If you want a visual indication of how visitors behave on your site once they arrive, Crazy Egg is a fantastic tool. With Crazy Egg, you can get heat maps of where visitors click on the page. You can also see heat maps of how far visitors scroll down the page. Optimizely. Free for basic users Optimizely is a popular split-testing analytics tool. With Optimizely you can split test different variations of your site, and see which version makes more sales or conversions.
Common SEO problems & how to fix them.
Dealing with Google can be massively frustrating at times. Customer support barely exists, and trying to understand why your site isn’t playing well with Google can spiral into a wild goose chase. Don’t let Google’s lack of customer support or the horror stories dishearten you. Most of the time, if a site is experiencing Google problems, it is only temporary. SEO problems are rarely irrecoverable. Usually it’s simply a matter of finding out the underlying cause of the problem— more often than not, the cause isn’t what the popular blog posts are saying it might be.
This sometimes means fixing several items. Once all fixed, you have stacked the deck in your favor and you are more likely to make a speedy recovery. This chapter outlines common SEO problems that plague web site owners. If you are not at all technically inclined, I urge you to read the section on getting additional advice, or even consider getting professional help if your site is experiencing serious SEO issues
What to do when your site is not listed in Google at all
This is a common problem among webmasters and business owners alike. If you have just launched a brand new site, it is possible Google has not crawled your site yet. You can do a quick spot check by typing ‘site: yoursiteaddress.com’ into the Google search bar and checking to see if your site comes up at all.
Typically all that’s required for Google to pick up your site is to generate a handful of links to your site, and some social activity. Tweeting a link to your site is a quick way to ensure your site is indexed by Google’s software, typically within 24-hours. Try to share your site from a handful of social networks for faster results.
Check Google again in 24 hours with the ‘site:www.yoursite…’ search query and see if any pages from your site comes up. If you do see pages, this means Google has indexed your site. If this doesn’t work, ask your web designer to setup Google Webmaster Tools for you, login, and see if there are any errors. If there are errors, Google will outline the steps to fix them, so Google can see your site
What to do when your business is not ranking for your own business name.
A business not coming up in the top position in Google for searches for the official business name is a surprisingly common issue among brand new sites. Google is smart, but sometimes you need to give Google a nudge to associate your new site with the name of your brand. This solution is easily fixed by building links to your site, with some of the links with your brand name as the anchor text.
This can take up to a couple of weeks for Google to see these links, connect the dots and realize your site is the real deal.
Last word
The fast way to get the ball rolling is to do a quick search for the business directories used in your country—Whitepages, Yellow Pages, Yelp, and so on— fill out a listing for your business on each site and include a link back to your web site. The more links the better, but you should be aiming for a minimum of 50 links. In 95% of cases, this will solve the problem of a site not coming up in the top results of searches for the business name. If this doesn’t work, setup Facebook and Twitter accounts for your business, filling out as much information about your business as possible in the profile. Then do a post a day for about two weeks, mixing in links to your site in the posts
