WHITE HAT SEO BLOG

Google Analytics is a powerful tool to see what your visitors do on your site. It is an effective analysis weapon that can give you real statistics as to what it is your site is doing on the web.

Knowing the behaviour of your visitor is important, as you need to be able to identify the weak and strong parts of your site and tweak it. Along with AdWords, its integration with it is paramount for this tool to work.

It is free and all you need to do is register your account and add some java snippet to each page on your site.

Google Analytics is not without its limitations. For example, a custom report. It cannot do it. This is a major limitation. Another limitation is ownership transfer. You cannot do it.

The lack of support. Google has its help files, but forget about emailing them to ask a question. Choose some of the forums instead.

AdSense is not integrated with Analytics. You are not allowed to track users. There are hacks available that allow that. Included in the negatives here are two more: heat maps are not part of it. A site report simply does not provide this and, real time tracking is nonexistent. They are updated once every 24 hours.

A new site is sandboxed by Google once indexed. Google tries to find out what this site is all about, before releasing it for higher indexing by the Google SERPS.

You get what is called the sandbox effect:  It has not yet been ranked by keywords and is a new site. These sites wait longer to be at the top of a Google page and are basically punished; irrespective of how competitive they are, until such time as Google’s algorithm takes the site out of the sandbox.

There are many ways to try to avoid the sandbox. One of them is to check your site with the many sandbox checkers on the web. You input your URL and check. If you are sandboxed then the following may help.

A new site is given enough rope to hang itself. Google SERPS give you a fair ranking and essentially wait for you to screw that up.  Get natural links on your page (other sites linking to yours).

Possibly purchase an older site and ride on its coat tails for a higher ranking. This helps with the age bonus factor, where the site has been up for a long time and the SERPS therefore reward you.

Add no more than 10 new links to your site. Also, add quality content to the site.  Don’t just link to your homepage but also deeper pages.
And finally, try to get a higher ranking with Yahoo or MSN. That can only help you with staying out of the sandbox.