Search Engine Optimization

Basics of SEO/SEM

Market Share 2008

[ Image from http://blog.compete.com ]

The information from this page was provided by seomoz.org, summarized for this short introduction. Many thanks go to seomoz for providing their free and awesome Beginner's Guide to SEO. Please visit their site and check out the numerous useful tools and timely information on SEO/M.

Why does my company/organization/website need SEO/M?

If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search - people who want what you have visiting your site. Whether your site provides content, services, products or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

Measuring search success

Relevance - the degree to which the content of the documents returned in a search matched the user's query intention and terms. The relevance of a document increases if the terms or phrase queried by the user occurs multiple times and shows up in the title of the work or in important headlines or subheaders.

Popularity - the relative importance, measured via citation (the act of one work referencing another, as often occurs in academic and business documents) of a given document that matches the user's query. The popularity of a given document increases with every other document that references it.

In document analysis, search engines look at whether the search terms are found in important areas of the document - the title, the meta data, the heading tags and the body of text content. They also attempt to automatically measure the quality of the document (through complex systems beyond the scope of this guide).

The theory goes that if hundreds or thousands of other websites link to you, your site must be popular, and thus, have value. If those links come from very popular and important (and thus, trustworthy) websites, their power is multiplied to even greater degrees. Links from sites like NYTimes.com, Yale.edu, Whitehouse.gov and others carry with them inherent trust that search engines then use to boost your ranking position. If, on the other hand, the links that point to you are from low-quality, interlinked sites or automated garbage domains (aka link farms), search engines have systems in place to discount the value of those links.

Sorting the Wheat from the Chaff

In the classic world of Information Retrieval, when no commercial interests existed in the databases, very simplistic algorithms could be used to return high quality results. On the world wide web, however, the opposite is true. Commercial interests in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) are a constant issue for modern search engines. With every new focus on quality control and growth in relevance metrics, there are thousands of individuals (many in the field of SEO) dedicated to manipulating these metrics in order to control the SERPs, typically by aiming to list their sites/pages first.

The worst kind of results are what the industry refers to as "search spam" - pages and sites with little real value that contain primarily re-directs to other pages, lists of links, scraped (copied) content, etc. These pages are so irrelevant and useless that search engines are highly focused on removing them from the index. Naturally, the monetary incentives are similar to email spam - although few visit and fewer click on the links (which are what provide the spam publisher with revenue), the sheer quantity is the decisive factor in producing income.

Other "spam" results range from sites that are of low quality or affiliate status that search engines would prefer not to list, to high quality sites and businesses that are using the link structure of the web to manipulate the results in their favor. Search engines are focused on clearing out all types of manipulation and hope to eventually achieve fully relevant and organic algorithms to determine ranking order. So-called "search engine spammers" engage in a constant battle against these tactics, seeking new loopholes and methods for manipulation, resulting in a never-ending struggle.

Paid Placement and Secondary Sources in the Results

The search engine results pages contain not only listings of documents found to be relevant to the user's query, but other content, including paid advertisements and secondary source results. Google, for example, serves up ads from its well-known AdWords program (which currently fuels more than 99% of Google's revenues).

The sites/pages ranking in the "organic" search results receive the lion's share of searcher eyeballs and clicks - between 60-70% depending on factors such as the prominence of ads, relevance of secondary content, etc. The practice of optimization for the paid search results is called SEM or Search Engine Marketing while optimizing to rank in the secondary results requires unique, advanced methods of targeting specific searches in arenas such as local search, product search, image search and others. While all of these practices are a valuable part of any online marketing campaign, they are beyond the scope of this guide. Our sole focus remains on the "organic" results, although links at the bottom of this paper can help direct you to resources on other subjects.

How to Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is critical to the process of SEO. Without this component, your efforts to rank well in the major search engines may be mis-directed to the wrong terms and phrases, resulting in rankings that no one will ever see. The process of keyword research involved several phases:

Brainstorming - Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type in to search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms, etc).

Surveying Customers - Surveying past or potential customers is a great way to expand your keyword list to include as many terms and phrases as possible. It can also give you a good idea of what's likely to be the biggest traffic drivers and produce the highest conversion rates.

Applying Data from KW Research Tools - Several tools online Wordtracker and Overture offer information about the number of times users perform specific searches. Using these tools can offer concrete data about trends in keyword selection. Term Selection - The next step is to create a matrix or chart that analyzes the terms you believe are valuable and compares traffic, relevancy and the likelihood of conversions for each. This will allow you to make the best informed decisions about which terms to target.

Adwords Keyword Difficulty Tool.

The Long Tail of Search

The "long tail" is a concept pioneered by Chris Anderson (the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, who runs the Long Tail blog

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

This concept relates exceptionally well to keyword search terms in the major engines. Although the largest traffic numbers are typically for broad terms at the "head" of the keyword curve, great value lies in the thousands of unique, rarely used, niche terms in the "tail." These terms can provide higher conversion rates and more interested and valuable visitors to a site, as these specific terms can relate to exactly the topics, products and services your site provides.

For example: Keyword Term/Phrase # of Searches per Month "men's suit"

Critical Components of Optimizing a Site

Each of the following components are critical pieces to a site's ability to be crawled, indexed and ranked by search engine spiders. When properly used in the construction of a website, these features give a site/page the best chance of ranking well for targeted keywords.

Accessibility

An accessible site is one that ensures delivery of its content successfully as often as possible. The functionality of pages, validity of HTML elements, uptime of the site's server and working status of site coding and components all figure into site accessibility. If these features are ignored or faulty, both search engines and users will select other sites to visit.

The biggest problems in accessibility that most sites encounter fit into the following categories. Addressing these issues satisfactorily will avoid problems getting search engines and visitors to and through your site.

Broken Links - If an HTML link is broken, the contents of the linked-to page may never be found. In addition, some surmise that search engines negatively degrade rankings on sites & pages with many broken links.

Valid HTML & CSS - Although arguments exist about the necessity for full validation of HTML and CSS in accordance with W3C guidelines, it is generally agreed that code must meet minimum requirements of functionality and successful display in order to be spidered and cached properly by the search engines.

Functionality of Forms and Applications - If form submissions, select boxes, javascript or other input-required elements block content from being reached via direct hyperlinks, search engines may never find them. Keep data that you want accessible to search engines on pages that can be directly accessed via a link. In a similar vein, the successful functionality and implementation of any of these pieces is critical to a site's accessibility for visitors. A non-functioning page, form or code element is unlikely to receive much attention from visitors.

File Size - With the exception of a select few documents that search engine consider to be of exceptional importance, web pages greater than 150K in size are typically not fully cached. This is done to reduce index size, bandwidth and load on the servers, and is important to anyone building pages with exceptionally large amounts of content. If it's important that every word and phrase be spidered and indexed, keeping file size under 150K is highly recommended. As with any online endeavor, smaller file size also means faster download speed for users - a worthy metric in its own right.

Downtime & Server Speed - The performance of your site's server may have an adverse impact on search rankings and visitors if downtime and slow transfer speeds are common. Invest in high quality hosting to prevent this issue.

URLs, Title Tags & Meta Data

URLs, title tags and meta tag components are all information that describe your site and page to visitors and search engines. Keeping them relevant, compelling and accurate are key to ranking well. You can also use these areas as launching points for your keywords, and indeed, successful rankings require their use.

The URL of a document should ideally be as descriptive and brief as possible. If, for example, your site's structure has several levels of files and navigation, the URL should reflect this with folders and subfolders. Individual page's URLs should also be descriptive without being overly lengthy, so that a visitor who sees only the URL could have a good idea of what to expect on the page. Several examples follow:

Meta Tag Recommendations:

Meta tags once held the distinction of being the primary realm of SEO specialists. Today, the use of meta tags, particularly the meta keywords tag, has diminished to an extent that search engines no longer use them in their ranking of pages. However, the meta description tag can still be of some import, as several search engines use this tag to display the snippet of text below the clickable title link in the results pages.

Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) sometimes includes the use of the meta description and title tags. It is on this page that searchers generally make their decision as to which result to click, and thus, while the meta description tag may have little to no impact on where a page ranks, it can significantly impact the # of visitors the page receives from search engine traffic. Note that meta tags are NOT always used on the SERPs, but can be seen (at the discretion of the search engine) if the description is accurate, well-written and relevant to the searcher's query.

Make the primary term/phrase prominent in the document - general frequency can help rankings.

Make the text on-topic and high quality - Search engines use sophisticated lexical analysis to help find quality pages, as well as teams of researchers identifying common elements in high quality writing. Thus, great writing can provide benefits to rankings, as well as visitors.

Use an optimized document structure - the best practice is generally to follow a journalistic format wherein the document starts with a description of the content, then flows from broad discussion of the subject to narrow. The benefits of this are arguable, but in addition to SEO value, they provide the most readable and engaging informational document. Obviously, in situations where this would be inappropriate, it's not necessary.

Keep text together - Many folks in SEO recommend using CSS rather than table layouts in order to keep the text flow of the document together and prevention the breaking up of text via coding. This can also be achieved with tables - simply make sure that text sections (content, ads, navigation, etc.) flow together inside a single table or row and don't have too many "nested" tables that make for broken sentences and paragraphs.

Keep in mind that the text layout and keyword usage in a document no longer carries high importance in search engine rankings. While the right structure and usage can provide a slight boost, obsessing over keyword placement or layout will provide little overall benefit.

Information Architecture

The document and link structure of a website can provide benefits to search rankings when performed properly. The keys to effective architecture are to follow the rules that govern human usability of a site:

Make Use of a Sitemap - It's wise to have the sitemap page linked to from every other page in the site, or at the least from important high-level category pages and the home page. The sitemap should, ideally, offer links to all of the site's internal pages. However, if more than 100-150 pages exist on the site, a wiser system is to create a sitemap that will link to all of the category level pages, so that no page in a site is more than 2 clicks from the home page. For exceptionally large sites, this rule can be expanded to 3 clicks from the home page.

Use a Category Structure that Flows from Broad > Narrow - Start with the broadest topics as hierarchical category pages, then expand to deep pages with specific topics. Using the most on-topic structure tells search engines that your site is highly relevant and covers a topic in-depth.

Building a Traffic-Worthy Site

One of the most important (and often overlooked) subjects in SEO is building a site deserving of top rankings at the search engines. A site that ranks #1 for a set of terms in a competitive industry or market segment must be able to justify its value, or risk losing out to competitors who offer more. Search engines' goals are to rank the best, most usable, functional and informative sites first. By intertwining your site's content and performance with these goals, you can help to ensure its long term prospects in the search engine rankings.

Usability

Usability represents the ease-of-use inherent in your site's design, navigation, architecture and functionality. The idea behind the practice is to make your site intuitive so that visitors will have the best possible experience on the site. A whole host of features figure into usability, including:

Design

The graphical elements and layout of website have a strong influence on how easily usable the site is. Standards like blue, underlined links, top and side menu bars, logos in the top, left-hand corner may seem like rules that can be bent, but adherence to these elements (with which web users are already familiar) will help to make a site usable. Design also encompasses important topics like visibility & contrast, affecting how easy it is for users to interest the text and image elements of the site. Separation of unique sections like navigation, advertising, content, search bars, etc. is also critical as users follow design cues to help them understand a page's content. A final consideration would also take into account the importance of ensuring that critical elements in a site's design (like menus, logos, colors and layout) were used consistently throughout the site.

Information Architecture

The organizational hierarchy of a site can also strongly affect usability. Topics and categorization impact the ease with which a user can find the information they need on your site. While an intuitive, intelligently designed structure will seamlessly guide the user to their goals, a complex, obfuscated hierarchy can make finding information on a site disturbingly frustrating.

Navigation

A navigation system that guides users easily through both top-level and deep pages and makes a high percentage of the site easily accessible is critical to good usability. Since navigation is one of a website's primary functions, provide users with obvious navigation systems: breadcrumbs, alt tags for image links, and well written anchor text that clearly describes what the user will get if they click a link. Navigation standards like these can drastically improve usability performance.

Functionality

To create compelling usability, ensure that tools, scripts, images, links, etc., all function as they are intended and don't provide errors to non-standard browsers, alternative operating systems or uninformed users (who often don't know what/where to click).

Accessibility

Accessibility refers primarily to the technical ability of users to access and move through your site, as well as the ability of the site to serve disabled or impaired users. For SEO purposes, the most important aspects are limiting code errors to a minimum and fixing broken links, making sure that content is accessible and visible in all browsers and without special actions.

Content

The usability of content itself is often overlooked, but its importance cannot be overstated. The descriptive nature of headlines, the accuracy of information and the quality of content all factor highly into a site's likelihood to retain visitors and gain links. Overall, usability is about gearing a site towards the potential users. Success in this arena garners increased conversion rates, a higher chance that other sites will link to yours and a better relationship with your users (fewer complaints, lower instance of problems, etc.)

Professional Design

Elegant, high quality, high impact design is critical to gaining the trust of your users. If your site appears "low budget" or only marginally professional, it can hurt the chances of gaining a link and more importantly, the chances of engendering trust in your visitors. The first impression of a website by a user occurs in less than 7 seconds. That's all the time you have to convey the importance and authority of your company through the site's design. I've prepared two examples below:

Bad

Good

Authoring High Quality Content

Why Should a Search Engine Rank Your Site Above all the Others in its Field? If you cannot answer this question clearly and precisely, the task of ranking higher will be exponentially more difficult. Search engines attempt to rank the very best sites with the most relevant content first in their results, and until your site's content is the best in its field, you will always struggle against the engines rather than bringing them to your doorstep.

It is in content quality that a site's true potential shows through, and although search engines cannot measure the likelihood that users will enjoy a site, the vote via links system operates as a proxy for identifying the best content in a market. With great content, therefore, come great links and, ultimately, high rankings. Deliver the content that users need, and the search engines will reward your site.

Content quality, however, like professional design, is not always dictated by strict rules and guidelines. What passes for "best of class" in one sector may be below average in another market. The competitiveness and interests of your peers and competitors in a space often determine what kind of content is necessary to rank. Despite these variances, however, several guidelines can be almost universally applied to produce content that is worthy of attention:

Research Your Field

Get out into the forums, blogs and communities where folks in your industry spend their online discussion time. Note the most frequently asked questions, the most up-to-date topics and the posts or headlines that generate the most interest. Apply this knowledge when you create high quality content and directly address your market's needs. If 10,000 people in the botany field are seeking articles that contain more illustrated diagrams instead of just photos, delivering that piece can set your content (and your site) apart from the competition.

Consult and Publish in Partnership with Industry Experts

In any industry, there will be high-level, publically prominent experts as well as a second tier of "well-known in web circles" folks. Targeting either of these groups for collaborative efforts in publishing articles, reviewing your work or contributing (even via a few small quotes) can be immensely valuable. In this manner, you can be assured that your content is both link and visitor-worthy. In addition, when partnering with "experts", exposure methods are built-in, creating natural promotion angles.

Create Documents that Can Serve as One-Stop Resources

If you can provide a single article or resource that provides every aspect of what a potential visitor or searcher might be seeking, your chances for success in SEO go up. An "all-in-one" resource can provide more opportunities than a single subject resource in many cases. Don't be too broad as you attempt to execute this kind of content creation - it's still important to keep a narrow focus when you create your piece. The best balance can be found by putting yourself in the potential users' shoes - if your piece fits their needs and covers every side of their possible interests, while remaining "on-message," you're ready to proceed.

Provide Unique Information

Make sure that when you design your content outline, you include data and information that can be found nowhere else. While collecting and amalgamating information across the web can create good content, it is the unique elements in your work that will be noticed and recommended.

Serve Important Content in a Non-Commercial Format

Creating a document format that is non-commercial is of exceptional importance for attracting links and attention. The communities of web and content builders is particularly attuned to the commercialization of the web and will consciously and sub-consciously link to and recommend resources that don't serve prominent or interfering advertising. If you must post ads, do so as subtlety and unobtrusively as possible.

One Great Page is Worth a Thousand Good Pages

While hundreds or dozens of on-topic pages that cover sections of an industry are valuable to a website's growth, it is actually far better to invest a significant amount of time and energy producing a few articles/resources of truly exceptional quality. To create documents that become "industry standard" on the web and are pointed to time after time as the "source" for further investigations, claims, documents, etc. is to truly succeed in the rankings battle. The value of "owning" this traffic and link source far outweighs a myriad of articles that are rarely read or linked to.

Link Bait

When attempting to create the most link-worthy content, thinking outside the box and creating a document, tool or service that's truly revolutionary can provide a necessary boost. Even on corporate image or branding sites for small companies, a single, exciting piece of content that gets picked up en masse by your web community is worth a small fortune in public relations and exposure. Better still, the links you earn with an exciting release stay with your site for a long time, providing search visibility long after the event itself has been forgotten.

With content that generates links becoming such a valuable commodity, creating solely for the purpose of gaining links has become a popular practice for talented SEOs. In order to capitalize on this phenomenon, it's necessary to brainstorm. Below are some initial ideas that can help you build the content you need to generate great links.

Free Tools

Automated tools that query data sources, combine information or conduct useful calculations are eminently link worthy. Think along the lines of mortgage calculators and site-checking tools, then expand into your particular area of business/operation.

Web 2.0 Applications

Although the term Web 2.0 is more of a buzzword than a technicality, applications that fit the feature set described by the O'Reilly document do get a fantastic number of links from the web community and followers of this trend. Think mashups, maps, communities, sharing, tagging, RSS and blogs.

Collaborative Work Documents

Working in concert with others is a good way to produce content more quickly and with generally higher quality. If you can get high-profile insiders or several known persons in an industry to collaborate, your chances for developing "link-bait" substantially increase.

Exposes of Nefarious Deeds

Writing a journalistic-style exposé detailing the misdeeds of others (be they organizations, websites, individuals or companies) can generate a lot of links and traffic if done in a professional manner (and before anyone else). Make sure you're very careful with these types of actions, however, as the backlash can be worse than the benefit if your actions provoke the wrong type of response.

Top 10 Lists

Numbered lists (of tips, links, resources, etc.), particularly those that rank items, can be a great way to generate buzz. These lists often promote discussion and thus, referencing.

Industry-Related Humor

Even the most serious of industries can use a bit of humor now and again. As with exposés, be cautious not to offend (although that too can merit mentions) - use your knowledge of stereotypes and history inside your market to get topical laughs and the links will be yours.

Reviews of Events

Industry gatherings, from pubcrawls to conferences to speeches and seminars, can all garner great links with a well-done review. Write professionally, as a journalist, and attempt to use as many full names as possible. It's also wise to link out to all the folks you mention, as they will see the links in their referral logs and come check you out.

Interviews with Well-Known Insiders

Anyone inside an industry whose name frequently appears in that industry's internal press is a great candidate for an interview. Even if it's a few short questions over email, a revealing interview can be a great source of links and esteemed professionals are likely to answer requests even from smaller sources as they can benefit from the attention, too.

Surveys or Collections of Data

Offering large collections of industry data culled from polling individuals, an online survey or simply researching and aggregating data can provide a very link-worthy resource.

Film or Animation

Particularly in industries where video clips or animations are rare (i.e. Geology, not Movie Reviews), a high quality, entertaining or informative video or animation can get more than a few folks interested.

Charts, Graphs or Spreadsheets

These standard business graphics should certainly include analysis and dissection, but can provide a good source of links if promoted and built properly.

High Profile Criticism

Similar to the exposé system, well-written critiques of popular products, companies, sites or individuals in a sector have the ability to pull in quite a few links from folks who agree and disagree.

Contests, Giveaways and Competitions

Giving away prizes or public awards (even if they're just website graphics) can get a lot of online folks interested and linking.

Trend-Spotting

Identifying a story ahead of the crowd is commonly called "scooping" in journalism. Do this online, and all (or many) blog posts on the subject will reference your site as the first to "call it."

Advice from Multiple Experts

If you're creating an article that offers advice, pulling opinions from the well-known experts in the industry is a great way to make sure links flow your way. The experts themselves will often be inclined to link.

There are dozens of other great ways to get bloggers, writers and website editors in your field to add links to your site. Imagine yourself as an industry blogger, seeking to cover the most exciting, unique trends and pages in the sector. If this individual stumbled across your content, would they be likely to write about it? If the answer is yes, it qualifies as link-bait.

Growing a Site's Popularity

While developing a great website is half of the SEO equation, the other half is promotion. Search engines are very particular about growing their ability to detect artificial manipulation and link spam, so effective SEOs who want to promote sites to the fullest extent must use natural, organic link building processes in order to have success.

Community Building

Creating a user base that develops into a full-scale community is no easy task, but it's one of the holy grails of online marketing and promotion. The idea is to develop frequently updated content in the form of a blog, forum, wiki or other muti-user input system that can become a central reference and gathering point for a significant number of individuals in an industry.

Press Releases and Public Relations

Influencing mainstream or niche press outlets to cover your company or its actions can be a highly effective way to drive attention to your site, which, if link worthy, can earn a fantastic number of links in short order. Press release sites like PRNewsWire and PRWeb are good starting places for driving traffic and links, and as both feed the major online news search engines Yahoo! & Google News) they can provide high visibility as well. Optimizing press releases is a unique practice in and of itself - placement of text in the title and in visible headlines, compelling story writing and proper content structure are all important elements. One of the most touted experts in this field (Greg Jarboe) runs a site with specific advice SEO-PR) on the subject of optimizing press releases in particular.

Link Building Based on Competitive Analysis

Looking at the links obtained by your top competitors and pursuing methods of your own to get listed on those sites/pages is an excellent way to stay competitive in the link building race. It's also a good way to get natural traffic, as these are the links and sites that send your competitors their traffic, they will also bring visitors to your site. The methodology for investigating a competitor's links is fairly straightforward, although more complex methods can be used by the advanced researcher.

Patience is not the only virtue that should be used for successful SEO. The strategy itself must have a strong foundation in order to succeed. The best site's adhere strictly to these guidelines:

Unique Content - Something that has never before been offered on the web in terms of depth, quality or presentation (i.e. a unique value proposition) Access to an Adoptive Community - Connections or alliances with people/websites in an existing online community that is ready to accept, visit and promote your offering.

Link-Friendly Formatting - Even the best content may be unlikely to be linked to if it displays ads, particularly those that break up the page content or pop-up when a visitor comes to the site. Use discretion in presenting your material and remember that links are one of the most valuable commodities a site/page can get and they'll last far longer than a pop-up ad's revenue.

Monetization Plan - Intelligent systems for monetizing powerful content must exist, or bandwidth, hosting and development costs will eventually overrun your budget.

Market Awareness - If your site is targeting highly competitive terms you should make available, an online marketing budget, including funds for link buying, and hire or consult with someone experienced in bringing newer sites to the top of the SERPs. If you take these steps and have a robust knowledge of the methods described in this guide, you are ready to begin an SEO campaign.

Measuring Success: Website and Ranking Metrics to Watch

One of the most valuable sources for data, analysis and refinement in an SEO campaign is in the statistics available via website tracking and measuring programs. A good analytics program can provide an incredible amount of data that can be used to track your visitors and make decisions about who to target in the future and how to do it.

Below is a short list of the most valuable elements in visitor tracking:

Campaign Tracking - The ability to put specific URLs or referrer strings onto ads, emails or links and track their success.

Action Tracking - Adding the ability to track certain actions on a site like form submission, newsletter signups, add to cart buttons, checkout or transaction completions and tying them together with campaigns and keyword tracking so you know what ads, links, terms and campaigns are bringing you the best visitors.

Search Engine Referral Tracking - Seeing which search engines sent which visitors over time and tracking the terms and phrases they used to reach your site. Combined with action tracking, this can help you determine which terms are most valuable to target.

Referring URLs & Domain Tracking - This allows you to see what URLs and domains are responsible for sending you traffic. By tracking these individually, you can see where your most valuable links are coming from.

First-Time vs. Return Visitors - Find out what percentage of your visitors are coming back each day/week/month. This can help you to figure out how "sticky" and consistently interesting your site is.

Entry Pages - Which pages are attracting the most visitors and which are converting them. You can also see pages that have a very high rate of loss - those pages which don't do a good job pulling people into the site.

Visitor Demographics - Where are your visitors coming from, what browsers are they using, what time do they visit? All these questions and many more can be answered with demographics.

Click Path Analysis - What paths do your visitors follow when they get to your site? This data can help you make more logical streams of pages for visitors to use as they navigate your site, attempting to find information or complete a task.

Popular Pages - Which pages get the most visitors and which are neglected? Use this data to help improve low popularity pages and emulate highly trafficked ones.

Page Views per Session - This data can tell you how many pages each visitor to your site is viewing - another metric used to measure "stickiness."

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