Why Is Link Building Important to Businesses?

When a prospective customer enters a query into a search engine, the search engine needs to determine how to return the best results. Effective link building assists in the development of the link profile of the site and the web pages being evaluated. The links to the web page are like a vote of "relevance" for the web page. Basically, if your competitor has an equally relevant page for a given search term or keyword, your web page with a better inbound link profile will rank higher than your competitor page.

This will allow your business to reallocate marketing dollars and efforts to other search terms. It may also reduce the cost of your current search engine marketing campaign by improving your organic (non paid) search results for keywords critical to sales and lead generation. No Search Engine Optimization project is complete without Link Building.

Pay Per Click Testing

We received a question about testing ads in Google AdWords from one of our clients. As we have mentioned in the past, there are many different ways to test ads with pay-per-click advertising. The most common are A/B testing and multivariate testing. A/B testing is a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates. Multivariate testing or multi-variable testing is a technique for testing hypotheses on complex multi-variable systems, especially used in testing market perceptions.

Unfortunately, Google AdWords rarely provides an “apples to apples” comparison of the ads because it does not “serve” the ads at an equal distribution. There are several ways to streamline the results for the best data.

1. Add Conversion Tracking to the Campaign.
2. Link to Google Analytics for overall impact.
3. Calculate the Sample Size of the Market and do not make any changes until all ads reach the sample size or greater.
4. Isolate the ads with consistent testing methods (day of the week, time, etc.). Not always the best method.

Tracking Social Media with Google Analytics

Earlier this month, we had a presentation on tracking and social media marketing for the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce Rev Up Your Marketing 2010. At the event, we discussed a method for tracking Bit.ly links within communications. One of the attendees asked if it would work for TinyURL; theoretically, we did not see any reason why it would not work. So, we tested this theory and wanted to provide our readers with the information to track with TinyURL.

Step 1: Identify the page you want to send traffic to (www.dabrianmarketing.com).
Step 2: Go to Google URL Builder



Step 3: Add the Source, Medium, and Campaign Name.
Step 4: Document URL for Future Reference.
Step 5: Place the Generated URL into Make TinyURL Tool.


Step 6: Test the URL prior to distribution.
Step 7: Verify in Google Analytics




Step 8: Start Implementing into Tweets, Linkedin, and Facebook initiatives.

Google Analytics Column Hack-Pivot Tables

One of our clients requested a method to export more data from the Google Analytics pivot tables. The purpose of the export was to tie together Google Analytics with specific URL variables; however, Google Analytics displays a limited number of items on the pivot table. We did some research and we came across this Google Analytics Hack.

What You Will Need:
- Firefox
- Live HTTP header (http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/)

What are we hacking?
We’ll make possible for the analyst in you to download more than 5 columns from Google Analytics’ Pivot Table reports.

Below are the steps to the hack:
1. Go to any report that has the pivot table option and segment the data the way you want to analyze it (for testing purposes you can use the example above: go on Traffic Sources report à then Referring Sites and then pivot by Landing Page and choose Showing Visits)
2. Start Live HTTP header (in Firefox, under Tools) – do not load any other pages between step 2 and 3
3. Make sure you checked the Capture box on live HTTP header
4. Go back to your Google Analytics window and select a new number of page rows on, under Show rows (the footer of the pivot table). At this moment, the table should reload.
5. Open the Live HTTP header window
6. The first line there should be the request sent to Google Analytics in order to reload the pivot table. You should see something similar to Live HTTP Header
7. Copy the link (should be the first if you didn’t load any other page or made other HTTP request – music or video streams) and load it in another tab. You should have something similar to: Pure html table
8. Now look for the &tcols=5 parameter. Change it to &tcols=50 and load the new URL

Here’s a bonus hack for Google Analytics
The URL that exports Google Analytics reports in CSV for Excel (&fmt=5) is:
https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/export?fmt=5 and some parameters after.
You will have to copy everything starting and including &id=…. from the URL you previously modified (the one with &tcols=50) and append it to Google’s export URL. The export URL will look like:
https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/export?fmt=5&id=1234567&esig=4&seg0=-8&pdr=20091016-20091115&cmp=visit_segments&trows=25&rpt=ReferringSourcesReport&seg=1&view=4&tchcol=0&tst=0

We have used this several times to export additional pivot table information. A word of caution when using a hack, do it at your own risk. We highly recommend that you use this on a duplicate profile and on a secure network.

Source: You Should Test That!

DaBrian Marketing Group Update

DaBrian Marketing Group has officially changed its name to DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC. In addition to this change, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC will be opening a new office in Reading, PA. We are also expanding our team of search engine marketing professionals. As we move forward, we will continue to provide our followers and friends with information to help them achieve a greater impact on their internet marketing campaigns. Furthermore, we will begin to provide bi-monthly blogs, quarterly articles, and regular YouTube submissions. We will inform all of friends, followers, and colleagues via Twitter, Facebook, and the monthly newsletter. If you are not already “connected”, please subscribe to our newsletter at www.dabrianmarketing.com or follow us on twitter (DaBrianMarket).

In the meantime, please do not hesitate to send us a note or make suggestions. We look forward to hearing from you and answering your search engine marketing & web analytics questions.

The Changing Search Engine Environment

The world of search engine marketing is continuously changing and most businesses fail to keep up with these changes. Over the past year, we have seen changes to Microsoft Live (now Bing). This year, we have already seen changes in Google. Google’s latest changes come with the implementation of Google Caffeine. This update will have a dramatic impact on search engine optimization and search engine marketing for businesses in 2010.

Google Caffeine is the latest change to the Google search engine algorithm. According to Matt Cutts (Google Software Engineer Extraordinaire), said that Caffeine is the new technology that improves indexing infrastructure. It deliveries faster results, more accurate search results, larger index size, and better at capturing news. This improvement means a better user search experience. Hopefully, this will translate into more searcher using Google and more advertiser using Google AdWords to attract customers.

Remember that not everything has changed with Google. The content is still key to search results and meta titles/tags are still very important. You will need to update your content more frequently and improve the quality of links to relevant content.

Benefits of Web Analytics for Businesses

Online marketing has become a massive industry over the past decade or so. Its importance for the future growth of companies cannot be overstated. As web traffic continues to increase, web analytics becomes an invaluable tool for business and marketing managers. Web analytics allows companies to gather useful data about the impact their websites and products have on their customers.

With some marketing strategies, it can take time to see relevant results that come directly from a specific promotion. As web analytics continues to grow and change, this problem begins to disappear. With different metrics and analytical methods, it is possible to quickly see what strategies are effective and which ones may need some tweaking. For example, it is very beneficial for improving one’s marketing strategy to see which pages have a high bounce rate or which have high average time-on-page measurements.

It is undoubtedly becoming necessary to have an online presence in the current business world. Through the use of web analytics, businesses can manage their websites effectively and with the highest profit from their investment. The bottom line is that web analytics can help any business grow rapidly, robustly and in a way that ensures they stay relevant into the future.