Performing SEO Google Style with Help from Google Analytics

If you are trying to optimize your website for Google, or better still, hiring an expert to do it for you, isn't there a simple way that you can check to see if the said SEO efforts are actually pushing all the right buttons at Google? Well actually, now that you mention it, Google Analytics does help out people who are trying to rearrange their website to the rules of SEO Google style. In principle, SEO is simple enough: you keep working until Google can easily recognize your content, and connect discrete content with the right addresses. And Google Analytics comes in to kind of point you in the right direction when you make a mistake.

Consider for example the information you can get on Google Analytics in a report on your websitethey provide you with, called Hostnames. This report gives you all the possible addresses that can be used by people to arrive at your website. The aim is to have as short a list as possible - ideally just one address that refers to your website, like www.xyz.com. If you have a bunch of alternative website names and IP addresses pointing to the same site, some, say, with capital letters, and others with small letters (www.XYZ.com, and www.xyz.com for instance), this is going against doing SEO Google style. You will need to do extra work to 301 interpret all the alternative Web addresses you have to direct to one name. Look over your Google Analytics Hostnames report to see if there are any mirrors or staging servers listed. Try directly accessing them from the Internet; those are not supposed to be on the list at all. If you can directly access them, that's not good; your competitors or the search engines might spy on your content before it is ready.

If your website showcases products with parameter-driven webpages, and publishes articles to stay on top, it is a big problem if Google finds that you are given to publishing content that appears elsewhere on the Internet. To do SEO Google style, you have to know if Google sees duplication - and not so simple that is to do either using Google Analytics. Well here's an idea: head for the Content section in Google Analytics. Look for the Content by Title report, and pick out a few of your pages. Here you will see under each title, the domain-free URLs for each title tag. You need to see just one per title tag. More than one, is to be taken as a sign of duplication. Just make sure than that you 301 reroute everything to the mother page, and you should be fine. Actually you could get the same information on the Top Content report on Google Analytics, but it would not give you such specific information.

Of course, Google Analytics reports can sometimes be mistaken, or misleading. Some of these efforts of yours to curry favor with SEO Google standard (that's a take on Gold Standard), can still come up against a wall. The problem is that sometimes all the redirecting you do can be undone automatically by Google - a kind of bug if you will. Just keep reading up, and watching Google closely.