Top of Mind from 3by400

Not so long ago, you could look at your Google Analytics account and easily see the search phrases being used to find your site. Don't confuse these with keywords, which everyone says are dead...even Google (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html). Metadata keywords in and of themselves are not really of much value, but using them in your content...well, that is the real "Google juice". Google calls these search phrases "queries", but about two years ago, the most critical ones vanished from Analytics, showing "unavailable". If you were using AdWords, you could see them, so it looked like a heavy-handed approach to marketing Google AdWords. It was really more like a repositioning to Google Webmasters Tools.

How do you determine what is "fair"? I grew up in a time when not everyone got a trophy, grades were not assigned on a sliding scale, and no one bailed out businesses who couldn't figure out how to stay in business. That makes me sound really old, but I'm under 50. Two pieces of fresh news today lead me to believe that facts are becoming less and less important. First, I had to shake my head at a Business Insider "news" story that totally missed reporting on the new Google Conversion API because they were too busy complaining about the...

In order to determine how individual pages are faring in terms of visitors and other handy Analytics information from Google: Log into your Google Analytics account (www.google.com/analytics).Select "View Report" for the web site you wish to review.From the main Analytics report for your account, go to: Content (left menu), then In-Page Analytics (left sub-menu) This gives you a representation of your site with click info for each link. Just drill down to your desired page from your standard web site navigation. When your page displays, you can see the Content Detail on the left, showing pageviews, uniqueviews, bounce rate, etc. Note that...

Presented June 24, 2009 Dahlonega Lumpkin-County Chamber of Commerce Nuts & Bolts Presenter: Beth Snider This session included an overview of Google tools for businesses and a look at top-level Google Analytics reporting. Discussion included understanding what reports indicate, how to translate indicators into changes that may be required on your site, and a basic understanding at how Google indexes your web site. 3by400-GoogleAnalytics (downloadable PDF)

There is a fairly simple fix for the "Internet Explorer - Cannot open the site..." problem that is becoming more prevalent as we experiment with different Javascript libraries and Google API. In the index.php of the template file of Joomla, there should be a segment of code that calls the Google component config.php through a require function, as well as a Javascript call from Google itself. This segment of code was originally set to be inserted before head section the of the HTML. This insertion, however causes IE6 to abort all functions and not load the site. Solution: Remove the code...