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Archive for the ‘Google Analytics’ Category
Google Analytics Application Directory
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Google recently announced their application directory from a Google Analytics blog post. It includes links to online applications, mobile applications, and other add-ons to help you extend Google Analytics. Below are some of the applications we use.
Analytics App and Analytics HD
Available for the iPhone and the iPad, these two apps give you a preview of your data at a moments glance. Both apps allow you to load up multiple Google Accounts so you can track both work and personal sites. The iPhone app is very convenient for tracking on the go, and the iPad version gives you a bigger perspective and is a bit easier to navigate. One of my favorite parts about these apps are the Today and Yesterday reports which can be useful for checking traffic from recent content. The only downside I’ve seen thus far is the iPad version (Analytics HD) seems to be slower to load. This could be the app, or the fact that I monitor over 200 sites. Hopefully this will be improved in a future version.
Analyticator
This WordPress plugin shows your Google Analytics data within the WordPress back end interface. This is probably a great fit for publishers who aren’t interested in all that the web interface offers while still wanting to know basic things like visitor and pageview counts, keywords, and traffic sources. If you run a WordPress blog (like this one) or a WordPress website, this plugin is a great addition.
Link Tagger
Ever wanted to track downloads or external clicks but didn’t know how to do so in Google Analytics? Link Tagger can help with that. This is a javascript script you can download and include on your site pages that will automate the process of attaching the required Analytics code to track outgoing links and downloaded files. It works across all browsers with javascript support, so that should cover all users that analytics can track.
Ego
This is a personal favorite of mine. Ego allows you to view stats at a quick glance for Google Analytics as well as Mint tracking and other sites like Twitter, Vimeo, Tumblr, Feedburner, Squarespace, and Ember. At a quick glance you can tap through and see your stats for today, yesterday, the week, month, and year. The full iPad app allows you to swipe and load up the full statistics in the middle of the screen. I’ve yet to test that one, but I can attest to the iPhone version.
Be sure to check out the entire Google Analytics Application Gallery to see the other things like phone tracking, reporting tools, and site analytics auditing.
SEO Modules for your Drupal site
Monday, December 21, 2009
Drupal (for those that don’t know) is a very popular open-source content management system (CMS). It is built to be very lightweight at the core level. Features are added in by using modules that are submitted by the Drupal development community. They can help to create new content, work with users, add media, and of course, help automate the process of search engine optimizing your site. The following modules are essential to help the SEO of your site.
SEO Drupal Modules
Pathauto – Creates automatic URL aliases based on patterns created by the Token module. Includes options for taxonomy, user, content types, and others. This module is very flexible and allows you to modify the URLs for any page on the site.
XML Sitemap – Creates a sitemap based on the sitemaps.org spec. Also allows for submission to search engines with the required api keys. An XML Sitemap is the best way to show the search engines of new content on your site and this module can create that sitemap very easily for you.
Google Analytics – This is a fully loaded analytics tracking solution. Just imput the UA number for your site and the tracking code will be included on every page. Allows for blocking tracking on certain pages, tracking by role, downloads, and other metrics.
Page Title – Similar to Pathauto, but for meta Title Tags. You can setup patterns for different pieces of content. It also allows the option for a user to override and individual page’s Title Tag.
Global Redirect – Creates 301 redirects for different urls on the same site, like node/1, node?q=1, and /about-us/. This is great for making sure you aren’t splitting your rank between different URLs for the same page. Global Redirect also makes sure your URLs are all uniform by stripping the final “/”. This is a great help in Google Analytics reports so you know that every pageview is counted appropriately.
Nodewords – This allows you set meta description and keywords for individual nodes and views. Newer beta versions also include the ability to add a meta confirmation tag for Google Webmaster Tools. This way you do not need to edit your templates or upload a file.
SEO Checklist – This module is a great place to help keep track of all of the above modules and more. There are quite a few things that can be setup to automate your site’s SEO performance. SEO Checklist helps you keep all of these things straight.
Drupal SEO Performance
Because of these wonderful modules, Drupal is regarded as one of the top performing CMS platforms for SEO. With the tools above, you are able to configure everything to run in the background, so you can focus on your pages and your content and not have to worry too much about the technical details.
Other CMS platforms are able to accomplish some of these things, but very few if any are able to do everything for CMS that Drupal does with these modules. The other SEO benefit is that as search engine optimization changes, the Drupal community can adapt and quickly update the modules. The Drupal admin system can notify you of updates to you modules to make sure your site is kept up-to-date.
Schipul offers custom Drupal designs and is also able to do Drupal development for the site of your dreams. And of course, all of this great SEO configuration is included.
