How Bounce Rate and Event Tracking Are Related

Let’s say that a webpage contains an event tracking snippet to track visitor interaction with a video player; when a visitor lands directly on this particular webpage and interacts with the video player and leaves the website without visiting any other pages, this visit is excluded from the bounce rate calculation because the visitor did indeed interact with the video player (where the event tracking snippet was added). In most cases, it doesn’t make sense for visits to be excluded from the bounce rate calculation when an action is performed with a defined event. Now that we have the control of it, we can decide whether the particular interaction should be included or excluded in the bounce rate calculation.

Events can be classified into interactive events and non-interactive events.

INTERACTIVE EVENTS

Events that can be considered as interactive are:

• Clicks on download links
• Clicks on a ‘call to action’
• Clicks on submit button of newsletter subscription and contact form
• Clicks on social media links

When a visitor lands on a page and performs any one of these interactions then leaves the site, we can exclude this visit in the bounce rate calculation as the interaction is considered to be more valuable and not a “true bounce” per se. This works with the default event tracking snippet and doesn’t need a *true argument at the end. This works with the default event tracking snippet and doesn’t need this new feature.

NON-INTERACTIVE EVENTS

Events that can be considered as non-interactive are image sliders, video player interaction etc. These interactions have nothing to do with conversions and it’s just measuring the visitor activity in the website. So these interactions have to be excluded from the bounce rate calculation and here is where this new feature helps. With the usual event tracking snippet, we just need to add a true argument at the end to exclude it from the bounce rate calculation.

Below is an example of event tracking snippets :

_trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)
Non-interaction – A Boolean that when set to true, indicates that the event hit will not be used in the bounce-rate calculation.

Below is an example to measure the event that tracks the ‘play’ button of the video with a non-interaction argument.

_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘Videos’, ‘Play’, ‘MJ Moonwalk’, ’5′, ‘true’);
The ‘true’ argument added to the end of the snippet will exclude this event from the bounce rate calculation. Hope this helps!

*The Boolean parameter (‘true’) added at the end of the snippet will include this visit in the bounce rate calculation. Visits that attempt the defined event and leave the web page without visiting any other pages will also be counted as ‘bounce rate visits,’ provided that the Boolean parameter is set to true. Learn more about this new parameter from Google’s Event Tracking Guide on Non-Interaction Events.

Search engines have to trust your website in order to rank your “website search pages.” In order to achieve this there should be a considerable number of searches taking place on the website. Big portals and eCommerce sites will gain Google’s trust easily because of the higher number of internal site searches. Below are some tips to optimize your search pages.

Tighten Up Your Internal Search

The search functionality should deliver relevant web pages/products and should strictly relate to the phrases being searched for. For example: If visitors are searching for “Search Engine Optimization,” the site should only retrieve the pages talking about “Search Engine Optimization.”

URL Format

In most cases you will see that search URLs are generated with query URLs – not exactly user friendly. Try to convert it into a friendlier URL, it’s recommended to have the following format:

http://domain.com/search/search-term/ – Recommended Search URL format.
http://domain.com/?=search-term – URL with query strings and not search engine friendly.

Page Title Format

As we all know, page titles play a vital role in SEO. Below I’ve indicated the proper title format for search pages.
“Search Term” | Company/Website Name

H1 Format

It’s best to define the H1 term of the search page by including the search term in it.

Display the Recent/Popular/Relevant Search Terms

To increase user friendliness and to make the search pages more effective, it’s advisable to display the recent/relevant/popular search terms in your site’s left/right navigation.

Also remember that search engines will not be able to crawl your search pages only until it’s linked from the website. So it’s pretty much mandatory to have a “popular search terms” widget on your website in order to rank your search pages in search engines.

How to Track Your Internal Site Search?

Check out our blog entry on tracking internal site search terms in Google Analytics. Google Analytics enables you to sort out the search terms that are being searched within your website, which can later be optimized accordingly. Here are few examples that caught my attention:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/easy+mp3+cutter+2.9/
http://www.2000shareware.com/downloads/easy/mp3/cutter/online/

Above are two examples of search pages that are listed in Google for the keywords “easy mp3 cutter/easy mp3 cutter 2.9” When you cross check all the points that are mentioned in this blog along with the above listed websites, you’ll notice some very interesting  similarities!

Where do you see these buttons?

The Facebook 'Like' button is integrated with many websites around the internet and 'Facebookers' are widely using this to share their favourite pages with friends. 

+1 button is integrated in Google search results and search engine users can vote for their favourite sites. We also see the +1 button integrated with many websites and this will definitely increase the visibility and the usage of the +1 button.

How are they shared with your connections?

The page that is liked by a Facebook user is updated in his/her profile and is shared globally (to all of their friends) regardless of friend groups or lists. All the connections in your profile can see the recommended (liked) page in their news feeds, gaining better visibility and the potential for more traffic.

The page that is +1’d will go into your ‘+1’ tab and will not be shared with your friends through their news feeds.

The +1 tab is visible only to you unless you change to make it public. You can always customize the tabs of your Google+ profile.  If you choose to keep your +1 tab private, only you will be able to see the sites you've +1’d. If you no longer wish to recommend a page, you can always delete it. If you turn off the +1 setting for non-Google sites, you will only be able to see an aggregated, anonymous count of people who've also +1'd the site and not connections in your social network who have +1’d the page. The default setting enables you to see the connections in your social network who have +1’d the page.

Google has taken one step ahead and integrated the +1 results to SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for the related search terms that your connections have +1'd. This makes a big difference and it's got great potential marry search and social.

Apart from the social side of +1, Google’s organic algorithm will definitely give high importance for the sites that have more +1's. Google will no longer rank with just your with your SEO. So it's wise to try to get more +1s for your site by providing valuable information.

Facebook already has the Open Graph Protocol API which enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. Let’s wait for Google to come up such API to customize the image/title/description of +1’d item.

Click here to see how the +1 button can be integrated to websites. Here is a plugin to add +1 button to your wordpress blog and click here to see how the +1 button can be added to a blogger blog.

Have Fun!

All website owners should be interested to increase their website visibility in Facebook as it is the largest social media website in the world. OGP meta tag integration to the web pages can encourage/optimize Facebook 'Likes'. Through the meta data applied to web pages,Facebook  users will be able to view the 'likes' in the format described in meta tags (category, type, URL, site name, image, address).

Integrating Open Graph tags on your web page will make your page equivalent to a Facebook page. When a user clicks the 'like' button on the page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's Facebook profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. The data that you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook. In other words, OGP will help your website gain even more exposure through Social Media!

To get started with this we need the two following things enabled on your web page.

• Facebook 'like' button
  
• OGP Meta tags

Facebook Like Button

If your website has a blog/article section, add the Facebook like button to all the web pages in that section. This will enhance the user interaction and the ability to share with friends.

Open Graph Protocol Meta Tags

These are the Meta tags that are included in one of our article page.

<meta property="og:title" content="This Week In Internet Marketing 2011 02 22" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="TechWyse Internet Marketing"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.techwyse.com/blog/internet-marketing/this-week-in-internet-marketing-2011-02-22/" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="1354053568" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.techwyse.com/images/new-ranking-signals.jpg" />

The above Open Graph protocol Meta Tags defines the following properties: 

og:title - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., " This Week In Internet Marketing 2011 02 22".
og:type – The type of your object, e.g., "article". See the complete list of supported types.
og:site_name - The site name as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "TechWyse Internet Marketing"
og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph.
og:url - The URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., http://www.techwyse.com/blog/internet-marketing/this-week-in-internet-marketing-2011-02-22/

Check here for more properties that can be used to optimize your Facebook 'Likes'. If you are not technical enough to write meta tags, try using the meta tag generator mentioned here in step 2. You can also ensure the meta tags are added correctly on your page with the Facebook URL Linter tool.

If you are using WordPress and want to enable the OGP and Facebook 'Like' button, here is the plugin.

Hope this helps and if you have any questions feel free to post them here!

Slightly modify the URL fragments for AJAX pages

Developers use “hash” tags (#) as a part of URLs in anchor texts to distinguish the content from the rest of the website. It's great for users, but search engine spiders usually cannot understand it. For Google to crawl your Ajax content, they require hash (#) and exclamation point (!) which is together named as “Hashbang”(#!). See how it is implemented in example.

Allow search engine crawlers to access these URLs by escaping the state

To allow Google to index your Ajax content, you must use the hashbang in the URL, which will be interpreted by Google in a unique manner – they'll take everything after the hashbang, and pass it to the site as a URL parameter instead. The name they use for the parameter is: _escaped_fragment_

Google will then rewrite the URL, and request content from that static page. To show what the rewritten URLs look like, here are some examples:

http://www.wyselabs.com/ajax-test/#!Kid

becomes

http://www.wyselabs.com/ajax-test/?_escaped_fragment=Kid

Google will list the new URLs in SERP (without hash or hashbang).

We at TechWyse are always researching and testing new tools. We have successfully completed our Google Ajax index test!

Below is the outcome to show how our Ajax content is crawlable. A single paged Ajax website has been indexed as four pages in Google.

As this concept is still in Beta, there are a few things to keep in mind before you decide to program your entire website in Ajax:

1) Only the Google algorithm can understand and cache as different pages whereas other search engines currently do not.

2) The page load time is increased because of the Ajax scripts

3) Unique Meta tags cannot be implemented for the pages that contain Ajax content, so you will be losing weightage in many other search engines.

The '404' or 'Not Found' error message is an HTTP standard response code indicating that the server could not find the file that was requested. Both 404 and soft 404 are indicating the same thing - that the requested file is not present on the web server. But a soft 404 will return the server status code of 200 (OK) which tells a search engine that the page exists. (which it doesn't) So obviously it is now necessary for us to learn how to tell search engines that soft 404 pages are actually 404 pages (broken links) and should therefore not crawl them.

'Soft 404s' in Google Webmaster tools is one of Google's latest updates.  They give you more control over the robots that are crawling your web pages. Why is this important? Search engines are very concerned about the web page’s server status code. If many of your web pages have a “404” set as server status code, your site will be considered low quality and will be pushed down in search engine rankings. Usually we try hard to find and fix the broken links that occur in a website. In some cases we may have a hard time in finding the broken links.

Soft 404s – What Does This Mean?

In short, broken links that are labeled as 200 (OK – server status code) by web servers are called soft 404s.

How can a web server report broken links as 200 (OK)?
Incorrect custom 404 page set up makes the web server report all the broken links (404) in your website as 200 (OK).

Correct Setup – Error Document 404 /unknown-page.php (Relative path is used to define the custom 404 page)

Incorrect Setup – Error Document 404 http://www.techwyse.com/unknown-page.php (Absolute path is used to define the custom 404 page) 

If you have an absolute path for your custom 404 page in error document set up it will make the web server report broken links as 200 (OK) server status code and not a proper 404. Tools like Xenu or GPablo (or other broken link check tools) will not be able to find the broken link if you have an absolute path in the error document set up.

In this case, you cannot identify the broken links present in your website. Search engines also will consider this as an existing page and crawl it. This may end up with a duplication penalty if the URL matches with any other pages in your website.

Google has started showing these soft 404s in Google Webmaster tools.

Technically Google should report only the pages that do not exist and have 200 (OK) server status code. But now Google Webmaster Tools is reporting some 404 pages in the soft 404's list which Google will have to correct.

Following are the actions required against each of your soft 404s listed in Google webmaster tools for your website.

1) Page contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response – Not actually a soft 404 and no action required

2) Page returning 404 status response – Not actually a soft 404 and no action required

3) Page doesn’t exist but returns a 200 response code – 301 redirect to a more accurate URL

If you are sure about these conditions, your site is completely free from broken links. Search engine robots are always interested in crawling strong content driven web pages. Make sure to let them visit only your valid pages and not the unwanted ones.

1. Creating Filters In Google Analytics

Filters in GA are more advanced and is useful for getting some very refined reports. One of the most used filter application in GA is excluding IP addresses.  This allows us to strip out the internal traffic from the GA report. Individual IP's can be excluded with predefined filters. By using custom filters we can block a range of dynamic IPs . This can be done by defining a proper RegEx format to get the entire IP series blocked.

Are you not a RegEx geek? Not sure about the expressions of quantifiers & repetitions? No worries. Google has a tool to automatically generate the correct regular expression for your range of IP addresses.

How will you make sure that you filtered out all internal IPs? Recently our very own GA wizard Jon has written a post on this titled “making sure specified RegEx format filters all internal IPs”.

2. Setting up Goals in Google Analytics

Goal set up is used to measure the number of conversions that a website is getting.  Most conversions we use help us understand how many form leads are being received.  To do this we need to choose a goal page which loads after the visitor completes the desired action. You may need to track many actions under one goal setup which have different goal pages. If that is the case the goal page should be defined in regular expression format so that Google Analytics will register goals when users complete all the desired actions which you want to be completed.

For example, the following are the pages that come after the desired actions.

/offer/signup.html
/offer1/signup.html
/offer2/signup.html
Exact regular expression will match all the above three goal pages is “/.*/signup\.html” or “signup\.html$”

3. Filtering Data Within The Report Interface

Most Internet marketers love getting the Google Analytics keyword report to see the search terms that visitors used to reach the website. While reporting to this client, we at TechWyse like to filter out brand name searches in the keyword report.

This regular expression (tech\s?wyse) matches the following terms and strips them out from report.

“techwyse, techwyse.com, tech wyse”. This is an example and can be used in any Google Analytics report.

And so this ends my session on using regular expressions in Google Analytics.  I hope it helps!

The variation should be created by varying an element from the original so that the optimizer test results can give the best option to proceed with. The changes that you perform should be completely focussed on taking the visitor to the conversion page. A variation that directly influences leading visitors to the conversion page will ensure 100% data accuracy in result.

I'm not going to speak here about the set up process of Google Website Optimizer. For that you can refer DJ's earlier post for complete website optimizer test set up.

The purpose of this article is to help you understand how to best determine your goals using Google Website Optimizer.

Figuring Out The Right Conversion Page?

Irrespective of the test type, (A/B or multi variate) the result is always concluded with the number of conversions arriving from original and variation elements. Identifying the right conversion page is pivotal in GWO test implementation. If you are choosing the wrong conversion page, you may end up with finalizing a poor landing page as per the test result.

Pick a High Volume Conversion Goal

Some typical conversion goals include "adding an item to a shopping cart", "clicking product details page", "thanks page" etc. Beware that if you use a conversion goal that doesn't occur often, it will take much longer to find the most effective content. Also worth nothing that your conversion page doesn’t have to be an actual website page, and can instead be an action such as 'clickable text' or 'form submit button.'

Counting a Conversion When a Link is Clicked

Conversions are counted when a simple html link is clicked. You will be able to count file downloads or leads sent to other sites without placing scripts on other sites. To do this, you have to add modified conversion code after your <HEAD> tag. Also the conversion link should be tagged with a script. You can tag multiple links on the page if you like, but Website Optimizer will not differentiate between them. A click on any of the tagged links will count as a conversion. Here is a guide to track conversion when a link is clicked.

Counting a Conversion When a Form is Submitted

Filling out a contact form or news letter sign up can be set as a conversion. Modify the form code by adding a conversion script, so that it will trigger the conversion script when the  forms 'on submit' event is executed. In this case, your conversion page is the page with which the form exists, even if your form's action leads to another page. Here is the guide to track conversion when a form is submitted.

Local search marketing for a business can help in three ways.

1. Increasing the online visibility where your geographic  target market is searching from.
2. Search Engines will understand your business location and rank accordingly.
3. Local search marketing provides detailed business related information if added properly.

ccTLDs

It’s good to choose a ccTLD domain name if you primarily deal only with local business. By having a local domain extension you can let Search Engines know your exact targeted business location. Local business directories will spend less time in recognizing the business location while approving your business request.

Geo Terms

Using geo terms in the content of web pages can make your website more locale to search engines. Make sure to include the address in ‘contact us’ page. Having your address in the contact us page increases the trust factor amongst your local audience and also helps search engines to understand your business location. Hey, did I mention TechWyse is based in Toronto?

Google Local

Google Local search service uses Google Maps. Ownership can be verified in any of the three ways (postal, phone and sms) while registering the business in Google Local. Getting listed in Google Local will benefit you by getting targeted visitors to the website which increases the chances of conversion. Here is where you can add your business in Google Local.  Google also recently launched a full suite of local business tools to help edit your profile and receive valuable analytical insights.  Having a strong listing in Google Local is also a way of ensuring that your listing is at the top of the page without having to pay for a pay per click ad!

Yahoo Local

Yahoo Local search service integrates yellow page-style listings, Yahoo maps, user reviews and content, and other elements of Yahoo’s network. User reviews are included (when available) with each business listing that gets returned in a local search. You can add your business in Yahoo Local here.

Bing Local

Bing Local Search begins with two text fields on its search form and adds extra links on the home page for functions like getting directions for the business results which will take you to Bing Maps. you can add your business in Bing Local here.

Local Business Directories & Yellow Pages

Each country has many business directories and yellow pages where users are allowed to comment, rate and review the businesses. Local business will be accepted & listed with contact information in business directories after the address verification. It’s getting more important that business monitor the review/comment/rate area for your listing as it can help or hinder reputation.

If you are successful with all the aforesaid points, you can enjoy a fruitful result like below. In the below example you can continue to receive rankings near the top for people searching for services related to you in your area. After all, local business results is yet another way for people to find and convert to your product or service.

If you are not familiar with Duplication Issue, you can find the basic information in my earlier post “Duplicate Content Problems & Solutions For SEO.”

The parameter handling tool has been enabled by Google in webmaster tool accounts. The tools allows webmasters to have complete control of the Google robot to index our files. Some content management systems may produce different URLs for the same content based on how the user navigates around your website.

Here is an example how to use the Parameter Tool

Primary URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish

If a user reached the same page via category “gummy-candy”, the CMS may produce the URL as: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy

If a user reached the same page through a shopping cart page, the CMS may produce this as the URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

The issue in the past is that search engines would look at this as three different pages but the content is the same.  This may lead to penalty due to the same page content.  With "Parameter Handling" in GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) setting, you can now provide suggestions to Google’s crawler to ignore the URLs that contain parameters like category, trackingid, and sessionid.
Below is an image that illustrates how to enter the parameters which you want to be restricted from Google's Index.

This way of fixing duplication will not immediately reflect the indexing algorithm but it will be taken into account after Google's manual review. There is no harm in using both rel=canonical and parameter handling tool for fixing the duplication issue within the website. Rel=canonical works for all search engines whereas parameter handling tool works only in Google. You can choose the option that works the best for you although both if used simultaneously will help you to deal with duplication most effectively.

Yet another tip to keep your SEO in good order!