It might sound simple enough to do, but you’d be surprised how many companies, large and small, have fallen foul of Google. Some people accept their failings and make amends, while others take affront and try to fight the system.

The simple truth though is that Google controls the market. It isn’t quite a monopoly, but with a 90% share of the market, it might just as well be. Playing by Google’s rules won’t hurt you elsewhere either, with ethical SEO you can benefit right across the board.

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If you are not using Google Analytics to monitor your website’s traffic and user behaviour, the first thing you should do is start. Setting up Google Analytics is a straightforward process and the standard version is completely free. A quick registration and small-chunk-of-code-on-site later and you have access to one of the most powerful website tools available today.

However with so much information locked within the Analytics interface, it can be difficult to know where to start. These three reports are my top three basic reports for gaining some top-level insight into user activity. Before you dive into deeper, more advanced reports, it’s worth getting to grips with what you can learn from these sorts of reports.

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Since October 2011, there’s a good chance you’ve seen “(not provided)” reported as a keyword for organic search in Google Analytics. For many websites, (not provided) may even be the top organic search keyword.

But what causes keywords to be “(not provided)”, why is the percentage of (not provided) keywords continually increasing and what effect is this having on organic search analysis?
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Before you go ahead and read this article, I’d recommend that you take a moment to read last week’s precursor, where I discussed how optimising your site for user experience is vital.

Following on from last Friday’s post, today I’ll be looking at how you can clear the cobwebs from your social signals and amp up your site to become a social powerhouse through a selection of simple to implement techniques.

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It finally seems as if we’re getting out of winter, the clouds are starting to clear and the sun has begun meekly shining down. Spring is well and truly here.

It’s time to put on your marigolds and dust out those cobwebs from the corners of your home, and whilst you’re at, why don’t you give your website a well-deserved spring clean as well? Read more

Whenever you perform a search online, your results will appear with a few lines of text underneath each of the pages’ titles.

That small snippet of information is there to provide users with a brief summary of what the page behind the title is about. When used properly, the meta description acts as a form of marketing or advert for the page, explaining how this page is more relevant for the users’ needs when compared to all the others. Read more

Rumours have been flying round the SEO world recently with talk of a new, rather significant version of Google’s Penguin Update being released into the wild later this year.

Although it’s unknown exactly when the new update will arrive, a statement issued earlier this year by Google’s own head of webspam Matt Cutts revealed that Google are apparently working on a “new generation” of the infamous Penguin update. Read more

While nobody ever enjoys criticism, it doesn’t mean that you should hide from it. Sometimes comments will be unjustified or spoken in spite, on other occasions though they can highlight issues that others were too polite to mention.

When it comes to SEO and site management in general, you always need to keep your eyes and ears open. So if someone tells you that a link isn’t working or they can’t access an important area of your website, it is always worth investigating further.

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A robots.txt file isn’t the most exciting thing in the world. Its purpose is to tell search engine robots which pages on your website should and shouldn’t be indexed, and therefore searchable.

Most of the time, these files simply include the information that search engines like Google need to index websites, plus information that website owners and developers need to read a site’s source code. Some sites, however, have some hidden gems contained within their robot.txt files…if you’re willing to search for them.

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Those clever guys at Google have gone to greater lengths to improve safety and security by editing their Webmaster Tools Verification process. Verifying yourself as a webmaster serves a number of useful functions – it basically enables whoever holds the title of a ‘webmaster’ to be able to do various things that are integral to the smooth running of the website.

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