Bay Area Web Design

The Importance of Building Quality Backlinks

What are backlinks? Backlinks are incoming links to a website. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one leading indicator of the popularity of a website. A high number of backlinks indicate to the major search engines the relative popularity of a website; you can think of each backlink as a vote for the website linked to

Why are backlinks important? Because Google considers backlinks a vote for your website, it’s important to get as many relevant backlinks as possible. This is especially true in highly competitive industries or when two websites are very similar with regards to content and navigation, it’s the number of incoming links that will help you gain ground on your competitors.

Not all links are created equal, so try to get backlinks from reputable websites with high PageRank and few outbound links. Do not fall for the many company advertisements out there that claim they will submit your website to 1000 search engines or directories for $49.95, or similar offers. This strategy might actually hurt your SEO efforts if Google determines you are trying to manipulate their search results.

Building quality backlinks should be very high on your SEO priority list. I hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your website, and some of the pitfalls that are out there.

If you would like help with your link building strategy contact one of the companies below.

Bay Area Website Designer

San Francisco Website Designer

Understanding Your Website Visitor Behavior with Google Analytics

It wasn’t that long ago that only large online retailers like Amazon.com and Walmart.com had the advanced web analytics tools to understand the customer experience. Today there are a lot of web analytics choices both free and subscription based, but we believe Google Analytics to be the best solution for most businesses. For a list of some of the features you can visit the Google Analytics website http://www.google.com/analytics/features.html .

Getting Started With Google Analytics

Step 1: Sign up for an account it only takes a minute. http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html

Step 2: Add the tracking code to all your web pages or contact your web designer to add the code.

Step 3: Familiarize yourself with the different reports and terminology. The Google Analytics website has a great help section. http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/?hl=en . Alternatively you can ask your web developer to help you configure the account, set up filters and conversion tracking, and help you interpret the reports on a monthly or quarterly basis.

What Questions Can Analytics Answer For You?

1. How did your visitors arrive and where did they come from? Analytics can tell you whether your traffic is coming from search engines, referring sites, or if your website address was typed in directly into a browser. Knowing this information can help you direct your limited marketing dollars towards the most effective sources of traffic.

2. What are your website visitors looking for? Analytics can tell you what keywords visitor’s are using to find your website. We used this data to identify new keywords for our Google Adwords account that were cheaper to purchase and have a better conversion rate.

3. How are visitors entering your website, how long are they staying, and where are they exiting? Analytics reports on the number of page views, unique views, your most popular web pages, and the bounce rate. The bounce rate refers to when a visitor lands on a page and then exits from that page without viewing another page which can indicate a serious problem.

4. How often should I check my Analytics reports? Monitoring your websites’ trends over time is extremely important and I would recommend at least monthly if no major changes have been made to the website. If major changes have been made I would review the reports at least weekly and compare the results to previous time periods. Another reason to monitor your reports more often is if you have started a radio or print campaign that refers consumers back to your website; by doing so you can track the response to your advertising campaign.

Google Analytics is a powerful piece of software that when used properly will give you incredible insight into the effectiveness of your website over time. If you are interested in using Google Analytics and don’t know where to start contact one of the web design professionals below.

Bay Area Web Design

San Francisco Web Design