Wikipedia defines Web Analytics as, “the monitoring and reporting of Web site usage so businesses can better understand the complex interactions between Web visitor actions and Web site offers, as well as leverage that insight for increased customer loyalty and sales.” Simply put, Web Analytics provides information about users of your website on the internet.

Web Analytics helps you understand the user’s experience on your website. Using this information, you can make modifications to your website that will help your website rank higher in search engines and thereby help you get more website traffic. It not only gives information about the number of visitors to the site but gives a world of useful information like time every individual spends on the website, pages visited in the website, where a person left your website, and much more.

SEO importance of Web Analytics

The question here is how does Web Analytics help SEO? Here are some of the ways in which web analytics can influence your SEO campaign:

• Visitors to the site: The very basic of information, this tells you how many visitors came to your site in a given month. You can also compare the data with past information to see how the traffic to your website is growing over a period of time. You can identify trends and seasonality of visitors to your site. In turn, this will help you refine your marketing efforts to coincide with period when visitors to your site are the mximum.

• Top referring keywords: This lists the relevant keywords that brought visitors to your website. Based on this information, you can see where your website ranks for these keywords. In turn, you can make changes that will help your website rank higher for the keyword. The end result is that you can tweak your SEO campaign to rank higher for keywords that are bringing visitors to your website.

• Domains that bring in traffic: Also called referrers, this is another important metric as it gives you an insight about the source of the traffic to your website. If a website is referring visitors to your site, then it tells you the kind of websites you should be present on, which sites the visitors to your site are likely to visit and this can help you refine your link building strategy.

• Click Path: This helps to judge how user friendly your site design is, how people navigate your site and where they are most likely to exit your site. This helps you refine your website navigation and maximize conversions on your website.

• Bounce Rate: This shows how many visitors left your website and which pages they left the site from. This helps you analyze what could be causing people to leave your site and you can accordingly modify the content of your site.

There’s a lot more useful information and data that web analytics provides. The items listed above are the very basic. A proper tracking of your website traffic can provide you with a wealth of information that you can use to refine your SEO campaign and attract more traffic to your website.

Let’s see how Google Analytics helps you track the above details of your website. Google Analytics is a free solution from Google and it can provide you with data that helps you refine your SEO campaigns and attract more traffic. Here’s an example:

In the above image, you can see the details that Google analytics provides about a particular website. You can find that it mentions about number of visits, bounce rates, pageviews, etc. This is a top level view. You can explore details of each of the above metrics, decide refinements to your SEO campaigns and track the impact of the changes you make.

If you do not know the impact of your efforts, it becomes next to impossible to know if your efforts are working. Analyzing the information available through a Web Analytics solution, you can take informed decisions and make changes to your SEO campaigns to drive more website traffic.

Contributed by Sudeep Rao

What is an anchor text?

Anchor text, also known as link text, is the hyperlinked text on a web page that leads to another web page or web site. In other words, it is the clickable text in a link. Anchor text is meant tell the user what to expect in the content of the link’s destination. For instance:

 In the image, there are a number of anchor texts like email marketing, deliverability tools, content creation, Web analytics software, search marketing and mobile marketing. Clicking on the text “email marketing” for instance, takes you to the page http://www.lyris.com/solutions/lyris-hq/email-marketing, a page dedicated about the company’s email marketing solution.

Anchor text and its implications on search engine optimization 

 Anchor text is an important search engine optimization factor. It is one of the elements that search engines evaluate when ranking websites for specific keywords. Search engines collect information by crawling around the web by following links i.e., hopping around from one page to another through the links on the page. Links then, are a fundamental necessity for search engines to identify websites and to go from one website to the other. Search engines use the links as indicators of the topic of the page they are about to visit.

Types of Anchor Text

 1. Internal Links: The hypertext that is pointing to page within the same website is called an internal link.

 From the search engine optimization point of view, the anchor text of an internal link:

a) ensures that all the pages within a site get crawled and indexed by the search engines.

b) helps to increase the page rank of an internal page.

c) increases the relevance of the linked page for the keyword that may be a part of the anchor text.

 In the  image, “email marketing” as an anchor text is an example of an internal link.

 2. Inbound Links: The links that are pointing to your site from other sites are known as inbound links. If more number of sites link to the webpage “http://www.lyris.com/solutions/lyris-hq/email-marketing” with “email marketing” as the link text, the search engine start associating the page with the term email marketing. In addition to the number of links, the relevance of the link is also important. An inbound link from a well known site about email marketing is more valuable than hundreds of links of an irrelevant website.

Targeting Keywords in Anchor Text

When a particular keyword is extremely relevant to a page in your website, try to make sure that links pointing to the page have the keyword in the anchor text. The more the instances of internal links and inbound links that point to the page with the keyword in the link text, the higher it will rank for that keyword. One needs to be cautious while doing this. If too many links suddenly appear to point to a page with the same anchor text in a very short period of time, then it can raise a red flag with the search engines. It is important to grow the links in a sustained manner over a period of time. Spread the effort over a long term period and also include variations of the keyword in the anchor text.

 Anchor Text and URL alignment

While getting the inbound links with the desired anchor text, make sure that you are linking to the appropriate page rather than always linking to the home page. For instance if desired link text is email marketing, then the link text should point to the email marketing page within the site and not the home page.

When effectively used over a long term, anchor text optimization through internal and inbound links can have a significant impact on your search engine optimization and help your website rank higher for the keywords present in the anchor text.

Contributed by Girish N N