It’s an interesting feature that allows web owners to take a piece of JavaScript and insert it into their pages to provide their site users links to related information about the page they are on.

As with any new Google product, one has to decide if this is worth the effort or not. In this article, I review this service and give you my opinion.

The new Google service called Google Related Links is intended to help webmasters “bring fresh, dynamic and interesting content links to any website.” But is that really what happens?

I recently installed this tool on one of my sites to see what it does. Let me explain what I’ve found.

If you are familiar with AdSense then you will find yourself in familiar territory with this new product.

There are several formats Google offers this program in including a banner sized “related links” box, in addition to a few other shapes and sizes. What I found handy was opening up the Ad Size page found under my AdSense account so I could better visualize what the format would be.

Once you choose the size you want, you select what you want to see. Google currently offers three types of related content: Searches, News, and Web Pages. I’ll explain these more a little later.

You can also select the color palette you’d like to use, however the number of palettes is limited at the moment to just a handful. But, if your site uses a common scheme you should find one to work for you.

Once you’ve made these three simple choices you are presented with few lines of JavaScript which you then place where you want on your site. Setting this up on your site is relatively painless.

I went through this process and experimented a bit with the formats until I settled on one that I thought suited my site.

Once the code is added to your site it only takes a few minutes for you to see results.

Now, is this really a useful tool?

That depends on your take. There are many ways this can be useful.

For example, I have a site that I’ve been trying to get indexed for over a year in Google. It’s a clean, straight HTML website that conforms to their webmaster guidelines yet it’s stuck in the “sandbox” and has been for some time.

What I’ve previously observed, however, is that sites that have AdSense seem to bypass the sandbox altogether. Yet I didn’t want to serve ads on this site as I didn’t feel it was appropriate.

However, what I noticed on the first site I put this on was that the content is served by the same ad serving platform as AdSense. Therefore, my feeling is that these related searches will also help a site get out of the sandbox early.

But there’s more to it than that.

If you truly believe in helping your web browser out then the Google related searches is an ideal addition to your site.

Just think about that for a second – you would be providing links to additional information your site users may not have considered.

For example, if you sell a product online, you could provide links to the latest news found on Google News for the product, or the manufacturer of the product.

And, while it is true you can also provide links to other web pages, perhaps even your competitors, you don’t have to use the “web pages” function.

So, in reality I do see this as a useful tool, but not for everyone.

If you are having problems getting indexed by Google I do believe this will help. Further, if you do want to provide as much information to your potential customers before they buy, this could also be a useful addition to your site.

If you are concerned about sending your customers away, or potentially promoting your competitors on your site then I’d say this isn’t the addition for you. This is because there is a good possibility that both of these could happen from these related searches.

In any case, the well used answer of “it depends” comes into play again. Is this a useful addition to a website? It depends

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

Alexa recently offered it’s services for hire. You can now hire the crawler to go index, pay to have the index sliced and even pay to host your own search service.

In this article I’m going to look at the impacts this could have on the web.

Ok, before I get into this I have to rant a bit:

<rant>

Who cares is Jeremy Zawodny sells text links on his site. After all here’s here to make money just like the rest of us. And who cares how Google deals with it? Do we really expect that Matt Cutts is going to “out” Jeremy or, worse yet, ban his blog site for 5 or 6 text links? Trust me, if my site got as much traffic as his, I’d be selling a lot more than 5 or 6 links.

I mean, really, in this industry with so much happening on a daily basis, why is everyone so concerned over this issue? Especially when the whole Alexa issue is to me much more than the flash in the pan this issue is. I think the Sony Rootkit fiasco got less play than this did.

</rant>

OK I’m done now. Thanks for listening

So anyways, yesterday Alexa announced that, for a fee, you can have virtually unlimited access to their data. You can get the entire database if you want, or you can pay them to slice it up for you. Ever been in the market for your own vertical search engine? Well for a few thousand a month you could have your own hosted vertical using Alexa.

That’s right – in an almost unprecedented move (I say almost because they tried something similar a year ago and it flopped) Alexa is selling parts of itself.

I think John Battelle hit the nail on the head with his take on the Alexa announcement. There truly is tons of potential here. And while it can seem expensive, especially when you consider some of the costs (such as $1 per CPU hour or $1 for every 4,000 queries) I think the payoffs (if you can monetize it somehow) will be much greater.

So let’s look at some of the options:

From a user perspective there could be literally hundreds of different vertical search engines you could build out of this one dataset.

Of course any vertical you come up with would have to be unique, but I’m sure there’s something out there that isn’t being tapped yet.

From a marketing standpoint, imagine the competitive intelligence you could gather on your competitors? You could have a mini vertical of your own industry, only accessible to you, and on this mini-vertical you could get some really detailed analysis of the sites to figure out why they rank so well.

Also, look at the other tools that could be built on top of this data – a more effective keyword analyzer than what’s currently available is the first that comes to mind. One of my biggest pet peeves with Wordtracker is its reliance on Dogpile as a source of data. Imagine the keyword extraction you could do directly from the Alexa index?

Who knows what else you could do with “100 Terabytes of Web content spanning 4 billion pages and 8 million sites.”

With such a large data set one could even perform some very detailed link analysis trying to understand how link popularity affects various sites on the webs.

And remember that it isn’t just web pages we are talking about. Alexa give you complete access, which means you can also do image, sound files like MP3’s and movies.

I’m sure if you thought about it there are many different ways you could use such a data set to accomplish your goals.

So if you are a large site in a competitive industry perhaps a review of what Alexa could offer you is in order. Whether it’s competitive intelligence gathering that you need, or a custom searchable index, I’m fairly confident that Alexa will give you the most complete view of the current search space (short of one of the bigger engines doing the same thing).

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

I also gave you an idea of some of the really great features of analytics.

Today we will look at some of the other data a good analytics package can show you.

For example, did you know that an analytics package will show you where your site is lacking?

There is usually a report which deals with technical site issues – this is where you’ll find out what page requests generated errors (such as 404 page not found errors) as well as what other files were requested that weren’t available.

One error you might see a lot of is a request for robots.txt. This is the file that search engine crawlers look for when they come to a site to index it. The robots.txt file is used to tell the crawlers which files they can access and which are disallowed. If you don’t have one that’s not such a big deal, as the crawler will index the site without one, but if there are things that you don’t want them to find, then you should use this file.

You may also see a request for favicon.ico – this is the little image you see in the address bar of your browser, just to the left of the URL. While not having it is not a big issue, it does help brand your site. Therefore if you can you should have one.

Another thing you will find here are broken images and links – this is generally because many times designers or web programmers will use relative links to these, and if the site is poorly constructed, the relative links may break. This could also be caused by browsers which can’t properly form relative links into absolute links. For example, some crawlers will see img src=”/images/image1.gif” and won’t be smart enough to append the http://www.site.com to the front of it image url.

What else can analytics do for you?

One feature not often used is the browser type and screen resolution. Too often designers build sites using obscure references. I remember working on a site once that was built to conform to Netscape 3.0. In other words, any feature that would work in Netscape 3.1 and above was not allowed as Netscape 3.0 wouldn’t support it. A note to you designers who may be reading this – Netscape 3.0 is used by 0.00001% of the population – do you really want to limit the design of the website to accommodate the 16 people in the world who are still using this browser?

As mentioned above, screen resolution statistics can help you ensure that your website is useful to the majority of your users. For example, if you find that most of your users use an 800×600 resolution, but your site is built to span 1024×768, then you are forcing most of your users to scroll to see the whole site. This may frustrate some who will leave.

What else are analytics good for?

While I mentioned keywords in the last article, I haven’t touched on the page elements. That is, you can use analytics to find out what the top paths through your site are. From here you might be able to get an idea of any roadblocks to conversion.

For example, if it takes 5 or 6 clicks to get to a converting page, you may want to change this – and move the conversion closer to the site entry point. This is because most web users have notoriously short attention spans and will not click a long path to conversion. You want to get your conversion to within 3 clicks of any entry point.

Take a look at some of the top paths and go through them yourself – put yourself in the shoes of your customers. How satisfied are you with the path you have taken. Would you seriously consider buying from your site? Do you clearly see a conversion path?

Also, look at the abandonments on your conversion paths to see if there are any trends.

For example, if you have an exceptionally long form – do you need to gather all that information just to allow your customer to download a catalog or request more information? In general, you want your conversions to be as quick and painless as possible. Don’t give your visitors a chance to back out of the conversion. Therefore if you need to collect personal information, make it the absolute minimum such as name and email address. You can always follow up later with a personal email which they may appreciate more.

What else is there?

A nice thing about many real time packages is that they can overlay stats on top of your site pages. So if you wanted to see how many clicks each link got on your homepage for example, you could quickly and easily do this. Generally many packages will allow you to open a sidebar in your browser where you can view the page on your site, with hotspots showing statistics (such as the clicks per link), and providing a more detailed analysis in the sidebar. This can help you get a more detailed idea of what your site visitors are seeing and doing when they visit your site.

If you see, using this tool, that a conversion link isn’t getting clicked, perhaps all it would take is to move the link to a more prominent spot on the page. Or, if you see that 80% of your visitors are coming to the home page but leaving the site right away it’s time to dig into why. Are they finding what they expected? What about the page is turning them off.

Of course some of this takes some speculation on your part, but as you get to know your sites visitors (and more importantly get to know the paying customers) you can begin to develop a profile of them and understand what they like and don’t like, and what they want to see and don’t want to see.

In the end, analytics should become your best friend if you plan to become a serious online business. Whether you are selling online, or providing free information, or gather leads for future follow up, the analytics package you choose can greatly improve your sites success.

In order to understand what analytics to use you need to know a little about your system. But that’s ok if you don’t know for sure. Usually your hosting provider can help you figure that out.

Basically there are 2 types – one is the more traditional log based system, that uses your webserver logs and analyzes them to produce reports, while the other is an on-demand system which utilizes code usually placed on each page of the website to track visitors and output reports.

Both systems have positive and negative aspects which could impact your decision of which to use. And I can’t stress it enough – you MUST use analytics of some kind if you have a website. Otherwise you will never know where your visitors are coming from or what they are doing once they hit your website.

Log based systems are probably the most well known. They come in different flavors – from a free version, such as AWStats to a paid version, such as WebTrends or Urchin. While different systems rely on log files to produce the reports, there are different qualities of reports and different details that go into those reports.

Generally, I prefer log based analysis mostly because with logs you get all traffic, and not just those that can execute JavaScripts. This is because usually with the on demand analytics, the site visitor must execute a script in order for the system to record the visit (I’ll get more into this later) whereas with log files, all traffic regardless of their script executing abilities get tracked. This means the search engine crawlers will be tracked more effectively than with some realtime analytics.

One drawback, however, of the log based systems is that they tend to be resource intensive, especially if you need to run the reports locally, and they have to be manually set to run on a regular basis.

Another drawback, with some packages, is that they lack the detail you may need to make an informed decision.

For example, a basic install of AWStats (as hosted by many hosting companies) really only give you such simple details as the number of hits and/or bytes transferred over a date range, and what pages were requested.

This despite the fact that most log files can be configured to log much more detail.

Ideally, your log files should be configured to capture as much detail about the visitors as possible. Even if you don’t use it now, you may want to use it later. The problem you may run into is that the host may be unwilling or unable to log that much data, and they may charge you for the extra space such logging needs.

For example, if you log everything, and want to store your logs for 6 months, there could be a substantial charge as these logs could use many megabytes of disk space even if they are compressed. Of course the other option would be to download them and store them locally, then you wouldn’t have to worry about paying for extra space, but you’d have to remember to download them as many hosts will delete last months logs a few days into the next month.

A program like WebTrends has great analysis abilities. WebTrends is one of my personal favorites because once you get to know what you can do, it’s quite easy to set up multiple custom reports. However, if the site gets a lot of traffic, generating reports can take a lot of time.

On demand analytics

These types of analytics are becoming much more popular mostly because they can provide you with up-to-the-minute data on who is visiting your site, how they got there and what they did once they came to the site, regardless of how much or how little traffic the site gets.

And rather than configuring multiple reports and re-analyzing the data over and over (as is common with log based analysis) most of your reports are available within a few mouse clicks.

Even custom analysis can be performed in a fraction of the time it would take to define a log based report, and run it to analyze past performance.

With most real time analytics, it’s merely a matter of selecting the report you want to see, and picking a date range, and viola, a few seconds later there is the report.

Most of these types of programs also allow for custom reporting. For example, if you wanted to know how many of your sites visitors came during a specific time period, and from a certain geographic region, you can easily find out. Then if you wanted to find out what paths they took, you can define that, and finally if you wanted to append your path report with a conversion report to see what they bought and even how much it cost, you could do that too.

As mentioned above, there is one drawback and that is that many of these programs are script based which means that the visitor has to execute a JavaScript in order for their visits to be recorded by the analytics package.

If the visitor won’t accept scripts (like a search engine crawler won’t) then you won’t get to see their traffic.

Of course, some packages try and get around this by attaching the tracking code to an image, for example, and recording the accesses to that image. In this case, the image request that comes from a search engine crawler would be recorded just as a request from a site visitor would.

Or the package may require a visitor to accept cookies, but again a search crawler won’t accept cookies so the crawler traffic won’t get recorded.

In a nutshell those are the main differences between the 2 most common forms of visitor analysis. Now its time to examine what you need to get out of your reports.

What to Look For

First is to define what you want to see. And to do this you need to know what the purpose of your website is. For most site owners it is sales made, but there are other things you may want to track such as email addresses stored, catalog requests, PDF downloads and more.

Think of every way you could capture someones information – this is a potential future customer and one you may want to follow up with later. Therefore if there is a form to fill out, this too would be information you’d want to track.

Once you have decided the multiple conversions you want to track (in this industry those things I listed above are considered conversions) it’s time to do some homework and see which analytics package(s) will return the reports you are looking for.

With most real time analytics, you can insert custom code which allows you to record these conversions and even output them to a nice simple report. With log analysis it may be a little more difficult, but not impossible.

One thing I’ve done in the past is set up custom “thank you” pages for a form submittal, or PDF download or other conversion. This way, the analytics package can track the number of times the special thank you pages were requested and using log analysis I can see how many times the thank you pages were loaded, indicating a conversion.

Some things to watch for

One common thing I hear is “my site gets 10,000 hits a day!” Wow that sounds like a lot, but when you think about it, that many hits may not be that great.

This is because hits in all analytics packages refer to the number of files requested in a day. This includes not only the page requested but also every image, stylesheet, javascript, flash movie, pdf, word doc or spreadsheet that is available on your website.

To put it in other terms, lets say it takes 20 images, 3 javascripts and one stylesheet to render your page. When you factor in the actual page, that adds up to 25 hits – just to display one page! That means that in reality, you’ve only have 400 page views.

Let’s take this a step further. Let’s assume that your average visitor views 4 pages per session. That means you’ve only had 100 visitors in one day.

If you have a 2% conversion rate (that is, 2% of all your visitors buy something) you have only had 2 sales today. If you average $10 per sale, that means you’ve only made $20 today. Doesn’t sound as impressive huh?

And that’s the thing with analytics – you really need to understand what you want your site to do, and find an analysis package that will support you. Otherwise it’s just numbers with no real meaning.

Analytics are also a great way to discover new keywords you can position your site for. Chances are, when you review your keyword referrals, 90% of all traffic will come from phrases which you aren’t optimizing for.

But, if you are getting traffic from Google for “blue right handed widgets” there’s a good chance that with a little optimization for that phrase, you can also capture top spots on Yahoo! and MSN for that phrase.

And if you are into PPC, then analytics also could provide you with some undiscovered keyword markets which you can buy cheap and reap the rewards. Chances are “blue right handed widgets” has few bids, so you can own the top paid spot for a few pennies per click.

When you combine this with the fact that you likely already rank organically for the same phrase, you now own the top 2 spots most visible to someone who may be in the market for a “blue right handed widget.”

As you may see, analytics can be a very powerful tool when used properly, and I haven’t even got into the problems they can solve. That will be the topic of my next article.