Analyze That: Your Guide to Finally Understanding Web Analytics - Part 1

Does the thought of analytics seem confusing and daunting to you? Do you have analytics set up on your website but are unsure of what you are really looking for?  Don’t be confused any longer, take a look at this article for a good idea of how to use analytics to effectively target your marketing efforts.  The article is in two parts.  Today we take a general look at what analytics is and how it works as well as the benefits of reviewing analytic data.  Come back for more tomorrow.  Leave a comment and let me know what you think of this article.

Analyze That: Your Guide to Finally Understanding Web Analytics – Part 1

Analytics can help identify opportunities, improve processes, and help your marketing team know who to target.

Analytics don’t have to be a confusing jungle of information. When website metrics are explained and the question, “what is web analytics?” is answered simply, you will be armed with vital information.

To simply understand what a professional web analyst knows in the most basic sense continue reading this article. You will learn information you can apply in your business right away.

What Is Web Analytics and How Does It Work?

Just because analytics are set up on your site, it doesn’t mean you understand them. Learning what they are, how they work or how to use the information is vital. Whether you use Google Analytics, Funnelytics, CrazyEgg, Clicky, or Spring Metrics, you need to learn what you are looking for in your dashboard and reports.

Whether the analytics tool you are using is complex or simple, the most important part is understanding the analytics data that is gathered.

Some of the information analytics will allow you to review are as follows:

·        Traffic

·        Conversions

·        Referral Sources

·        Keywords used to locate your website

·        And more

Benefits of Reviewing Analytics Data

You don’t have to spend a lot of time reviewing your analytics data to notice a piece of information that can change your strategies. Noticing a trend, a slump or some other happening in your data can mean changing course in your strategy. Read on to learn more about how you can make decisions based on analytics.

Source:  By Dale Harris

https://www.articlecity.com/blog/analyze-that-your-guide-to-finally-understanding-web-analytics/

How Search Engines Work

Ever wondered what makes search engines work so fast? Find out here in this video.  Understand this and you will understand how you can ensure your website is found as easily as possible in searches for the content of your website to attract much more traffic.

How Search Engines Work

By: David Tang

A search engine operates, in the following order: 1) Crawling; 2) Deep Crawling Depth-first search (DFS); 3) Fresh Crawling Breadth-first search (BFS); 4) Indexing; 5) Searching.

Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler (also known as a spider) - an automated web browser which follows every link it sees, exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed. Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas some store every word of every page it finds, such as AltaVista. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned web page. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

When a user comes to the search engine and makes a query, typically by giving keywords, the engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean terms AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. An advanced feature is proximity search, which allows you to define the distance between keywords.

The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back. While there may be millions of Web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.

Most web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the controversial practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results.

The vast majority of search engines are run by private companies using proprietary algorithms and closed databases, the most popular currently being Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo! Search. However, Open source search engine technology does exist, such as Dig, Nutch, Senas, Egothor, OpenFTS, DataparkSearch and many others.

Author Bio

David is the leader of a software development team, who developed many types of automation software. One of them is www.ArticlePostRobot.com, the software which can post articles to hundreds of article sites and mail lists automatically. Demo is available upon request at help(at)articlepostrobot.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

http://www.articlegeek.com/internet/seo_search_engine_optimization/how_search_engines_work.htm