The explanation given was that we had perhaps suffered penalties due to some historical link activity, but further investigation showed this was unlikely. In the end, I discovered that 2 product pages had been merged (one containing content, and the other detailed price data), unfortunately the content was merged into the prices page which was previously noindexed. The result was that were now no product pages indexed! The change had been done to aid usability by making navigation easier for the user. Moral of the story? People responsible for usability aren’t always well educated in SEO – compensate for this by having a thorough sign-off procedure” (Thanks @Moxley)

SEO Apocalypse #2
One company added a rel canonical tag to every single page of their site pointing to the homepage. Google said “gee thanks” and removed every single page from the index except the homepage…(Thanks @tomcritchlow)

SEO Apocalypse #1
Hey, that site always ranks top for “keyword”, let’s copy their site…some months later when they approached us for SEO: “You’re going to need a new site…”  (Anonymous)

That’s it folks! If any of you have inspiring tales to tell then please do post your comments!

PS. Behold the Magnificence!

Stu’s new hairstyle: (Best pic I could get chaps!)

Dear fans of the Bloom Media Blog
Very recently, my esteemed and reliable SEO comrades subjected me to the worst possible SEO torture in the SEO world, a torture so horrible that the Sicilian Mafia may even consider using it for their own dark purposes, or possibly it may even feature as a critical part of the plot in a future “The Godfather 5”!?
Yes, it was in fact writing a unique set of Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords tags for a grand total of 600 pages! Fortunately, a kind hearted soul called Naz (a new member of our team) heroically rode to the rescue and helped me out with some of the work.
Anyway, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Bloom Blog and decided that I had had enough of looking at Stu’s profile picture with him trying desperately hard to look like the hero D’Artagnon from the Three Musketeers and somehow not quite able to pull it off. Is it something to do with the Recycled Student haircut, eh Stu?? 

Stu

Have I just spotted Stu’s alter ego??

I’ve decided to give you readers out there some help when it comes to writing your Title and Meta tags for each page.  I have compiled a list below on the sort of things you need to bear in mind when writing them.

Firstly, to introduce to you what Meta tags actually are; they are contained in the <head> section of a web page. The <head> section contains all the information for a page including Title, Description, Authored by, CCS Templates and Javascript commands.

Norton’s 5 Golden Rules of Meta Tagging

Golden Rule 1) Keep it unique & relevant – there are a great many websites out there that simply duplicate their Title and Meta tags across all their pages in the belief that this is an unimportant aspect of their site. Nothing could be further from the truth! The content of these tags can be instrumental on what level of clickthrough rate your site will receive; these tags need to be unique and relevant to the page they are featured on.

Golden Rule 2) Keep it short and sweet – think of the search engines in a human capacity, they don’t want to be inundated with reams of text, they want something brief and to the point which will tell them “at a glance” what that page will be about.

Golden Rule 3) Remember the brand! -  A great (and costs nothing) way of promoting your brand as part of a wider online marketing strategy is to include your website (or indeed your company name) in the Title tag of each page. This helps to promote brand awareness for when your rankings really begin to kick-in.

Golden Rule 4) Get your keywords in – If you’re populating the Title and Meta tags of a category page, say “Car Insurance”, ensure that this keyword is featured once in the Title tag, once (or even twice) in the Meta Description and once in the Meta Keywords tag. DON’T spam the Meta keywords tag with repeated instances of the same keyphrase, it’s counter-productive and doesn’t provide any value in this way.

Golden Rule 5) Advertise! – If your keyphrase rankings are doing well, why not feature a promotion or special offer that you’re running? It’s a completely free way of promoting your site and offers out there resulting in a great way of attracting a higher clickthrough rate. Your Return on Investment (ROI) could be so much higher!

So there you have it! The secret to writing good, informative Meta tags a secret no longer! If any of you readers have any cunning ideas on how I can plot my revenge against my colleagues, please leave a comment!