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How to Get More out of Google Analytics

As a website owner there's a good chance you use Google Analytics to track visits to your website. It can be a very powerful tool to get to know your website, visitors, and keywords intimately -- provided you know where to look and what to look for. Here are some top tips to getting the most out of your Analytics account. 

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Top Blogging Tips for Great Content

If you are just starting out or are in need of a refresher on what is important in blogging, we have some blogging tips for you today. From understanding what you readers are looking for to working with others in your niche, we have some suggestions that you should have a look at.

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One of the biggest fears held by most website owners is that any small mistake they make in producing their content or interacting their users will immediately lead to precipitous drop in their ranking at major search engines like Google. And, while it's responsible to avoid these pitfalls and mistakes altogether, it's worth noting that an immediate and mind-blowing drop at the internet's search leader is simply not likely in many cases. Such a theory was proved correct by an SEO firm which recently decided to deliberately destroy a reputable website's search engine rankings. As part of its project to make a first-page result into a last-page afterthought, the company loaded that website up with more than 50,000 undesirable links. This included forum posts, blog comment links, and other links placed into the sidebar for the sole effect of destroying the site's reputation.

When you think about your site being hacked, you probably imagine an unmistakable notice, like a flashing screen with "HACKED" in large letters across the page. But in reality, you may not know that your web site has been hacked until much later on when a lot of damage has been done. Today's hackers are getting more sophisticated with the tools and methods they use to hack web sites. But knowing the signs and what to do in the event of a hack can help you to recover.

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Why You Can't Ignore Schema.org

As the Internet grows, so does the need for organization and better search engine results. Internet users expect to be able to use their favorite search engine to find relevant content without wading through sites that have little or nothing to do with their search terms. Schema.org provides tools for web developers to help search engines recognize information on web pages and catalog that information so it is easier to find for top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

When you type a search query into a search engine, you expect to find highly relevant sites at the top of the results page. As you know, this isn't always the case. Google and other search engines are constantly changing and tweaking their algorithms to determine rank, and they are still looking for more ways to make search results more relevant and consistent. Schema.org benefits both web developers and search engines by making it easier for engines to determine the relevancy of each page and site.

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When it comes to everything that has to do with websites, Google is the first to pop in any person’s head. Most dentists may not know much about dental SEO, but for those who do know a few things about websites they know that the only way to make any dental website shoot up to the first page of the search engine results is to get the attention of Google. However, that is not the only contribution that Google has to the World Wide Web. An entire collection of tools offered by Google are helpful in dental practice marketing.  The best part of all is that they are for free.

What does Google Places mean to me?

You probably already know, or have witnessed first-hand that Google have changed the way that searching for local business and accommodations. Local listings now integrate below the sponsored listings, but above the organic search results.

Google claimed some time ago that 1 in 5 searches across Google's search engine empire were location specific.  Due to this reason they have integrated more local listings within your search results. So this is seen as an attempt to provide results to that 20% of searchers.

There has been much chatter across webmaster and SEO forums such as CapturedTech.com  specifically about this subject. The reasoning behind this trend is due mainly to the fact this is a huge change for us as users, many of us as webmasters and our businesses as a whole are affected in one way or another.

Creating software is no easy task but testing it and finding all the bugs is even more difficult. Many companies, including Mozilla and Google are willing to offer up to $3,000 as a bounty to anybody who brings a serious security issue with their browsers to their attention. The same cannot be said if you find a bug hidden in Internet Explorer.

Adding Site Feeds to Google Buzz

One of the more popular features of Twitter is the ability through their API to post at intervals or when an RSS feed is updated a tweet to Twitter automatically. So blog owners don’t have to worry about tweeting their new blog entries cause it is done automatically from a service like TwitterFeed.com.

With Google Buzz being the latest micro blogging platform, everyone wants the same features as Twitter from Google. Of course Google doesn’t want some of the features that it deems to be problematic, but it does allow you to post your RSS feed automatically to your Buzz account whenever a new post is available. Just how do you get Buzz to connect to your site or sites?

There are a number of posts about adding a an XFN tag to the site or a rel=me tag when you link back to your site from Google. But all this seemed silly to me because the sites aren’t profiles of me, they are just blogs that I work on occasionally about topics that I enjoy. Then I discovered the simple way to connect a site.

Go to the Webmaster Tools portal within your Google account and add the site you want to connect to within Buzz. Verify the site by adding a file or a meta tag to the header of the home page. Then return to GMail, Click on Buzz, and Click on connected sites. The new sites will now be available for connection. Your latest post will appear within Buzz and new posts will automatically be posted.

Now if only I could figure out how to get more followers of my Google Buzz without a public interface.