How can one use web analytics to measure traffic from links when one does not control the destination website?

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What you are asking is ‘Referrals’ to your website. Traffic analytics software will show you referrals. From there look at the referrals that are from other websites and there you will find your answer.

Any analytics program can help you with that. Your web hosting provider should give you access to monitor traffic to your website, such as Webalizer or AWStats. Google Analytics is the go-to option that is free and gives you tons of insights once you know how to use it.

The opposite is a little bit more tricky. Detecting what traffic goes from your website to another website. This is important to know if you have paid banners on your website. To give you an idea of how many clicks your banner gets that go to a website will help you determine how well that banner is doing. To find this out you add a little bit of code to the end of a link that looks like this.

http://www.extremeterrain.com/clean-trail-initiative-program.html?utm_source=CleanTrailProject&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=AffiliateAd

//www.extremeterrain.com/clean-trail-initiative-program.html?utm_source=CleanTrailProject&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=AffiliateAd

Everything after the question mark (?) is a tracking code to help you find out the answers you need. Here is a link that helps you generate the tracking code that you need.

Eric Weathers requested your answer

What are the best ways to make a website seem bigger and more active or established?

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To make your website ‘bigger’ and ‘more active’ tells me right away to start writing articles or blog posts to your website. By providing content you gain a sense of ‘authority’ that Google considers in its ranking algorithm. It also gives your website a sense of authority to make it look ‘bigger’. Adding a FAQ (frequently asked question) page also gives a sense of professionalism and authority to help you in this area as well. I would do some keyword research or visit areas like Answer the Public to get ideas on what people ask. Soon enough you will start gaining more traffic from the blog posts, articles, and FAQ page to give your website a more ‘established’ internet presence.

To make it more active I would provide a feed of your Facebook page and new stories that relate to your industry onto the home page of your website. The new version of WordPress allows you to display feeds from other websites but when people click on the links for the feeds it DOES NOT open in a new tab so you will have to install a ‘feed plugin’ to make it open in a new tab. Ideally, it would be nice if you can open the link into a new smaller window so that they can see your website in the background.

Why do this? Because you do not want people to visit another website then close the tab thinking they will go back to your website but it will be gone. Another thing to take note is to make sure that the feed that shows news of your industry does not show your competitors. You wouldn’t want to send people to your competitor’s site instead of yours. You can view the feed of what you want to use and see where their past feeds compromise lead to. If you use a plugin you can decide which posts go through and which ones not to display if you have the time. Otherwise, it can be done automatically for you.

Another way to make your website more ‘active’ is to install a forum where people can get together and discuss topics. This is only effective if you already get a lot of visitors to your website so I would put a hold on this until you do. I have found that popular posts have people leave comments and talk to each other a little bit that way.

Making the website more interactive with the general public is another way to make it more ‘active’ as well. Here is a Google Search on how to do this.

Santos Halper requested your answer

Search Engin Optimization (Where’s the E!?!)

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This is just a test to see how easy it is to rank for ‘search engin optimization’

You see sometimes when keyword research is done you will find a misspelling that is searched for quite a bit that you can bid on in Google AdWords. It just so happens that this keyword phrase says the competition is very low so I am testing out that theory here.

According to SEMrush the ease of rank is 0 out of 100 and I have my doubts about that. So, I checked Moz and they say it has a difficulty of 77 out of 100. That one seems more likely.

search engin optimization

Search Engin Optimization (Where is the ‘e’?!?

How to see how a particular page ranks in SEMRush

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SEMRush Landing Pages Report

For those of you used to another SaaS (software as a service) here is how you find how a particular page ranks in SEMRush. At first, you may think it is the report found by going to SEMRush Dashboard > Position Tracking > Pages. But this is not the case. The report on this page shows you what SEMRush finds that ranks on each page of your website.

Click to Enlarge

 

The URL column displays the web address for each landing page listed in the report. But there’s really more to it – clicking on a URL will show you every keyword this particular page ranks for. You can also view the page itself by clicking on the arrow icon.

Next is the Keyword Count column. Here you can see the total number of keywords a particular landing page is ranking for.

The Average Position column shows the average position number for all keywords the page ranks for. Clicking on a particular URL will let you see the precise position of each keyword.

Finally, in the Total Volume column, you can view the sum of search volume for all keywords.

This report is VERY useful when cross-referenced with data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics. It gives you great ideas on what to rank for each individual page.

SEMRush The Other Report: Domain Analytics Overview

The report you may be looking for can be found at Domain Analytics > Overview. This tool can be used for more than just the TLD (top-level domain). If you type the page of a website there it will return all of the keyword phrases that particular page ranks for along with a slew of other information such as page authority, traffic, pay-per-click ads, backlinks, traffic trends (with notes), competitors, etc.

So if the Landing Pages Report does not show a page that you want to see what you rank on you can use this report instead. Enter the data here along with your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Landing Page Report to cross-reference the information.

Once you enter the URL, keyword ranked on that URL, how hard it is to rank for each phrase, how much traffic you would get from each phrase from every source you can quickly look at the data and determine which keyword phrase to go for.

Unfortunately, you cannot enter a specific keyword phrase and a specific web page to find out how you rank, but you can go to https://smallseotools.com/keyword-position/ where they use the API for SEMRush and do exactly that.

Here is an image of the cross-referenced data to give you an idea of what keyword phrase to try for at a glance.

Click to Enlarge

If you are interested in trying SEMRush’s tools for a free trial follow this link.

What are some local SEO tips for a cake shop/bakery?

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Michael Rock, Owner at The Internet Presence, LLC (2003-present)
Answered Mon

If you are a local shop/bakery then you probably are not shipping out cakes out-of-state so then I would claim my Google My Business page first. This will add images of your product, display your shop hours, add sales to the post section, and help with people searching for bakeries ‘in the area’ while they are on their phone using Google Maps.

Second, I would utilize a service like Moz Local where you can enter your business information so that it is shared onto hundreds of other websites. This has always helped with local rankings.

Third, I would add your business address and contact info on every page of your website. Having the NAP (name, address, phone) on every page helps you rank locally.

Fourth, I would utilize social media like Facebook to help spread the word, then add ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons to the pages of your website.

Just let me know if you need any help with this. Glad I could help!

· Answer requested by Dexter Roona