It is an important web management practice for web business owners to track the visitor traffic and visitor behavior on their website. If your web business depends on traffic and sales from search engine visitors, then it is extremely important that you continuously monitor the search terms and phrases your prospects are using to find you in the search engines.

Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking web visitors and behavior. Google Analytics is free and is an extremely powerful web traffic tracking tool. One of our standard Internet marketing practices to create a Google Analytics account for our search engine optimization (SEO) customers.

In Google Analytics, there are "accounts" and there are "profiles." What is the difference in Google Analytics accounts vs profiles? And why should a web business owner care about Google Analytics accounts and profiles? (There is one very important reason.)

Below are six Google Analytics "accounts vs. profiles" facts that web business owners should be aware of:

Ping Services help your blog get found.  If you have a blog on your website and you want the blog to be found by prospects and people searching for your products and services, then you should be using "blog ping services" to promote your blog in the vast array of blog directories and blog search engines.

If you're using your blog for search engine optimization, then you absolutely need to know about and be using ping services.

If you use Wordpress for your blog and want your blog to be found in Google, then you have to take certain steps to make your Wordpress blog Google friendly.  This article contains the step-by-step tasks we do to implement search engine optimization (SEO) on our Wordpress blogs. 

Wordpress is a very popular content management system (CMS) that is used for blogging and website creation.  Note: we at Pagecafe don't particularly like Wordpress because in our opinion it has an awkward user interface that is time consuming to update.  We update over 40 blogs per week so we need fast and efficient user interface for our blog workflow.  We love Joomla for blogging and overall website development.

But, this blog post is about SEO for Wordpress blogs. 

Google makes over 400 search ranking changes each year to the "algorithm" used to rank websites.  

Last month Google made a search algorithm change that was substantial enough to have earned the code name "Mayday."  According to Google guru Matt Cutts, this change impacts "long tail" searches which are longer search queries with numerous (i.e four or more) words in the search query.  Matt Cutts posted a YouTube video about the Mayday change May 30th.

The Mayday change will likely affect the search ranking of larger sites with "item" or other "focused topic" pages.  These types of pages often don't get the specific SEO treatment as the pages that target shorter search queries of 2-3 search terms.

Was your site affected by Mayday?  What should a web business owner do? 

Want to improve your ranking in the search engines?  Here's one secret - Add fresh, original updates to you website on a consistent basis.  I have had great success improving search engine traffic for my clients with weekly updates to their websites (usually the Blog).  Google places high value on the "freshness factor" of your website, so make the effort to update weekly and you will soon see your ranking go up in the search engine results pages. 

Facebook is a key part of online marketing now a days (Feb 2010) so you need to understand the difference between a Facebook "Profile" and a Facebook "Fan Page."  A "profile" is meant to represent a single individual, and a "fan page" (aka "pages") is meant for organizations.  Important: It is a violation of a Facebook policy for an organization to create a profle. So don't create a profile page for your business, you will probably have it terminated.  

You have to create a fan page for your business.  A fan page can be associated with a profile, but it does not have to be. You can create a fan page without having a profile.  If you do associate your fan page with your profile, current Facebook features will not let you dissaccociate your profile from your fan page.  For a business this could be bad news when it comes time to sell your business and you want to sell your Facebook fan page as an asset with the sale.  Here is what I do.

Are you promoting a local business, i.e. in a city or region.  Then you need to submit your site to the local oriented web directories that focus on linking to local businesses and organization. The local directories usually have you fill out a profile form, be ready for this by having a professional sounding profile and a  photo (if appropriate) ready to go. 

Below are some of my favorite local directories, the link should take you directly to the submission page.

This post is a real world story of how we did a makeover and search engine optimization (SEO) to a website and traffic went down, but the client loved us anyway.  In the story I illustrate the importance of a web visitor statistic called the bounce rate and explain why it is important for web business owners to understand and monitor the bounce rate.

In Sep 2009 we completed a makeover to a business website, converting it to Joomla and upgrading the websites' copy and organization to improve persuasion, content and hopefully results.   The website also included my most aggressive search engine optimization (SEO) consulting program with emphasis on very specific keywords.

It's the first week of December, the day after Cyber Monday, and my wife is annoyed about all the email offers filling her inbox.  She is getting 20-30 emails a day from retailers and is tired of deleting them, so she says she is taking the time to unsubscribe from each email list.  How did something she once requested become an unwanted intrusion?

Could it be that email newsletter marketing is dying? Or evolving into something else?

It is extremely important that your blog be hosted on your own web domain.  Do not host your web blog on an external domain.  For example, you do not want your website address to be: yourblog.blogger.com, yourblog.worpress.com, or yourblog.blogspot.com.  You want your blog address to be something like blog.yourdomain.com or www.youdomain.com/blog which are both hosted on your web site's domain.  Here's why...