Provides information on Google developments and other Google issues.

In addition, it can test which type of Google analytic code you have on each page.  It creates a report identifying either the the older urchin.js or the new ga.js Google Javascript Code against each page.  This is useful to ensure that all your pages have the correct code.

thesitemapper will run for a 30 day trial period allowing you time to fully test it against your web site.

One of the major advantages of using this tool is that owners of websites find errors they never knew existed on their sites, such as href links not correct giving page not found messages.  These errors most often prevent sites from being indexed by Google, Yahoo MSN and others. Once fixed, site owners usually notice a major increase in search engine traffic.

* http://akismet.com/ Akismet – Kills spam comments, dead.

* http://www.1pixelout.net/code/audio-player-wordpress-plugin/ Audio player – An easy to embed audio player (possibly for use with podcasts)

* http://semperfiwebdesign.com/portfolio/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ All in One SEO Pack – All your search engine optimization needs in one package

* http://jamesmckay.net/code/comment-timeout/ Comment Timeout – Stop getting comments on posts older than X amount of days.

* http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/ Google XML Sitemaps – Easily create a Google-ready sitemap for your blog.

* http://www.smackfoo.com/plugins/sig2feed/ RSS Feed Signature – Add an extra line to your RSS feed (great for ads or plugs)

* http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/ Subscribe To Comments – Allow your users to get updates on when more comments are left on a particular story.

All you need to do is step through the wizard, customizing your news as you want it to be seen on your web site.  You can pick from a 728×90 leader board or a 300×250 medium square to display the news from. 

So take a look at this if you need something to replace that white space in your web site’s side bar or if you just want a little more interactivity on your web site.

There are two steps to ensure that AdWords and Anayltics are linked :

(1) In your AdWords account, go to My Account > Account Preferrences.  Click the ‘edit’ link next to Tracking.  Select the box that says ‘Destination URL Auto-tracking” and click Save Changes.

(2) Still in your AdWords account, click the analytics tab and choose to ‘Apply Cost Data” and select Save Changes.

With Auto Taging enabled and wehn someone clicks on your AdWord advert, the browser is redirected to your landing page with an additional parameter (gclid) added on to the url of your

landing page as follows :

It is this additional parameter that identifies vistors as coming from AdWords “google(cpc)” as apposed to organic “google(organic)”.  The correct google cookie is then placed on to the

visitor machine.  When a customer clicks on your AdWord, and then lands on your conversion page, you should see that that within the google(cpc) displays. 

The key point is : Google Analytics cannot tell if the visitor came from an AdWords click if the gclid parameter is missing on the page that the user eventually lands on.

The key is to test whether your landing page retains the gclid parameter and this can be easily done as follows :

1. Take your destination URL (eg http://www.yoursite.com/landing_page.html) and paste it into your browser’s location bar (where you usually type in a web address)
2. Add a test parameter on to the end of the URL.  If your URL does not already have parameters in it, append ?gclid=test.  If there are already parameters, append &gclid=test on to the end.  (For example, http://www.yoursite.com/landing_page.html becomes http://www.yoursite.com/landing_page.html?gclid=test; and http://www.yoursite.com/landing_page.html?myval=1 becomes)

http://www.yoursite.com/landing_page.html?myval=1&gclid=test

3. Press enter
4. Your browser will take you to your landing page.  Be mindful of redirects, especially if you are tracking with Doubleclick, Atlas, etc tags.
5. Is the gclid=test parameter still visible in your browser’s location bar?
If yes, then auto-tgging should come through onto your landing page (providing that you have enabled auto-tagging on your account of course).

If no, there is most likely an intermediate redirect that is stripping out the gclid parameter.

   1. First – change your destination URL to the ultimate page that the visitor lands on, thus bypassing any redirects
   2. Configure your server so that the gclid parameter is passed along in the redirect

Other possible problems are that users are landing on a 404 error page, or that your landing page does not have the required google Anaytics Javascript code located on it.

Just make sure that the Javascript code goes between the <patTemplate:tmpl name=”footer”> and </patTemplate:tmpl> and not outsite of those tags.

You should be able to test it by just looking at the source of the shopping cart web page when you display it in the browser.  You should see the Javascript code somewhere near the bottom of the page.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

With the new Google tool you can search for any keyword or keyword phrase and see the estimated traffic.

The first column shows Advertiser Competition. The bar graph represents the number of advertisers that are bidding on each of the keyword phrase in you results. From this you can determine quickly whether a PPC Adwords campaign will require a high bid price and large budget.

However, some web sites totally disregarded the robots.txt file. When optimizing a Web site, don’t disregard the power of this little text file.

What is a Robots.txt File?

Simply put, if you go to www.domain.com/robots.txt, you should see a list of directories of the Web site that the site owner is asking the search engines to “skip” (or “disallow”). However, if you’re not careful when editing a robots.txt file, you could be putting information in your robots.txt file that could really hurt your business.

There’s tons of information about the robots.txt file available at the Web Robots Pages, including the proper usage of the disallow feature, and blocking “bad bots” from indexing your Web site.

The general rule of thumb is to make sure a robots.txt file exists at the root of your domain (e.g., www.domain.com/robots.txt). To exclude all robots from indexing part of your Web site, your robots.txt file would look something like this:

User-agent:
* Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /junk/

The above syntax would tell all robots not to index the /cgi-bin/, the /tmp/, and the /junk/ directories on your Web site.

There are situations where you might use the Robots.txt file to cause issues with your site optimisation.  For instance if you include a * Disallow: “/” in your Robots.txt file it will be telling the search engines not to crawl any part of the web site giving you no web presence – not what you want.

Another point to watch out for is if you modify your Robots.txt file to dissallow old legacy pages and directories – you should really do a 301 permanent redirect to pass the value from the old Web pages to the new web pages.

Robots.txt Dos and Don’ts

There are many good reasons to stop the search engines from indexing certain directories on a Web site and allowing others for SEO purposes.

Here’s what you should do with robots.txt:

* Take a look at all of the directories in your Web site. Most likely, there are directories that you’d want to disallow the search engines from indexing, including directories like /cgi-bin/,  /wp-amin/,  /cart/,  /scripts/,  and others that might include sensitive data.
* Stop the search engines from indexing certain directories of your site that might include duplicate content. For example, some Web sites have “print versions” of Web pages and articles that allow visitors to print them easily. You should only allow the search engines to index one version of your content.
* Make sure that nothing stops the search engines from indexing the main content of your Web site.
* Look for certain files on your site that you might want to disallow the search engines from indexing, such as certain scripts, or files that might contain e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or other sensitive data.

Here’s what you should not do with robots.txt:

* Don’t use comments in your robots.txt file.
* Don’t list all your files in the robots.txt file. Listing the files allows people to find files that you don’t want them to find.
* There’s no “/allow” command in the robots.txt file, so there’s no need to add it to the robots.txt file.

By taking a good look at your Web site’s robots.txt file and making sure that the syntax is set up correctly, you’ll avoid search engine ranking problems.  By disallowing the search engines to index duplicate content on your Web site, you can potentially overcome duplicate content issues that might hurt your search engine rankings.

Setting up a schedule in Windows XP and Windows Vista is quite similar.  The only issue is that the schedule task will ask for a username / password so that the task can be run when no one is logged in.  If you are the only user on the computer, and it is logged in all the time, then click on the tick box to allow the task to run only when the user is logged in and it will not ask for a password.

In Windows Vista :

Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Task Scheduler

In the scheduler display, select the program to run as
‘folder name \ thesitemapper.exe crawl’
where the folder name will be where ever the program is located.

Then set the ’start in’ to the folder where thesitemapper.exe is located.

Click on ‘Run whether user is logged in or not’
Click on ‘Run with highest privileges’
Click on ‘Do not store password’

Enter in the schedule day / time details and make sure the schedule is enabled by the ‘Enable’ tick box.

Adding a small piece of JavaScript to any link will tell Google to track when someone clicks on that link. This works for pdfs, Word documents, email addresses and external links.

It also works if you want to see which two links on the same page are generating more clicks. Even though they go to the same URL, you can tag one link as ‘link one’ and the other as ‘link two’ and Google will track the clicks separately for you.

If you have a Wordpress blog, you can instantly tag all links across your blog with the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/)

A full description on adding the Javascript code to your web page can be found at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55529 when you are using the latest version of the tracking code.  If you are using the older of the tracking code version then refer to http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=74985