One of the least known features of Google Analytics is also the most powerful. We have seen that we can use Google Analytics in several ways including Visitor, Content, and Traffic Source analysis. However, each business is different and more importantly, each SEO professional performs his or her work in a unique manner with a distinct workflow. For these individuals, the Custom Reporting functionality of Google Analytics is a true swiss army knife.

For example, while evaluating traffic, I prefer to start with the Keywords and then for each keyword, drill down to see which pages on my site are being visited. For another, it might be the reverse. Google Analytics allows you to design your reports using Metrics and Dimensions on a drill down grid. Dimensions include those properties of pages that you want to see, and metrics are various aspects of that property. For example, if the dimension is “Page Title”, Metrics will include how many visitors, bounce rates etc.

The features also allows you to drill down from each dimension to another. So for example, if you click on a certain Page Title, you can view the “Keywords” dimension, giving you the keywords that people used to get to the page form various search engines. You can drill down even further to other dimensions if you want.

Mining data in various ways allows you to view it from several angles getting insights both into how people use your site, as well as how to improve your content or structure. Use the custom reporting functionality in Google Analytics to be a cut above the rest of the SEO experts!

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The heart of SEO after keyword research, is writing articles that target those keywords. This is a very fine line and one that is easy to misread. Far too many people cram keywords into their articles willy nilly and expect the Search engines to pick them up. The truth is more complex. However, even done right, how do you know how well you have succeeded?

There are many aspects to term targeting in SEO and each has a different level of importance with the search engines. What is needed, is a simple way to get to know how well you have addressed these aspects and which ones you have missed out on. Fortunately, there is such a tool, and it’s brought to you by SEOmoz.

If you’re not a member, you can check how well your article targets a particular keyword once every 24 hours and generate a comprehensive report about how well it achieves it’s goal. The score is ranked from D- to A+ with all grades in between. Some factors such as inbound links you may not have control over immediately, but you can definitely work on the others. It’s a tool I use everyday and – the only bee in the bonnet is the restriction when you’re trying it for free – once every 24 hrs isn’t good enough. But subscription isn’t cheap (of course there are many other benefits as well – not just this one tool). But for semi professional SEO experts, this should be extremely helpful.

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We all know that SEO can be a hit and miss game sometimes. Keywords or pages that we thought would be very popular fail to attract attention and sometimes those pages which we thought were useless, turn out to be hits. This is not surprising as we can’t always predict what people like. However, it is of utmost importance that we learn from our mistakes and capitalize on “hidden gems.”

Google Analytics, in addition to allowing you to view where are your visitors coming from also allows you to monitor the best (and the worst) content on your website. This allows you to get a glimpse of what people like and dislike. Also, you can find out how they are coming to each page – is it through search, and if so which terms are being used, or are they being referred from another site?

The site tools also allow you to drill down your directory structure and explore each sub domain – for example, if you have a shopping site, you can see how visitors get funneled through the categories and then to the individual products. Finally, it gives you the power to see the top landing and exit pages. This way, you can find out if there is a problem with the site when there are a disproportionately large number of exits on a certain page.

Along with Visitor Statistics and Sources statistics, content analyzation tools give you the most powerful reporting capabilities at your fingertips.

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