All Entries in the "Web Analytics" Category

SEO Tracking Tools – Crawler Simulation by Guest Blogger Gushchin Dmitry

First I’d like to thank Gushchin Dmitry of Easy SEO Tracking.com for being a guest blogger at the SEO Discussion Blog. We encourage our readers to send us their blog posts or become a regular contributor. We don’t mind if guest bloggers want to tell about their own product or service as long as it is useful to our readers.

User: I am the owner of the site. I did a good job by exchanging the links with other site owners, by increasing my page rank and creating the best content. Unfortunately, my site doesn’t appear in search engine results. What’s going on?

Don’t panic! One of the possible reasons might be that

Your site is “SEO Unfriendly”

User: What does it mean?

Let’s review the process of indexing the pages by the crawler:

strong>How Crawler Indexes Pages

First of all the crawler doesn’t treat the page the same way the users do.

Let’s consider the following example. What do you see at the screenshot below?

User: Umm… Well…

• Text box
• “Google Search” button
• “I’m feeling Lucky” button
• Logo

Excellent!

Do you want to know how Google “sees” the page above? If yes simply click “view page source” in your browser:

Exciting isn’t it?

The crawler doesn’t treat the pages the same way the users do, because what it “sees” and interprets are the HTML elements only. So one of the reasons your site is SEO unfriendly is the following;

The content of your site is not visible for the crawler as for the improper HTML. This scenario might appear for example in case when the developer or user who created the content incorporated JavaScriptcode or Javaapplets or Flash or things like that.

User: How can I found out whether my site is visible for the crawler or not?

By using Crawler Simulator like the one provided by Easy SEO Tracking.

Crawler Simulator Description
Crawler Simulator performs pretty straightforward operations:

1. It gets the page as if the crawler requests it.
2. And shows what part of the content the crawler actually “sees”

If you want to make sure that your site is visible for the crawler, simply enter the URL of the page in the Site URL field and click the “check” button:

In the example above the content of the page is visible for the crawler.

In cases when the “Content” field is empty or it contains too much JavaScript code it is a signal that the crawler will not see any information at the page (consider the example below):

In the example here there is not too much useful information for the crawler.

User: I entered the URL of my page in Crawler Simulator and it returns nothing. What I need to do?

Find the developer or someone who familiar with the HTML and ask him or her to fine tune the HTML! (If you need help adding content to your page that the search engines can see, click here and fill out the form or call us at 786-317-8774)

User: Thank you! Hey developer. I got some work for you!

Visit Easy SEO Tracking.com for more info.

Click Tale Review – Analytics Masterpiece

I decided to try the free version of Click Tale to see how their web analytics program works. I’m extremely impressed, except for the price. To be fair though, the service is good enough to demand a high price.

It does a screen capture video of users on your website. It’s like looking right over their shoulder as they navigate through your website. You see not only the links they click on, but also where they clicked on the page where there was no link.

You see how they scroll down the page. You see where they hold there mouse as they read the text. You see where they pause to read or re-read text.

There are also heat maps for how they move the mouse, where they clicked and how they scroll the page.

The form tracker is way cool. It tells you how many people only filled it out partially, then quit. It tells you how many people never touched the form.It tells you the average number of fields that were left blank. It tells you the average time it took users to fill out the form.

There are a ton of other features and reports that make Click Tale the best web analytics program I’ve tried yet.

Do you use web analytics besides Google Analytics? If so, let us know by making a comment. I’ll try them out.