Verecom Web Design Blog

We have discussed both Alexa and Aro last time; in the final part of these articles we talk about Google trends. Google trends is a user friendly tool provided by Google, and is quite similar to Alexa. First go to Google Trends Website www.google.com/trends and on the search bar type the websites you want to compare, and use the comma to separate the website.

The above Pic is the result of two famous portal website: www.yahoo.com and www.aol.com. Goodle trend use the Daily Unique Visitors to compare the traffic volume of each website.

On the first part of these articles, we mentioned that Alexa has the difficulty of compare the traffic volume of website’s sub-domain for different regions. Google trends overcomes this problem by the “regions selection” function box on the top-right corner. By selecting the region on this box you can get the traffic data on the particular country, the pic below shows the traffic volume of these two website on Unite States.

We can also use the Time period option to view the recent traffic volume. Google trends can provide the absolute traffic volume and user can use it together with Alexa to get much better traffic detail of website.

Edited By Henry Lu

Now we will talk about Aro (Access Rating Online). If we use the simplest way to describe Aro, we can say it is Nilson rating report in IT industry. Aro is very similar with Nilsom ratering report. Firstly, Aro gets information about age ratio and distribution in certain area. through national telephone census, and then it recruits the participants who are willing to be observed, through portal sites and news websites. The participants will be asked to install the detect ion software.

After that it will collect information about daily Internet behaviour of the samples and calculate the websites traffic in this area by statistic theory. In IT industry, we use the term of “Access Rate” to replace the term of “audience rate” in TV industry.

Access Rate=the percentage of unique visitors of certain website every month among the total number of Internet users

For example, we assume that the number of Internet users in this area is 10 millions; the Access Rate of certain websites is 4% that means the number of visitors for this website is: 10 million times 4% which is 0.4 million visitors.

From this prospective, we can find that:

1. The statistic data of Aro is macro-statistic data, to the website which is too small (Access Rate is less than 1%), the analytical data from Aro is void. And normally, it is also difficult to find the websites who’s Access Rate are less than 1% in Aro searching database.

2. To the middle or large scale websites, Aro can provide more accurate analytical data. For example, we can find the Access Rating ranking for all the IT websites, but this ranking is for all the Internet users in this area and the information about consuming capability of the visitors should be the focus in the point of view of advertising.

3. Aro is the product of InsightXploer Limited, currently Aro information is not available for general users, and clients have to pay for the database to get the data transfer service. To the web masters of new websites who won’t be able to purchase analytical information, this is really a big problem. Hope in the future, Aro can provide special offer for the new websites or open some parts of the database. And next time, we will talk about Google Trend, this is another method of statistic analysis and it is more precise than Alexa data ranks. See you next time. 

Edited By Vicky Yin

Besides their own back stage system, most of the web masters are using Google Analytics as an important analytic tool to detect their website traffic. Through Google analytics report, the web master can quickly find out:

The data about the web visitors, this data packet includes:

The most important: The numbers of unique visitors. From the perspective of marketing (include advertisement and sales), the number of unique visitors who really browser your website is the most solid and critical data for you website. Because even if one people click your website twenty thousand times it doesn’t means your website has twenty thousand visitors. Actually Web Reach is build up through unique visitors.

The second important: Page views. The reason why this data is important is because, currently, web advertisement is charged by CPM. For example, when CPM=40, if the website has been viewed 1000 times, in other words, the advertisement is also viewed 1000 times, then the advertiser should pay the website 40 dollars.

The web masters can think in this way: if the Page Views of the website for one month is ten million, and CPM for one advertisement is 40 dollars, then if this page is sold out for one month, the income from advertisements will be 400 thousands. If we put three pages for advertisement in the website, then the income of advertisement for all these three pages in this month will be 1,200 thousands. Of course, this is just an ideal number in mathematics view, if the website can sell the advertisements simply rely on traffics then the webmasters of XXX analytic or fortune telling website had already become millionaires.

How the visitors find your website?

1. Type the link directly
2. Through search engine
3. Though click the link on other websites

The best ratio of the numbers of visitors using these three methods respectively is 3:4:3

As Google Analytics is the best tool for you to know the data of your own website, which tool is the best to analyse the competitor websites for the web masters and advertisement agency? Currently there are a few good choices: Alexa, ARO and Google Trend.

Alexa:

Alexa has become a basic tool for nearly all the web masters, I will not explain too much about how to use Alexa. I will directly point out the blind spots of Alexa.

1. Alexa data is very easy to be manipulated: Through installing Alexa tool bar, Alexa can detect states of the web users and then estimate the number of online user through statistical inference. But the sample number is not defined strictly. The effect is that the bigger the website is, more precise the data Alexa can provide. However, on the contrary, the smaller the website is, the data is less representative. Therefore, to Web Reach, the data from Alexa can only be used as suggestion reference value but not the absolute reference value.

2. The problem to compare the local website with foreign one: For example, the business news website IBTimes(www.ibtimes.com) has the Australia sub-domain (au.ibtimes.com), and if we compare the traffic between au.ibtimes.com and its Australia competitor The Age(www.theage.com.au), it will say au.ibtimes.com has the greater traffic then its competitor in Australia. But actually it is not true. www.theage.com.au has lots more traffic than au.ibtimes.com in Australia. That is because Alexa treats all the traffic source for au.ibtimes.com as same as its parent domain www.ibtimes.com. Hence the Alexa cannot provide reliable comparison if webmaster want to compare the traffic data with the foreign website with sub-domain.

The shortage of Alexa can be fulfilled by the other analytic tool: ARO(Acess Rating Online) and on the next part, we will discuss the details of ARO and Google Trend.

Edited By Vicky Yin

After we learned how to be a good student in the eyes of teacher and started to find the favour of Mr. Search Engine then the next thing we must really consider about is what kind of keyword you want to use to let the web users find you.

Defining keywords for your website requires originality and brainstorming. The one interested about doing SEO for their websites needs some reverse thinking: what kind of keywords your target group will use to search the website they want to find. If you can use these keywords to optimise your website then the one visit your website will be the visitors your really aim to target.

Actually SEO means optimise all the pages in whole website and let every page of the thousands which is using different keyword to gain good rank (As good as possible, but not always first). For example, let us say there is one website has ten thousands pages. If each page can bring 1 traffic per day, then in one day, this website can has ten thousands traffics.

How to find keyword for SEO

Actually analysing keyword is a very hard and long term work. The right way of SEO is to keep increasing the web page, which also means to keep finding the effective keyword. It looks very simple to find the proper and effective keywords, but actually even the SEO expert sometime can not get in door. There are some simple skills which will help you find the suitable keywords.

1. Who, what, when and where: no matter what kind of website you are making, the basic information it provide should include: who, what, when and where. for example, using Italian restaurant (what) in Newtown (where) as keyword .First of all, you can start to analyse the keyword from these elements and see whether there is any keyword you can use inside of these 4 Ws.

2. Brand and model: if your website provides various products, especial 3C products, then don’t forget to consider the brand and model as the keyword. For example, normally, the one sale the mobile may think “mobile phone”, “cell phone”, or this kind of keyword should be the main keyword for their website, but actually it is wrong.

Most of the internet users will use the keywords like “mobile phone” as main keywords when they just want to check what kind of mobiles is popular. When they found the mobile they are interested in bigger website, they will focus on this mobile’s brand and model to do further research. And search volume of this kind of keywords can be accumulated in a very astonishing level; it can be 10 times more than that of the keyword like “mobile phone”. At the same time, normally, users will search brand +model; the chance for this kind of user to purchase the product is much high than the one just generally check the information of mobile. Therefore the more specific the keyword is, the higher the search accuracy is, and, the higher chance for this deal to be done.

3. After you list down all the keywords you can think about, the next step is to observe your competitors. You have to see what kind of titles you competitors have listed down, you may find some keyword you neglect, and it can be a good reminder for you. This is a method really save lots of time.

4. Use keyword advertisement: if you have permission to use keyword advertisement, you will find that normally there will be a tool which can suggest keyword for you on keyword advertisement. Under this tool, you can find many related keywords. This is also a sound way.

5. Use web traffic analytic: please add traffic analytic tool on your website, it can help you to know through which keyword the visitors find your website. Always you can find many keywords you neglect but really help people to find your website. If you find the traffic volume of these keywords is not bad and rank is not in front, then you can enhance this keyword to let it has better rank. However this method needs long term operation and observation. Although it may take long time, the keywords you find are always the keywords you can never think about by yourself.

6. Write the article diligently: this point is related to the third point, when you write the article, there will be more words in your website and have the chance to be searched through search engine. Only when you accumulate more articles, you will know more deeply that which keyword has been neglect.

7. Connect with the “hot” keyword: this is the most advanced method. When you are reading the newspaper or watching TV or listening to radio, you can find many popular topic people really interested at this period. You can use some of these popular issues to create your own keyword. For example, recently the news about poisoned milk in China is very hot. If you are a soybean milk products, you can use poisoned milk as a keyword, and in your website, you can post the article about the benefit of the soybean milk, how to use soybean milk to replace milk to make coffee, and so on. Of course this may requires certain level of professional knowledge, but normally this kind of “hot” keywords has terribly great volume. It may just last a while; but if you can successfully get a good rank using these keywords, it can bring great traffics in very short period of time for you website.

Edited By Vicky Yin

One of the web entrepreneurs shared his e-business experience as follow:

In the past when I was building the website, I did not put any idea of SEO into practice. Until one day I found that my website always ranked top on a lot of popular technology keywords searching page and some professional SEO companies started to discuss about the keywords advertisement with me. Hence I realized the strength of my website in this aspect. This made me start to think back how this website was built up at the first place.

We can use the relationship between teachers and students to explain the idea of SEO. Let us say a newly launched website is like a primary school first year student, what should he do to be a good student in the eyes of the teacher (search engine)?

Generally, teachers expect the students can grow healthily and study hard. In stead of just focusing on doing their own study well in the class, teachers also wish students develop good social relationship and some good characters, like cooperation and unity during the study.

Mr. Search Engine is a teacher who has great concern on his students’ social relationship; he doesn’t want students just concentrate on their own study without paying any attention to his questions or talking to the other students after class. He wishes the students can interact with the others, for example, giving a hand to Tom in Math homework and receiving help from John in Painting class as well. If you can have more interaction with the other students, even with many teachers, then in the eyes of Mr. Search Engine, surely you are good student who is active, open and easy-going.

Of course, if this student just plays with the others all day long, still he will be a “problem” student in the end. Study performance is still a very important part in students’ school assessment. At the same time, Mr. Search Engine is also a teacher who is very good at guiding the students develop their strength according to their own interest. If a student who really loves dodge ball and talk about dodge ball in all his homework. Then the teacher will write “best dodge ball player” in his school assessment.

Therefore we can summarize what kind of students (websites) your teacher, Mr. Search Engine like most:

1. Have good interaction with the other students (outbound links from other websites),

2. Have great passion on develop their own interest and always have new discoveries (unique information and creativity on website).

3. Last but not the least, never try to achieve everything in one day but grow up step by step (WebPages quantity).

Generally, search engine need to put the good website in the front to bring convenience to the users. In the example we just mentioned above, teachers build up their reputation by finding and rising up many good students, and students also receive more attentions because of the high rank teachers give to them. These two parties can promote each other for mutual benefit.

However, some students, although their performances are good, they don’t understand how their teacher’s make the assessment; in the end they missed the chance to be recognized as good students. Therefore, we can understand SEO in this way, the aim of SEO is to help students (websites) understand the assessment standard of the teacher (search engine). In order to evaluate billions of billions students, teachers need certain standards to evaluate the students systematically. In other words, even the students are good, but if they can not do their homework following the standards of the teacher, they might miss the chance to be recognized as good students (get high rank).

Two standards for Search engine evaluation

Then what are the standards of Mr. Search Engine to evaluate all the students? Mainly there are two:

1. Whether the quality and quantity of the research information the students provide are outstanding.

2. Whether the students can receive the agreements from the others in the research he released and they are willing to promote it for him.

The first point is about the information of the website, the quality of the information has to been good, and quantity has to be great as well. We can call it keyword index.

The second point means how many other websites, blogs, etc, have linked with this website. We can call it page rank index.

Time these two indexes (keyword and page rank), if the result your website gets is higher than the others and your teacher recognized that there is no violation, then in the most situations you will get the approval from the teacher to put your website in the front.

In conclusion, if your website wants to win the favours of search engines, then there are four things you have to know:

1. The rule of the keyword index

2. The rule of page rank

3. The methods which search engine might see as cheating

4. The score of the other websites.

Simply say, if the score (keyword index times page rank) you get can be ranked as first thirty among all the competitors, that means you have high possibility to be listed on the first three search pages. But there is one premise, no violation (cheating). If the violation has been found, your might receive punishment according to the situation. In the worst case, search engine might put your website into the blacklist and reject it to be listed in website rank.

Edited By Vicky Yin

If the goal of building up a website is to let more people like to keep using it after first try, then first of all, you need originality for your website. The originality can from an assembly of bookmarks, a combination of the pictures or certain scheme of the website, for example, an online stray dogs care community. I cannot tell you how to make these ideas, because this is the most precious treasure of the website makers, and it is the original point of everything.

After you have ideas, then you need to set up the website itself. I really wish the e-business entrepreneur see building a website as building a house in this stage. For both, the foundation has to set up properly. Therefore you really need some knowledge of web structure. In order to set up foundation properly you have to consider that which platform you will use to develop the product; whether there will be any difficulties for you to add new items based on the current service you provide in the future; whether there will be any troubles of system efficiency when the website is enlarged in size later.

All these problems will not emerge in the early stage of website construction. But you will find it is really hard to come back to solve all these problems after your website has developed in certain scale. This is one of the reasons why many articles about e-business emphasized on the important of having good technology development team at the first place. You also have to know that a good programmer is not always a good system planner. If you can have one or two people who have talent in system planner in your initial web development team then it will be really helpful for you to build up your website on a good foundation in the future.

One thing I have to mention that no one can predict whether the website will have great traffics at very beginning. You might feel annoying if the web technicians keep telling you how important it is to set up a good foundation at beginning. In this case, you have to understand that what they concern about is related to the three elements of web structure. They are “design”, “usability” and “Search Engine Optimization - SEO”.

To set up a commercial website is not something easy, good web skills and three elements actually are different things. Normally designer will in charge of the design part to make the page looks attractive; on the other hand, usability is to reduce the level of difficulty for the users in using this website. However in the eye of the designers, design and usability always conflict with each other. Therefore, balance these three elements is already a very difficult job in planning a commercial website, which expects to gain the profits in the future.

But actually the most difficult part for the website structure is SEO (Searching Engine Optimization). These three letters can mean many things to e-business, some people view this as cheating, like playing some tricks with the search engine while some people think this is just trivial things that all the developers can do. Some people can not bear the changes of the web page after the work of SEO; designers always complained about why they can not use Flash here or there because website with lots of Flash is hard to get optimised.

Then what on earth does SEO really mean? Before we doubt the validity of SEO, we should first understand SEO from the view point of the search engines.

If you are Yahoo or Google, what kind of websites you want to put into the front?

When the online users are using a search engine, if the searching results on this search engine provided can not direct them to find the information they want quickly; instead, they have to check page by page; then surely they will feel this search engine is not convenient and they may consider to choose another one. Therefore in order to enhance their competitive strength, search engines need to precisely rank many good websites, and provide more convenience to the users to find the information more quickly.

For this reason, search engines need good websites as well. If a search engine can not find good websites and give them suitable rank, then it will be very difficult for this search engine to be accepted by the users. The web designer with good SEO skills will enrich the information in website and let the search engine consider this website as a good website; then naturally this website will get a good rank. To evaluate whether it is a good website, search engines have developed a serial of program to rate the websites.

Some of the standards search engines have made are open, the search engine even provide assistant tools (like Webmaster Tool which Yahoo released recently) to help the websites improve themselves following this standards. Why they do in this way? Suppose search engine is using one kind of language follow the standards and rules they have made, for example, English. If the website designer doesn’t know English but only speak French while the search engines only accept English, then the search engines will have difficulties to estimate whether this is a good website and there will be a great confusion for the search engine. Therefore in order to have a good rank, website makers have to know what search engines want and what they don’t want and they have to help search engines to know their website well. This is why SEO is not a trick or cheating, on the contrary, SEO not only help the website boost their traffics through the search engines but also promote the search engine to the users through introducing good websites by their rank.

As we know, marketing expense occupies the biggest part of cost in operating the website. But if the websites can improve their traffic through SEO, it will not just greatly reduce the expense on advertisement but greatly increase the survival rate of the websites as well. Although SEO may cause some impacts on design and usability, if the website maker can plan it well, it is not a difficult job to minimize the side effects SEO brings. The reward of this effort is pretty high and surely the search engine will consider your website as a good website even more.

Summary : If you don’t want to deal with the search engine, then surely the search engines won’t be happy to be “friend” with you as well, they won’t put you on the tops of their friend list (ranking). For example, if the search engines say very clearly that they don’t like Flash of course it doesn’t mean you can not use flash at all, unless you want to make the whole page as Flash but you just follow your own favouritism and ignore the feeling of search engine, then later on, you should not complain about why search engines are not “friendly” to you.

Edited By Vicky Yin