How to setup Goal and Funnel in Google Analytics?

All of us are aware of Google Analytics tool, which is used to measure any site’s traffic.

Goal is a useful metric which measures conversion rate of any website. Goals can measure your business sales, signups, newsletters subscriptions, enquiries etc. Goals can also track other actions of your website to which you want to track.

In every goal, we can define its steps. A funnel represents complete visualization of what is happening on every step of your goal. For example if a signup process consists of 3 steps, then a funnel will show you how many users have entered on step1, step2 and step3. It will also provide details of entry and exit pages on each step.

At first, you need to decide which goal you want to track and the conversion page. Usually conversion page is “thank you” page or the page which confirms that a conversion has been completed.

Secondly, you need to define the goal steps. Once you have completed the above process, login to your Google Analytics Account and start creating a goal.

In goal creation you need to select a match type from three options:

• Exact Match

• Head Match

• Regular Expression Match

Exact Match

It uses regex and not suitable for dynamic URLs.

Head Match

It does not use regex and matches the ‘head’ section of the page url.

Regular Expression Match

It uses regex and suitable for complex urls.

Then, you need to put the Goal URL according to the selected match type. After that you can give a desired name to goal and its value in terms of conversion.

If you want funnel visualization for your goal, you must fill the steps for that goal. There is a checkbox named “required step” is used to inform Google Analytics to only record the goal if the visitor has been entered through step1.

If you have not checked the “required step” checkbox then the funnel visualization will show you the entrance points, exit points and the drop off rate at each step. It will help you in identifying at which step you are loosing more visitors. Then you can improve your goal conversion rate by removing or improving that step.

One Important thing that is a visitor converts the same goal within the same session, it will count as a single goal conversion.

If you want to just test the goal initially, you can create a goal in website’s test profile. Once you are satisfied with your goal, you can implement it to your main profile.

Advantages of using external CSS

CSS Stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS are used to separate the stylist elements of a page such as colour and fonts from the content of the page such as header tags and paragraphs. You can learn CSS from easy W3schools.com tutorials.

Advantages of using CSS in your website:

Full control of page structure
CSS allows you to display your web page according to W3c HTML standards without making any compromise with the actual look of the page.

Google gives value to the web pages that are well organized, though its designers that choose to ignore standards and guidelines, because incorrectly they believe standards lead to bland pages. Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), designers can make pages with good lookup, which can be changed easily any time.

Smaller file sizes
By separating styles from HTML page and putting it into a standalone CSS style sheet (.css file), designer can reduce the of code in your web pages. Pages with less code have smaller file sizes and Google and other major search engines prefers pages with smaller file sizes.

Apart from that Google doesn't define the actual page size of the web page, but community of search engine optimizers believe that the size of a web page is not be greater than 100KB.

Hide content from browsers while it still gets picked up by Google
CSS plays an important role when you need to hide specific code or content from web browser but not from the search engines. For example you may have some content like site navigation, that you only want to appear in print, or on the screen .The advantage of CSS is that search Engine will still crawl and index all of the content of your site navigation.

How to do 301 Redirection?

Need of 301 Redirection
Do you want to change the filename but worried about its current search engine ranking? You just need to do a 301 redirection from old URL to new URL which preserves your old web page rankings. 301 redirection is search engine friendly and treated as permanent redirection in search engine optimization process.

We use different codes for different websites as following.

PHP Redirection Code
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

JSP (Java) Redirection Code
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

ASP Redirection Code
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%>

ColdFusion Redirection Code
<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

JSP Redirection Code
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

.htaccess Redirection Code
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I hope that above codes will help you somehow.

Basic elements to consider in on-page SEO optimization.

1. Title Tag
2. Meta Description and Keywords
3. Content Optimization
4. Image Optimization
5. H-Tags (Headings H1, H2, H3, etc.)
6. Internal Linking Structure

Title Tag Optimization
Title tag is defined as the title of any document. It should be short but descriptive enough for the visitors to identify the business offerings. Title tag can be limited up to 70 characters. Company name and keywords are generally included in Title.

Meta Description and Keywords
Meta description should contain a brief description of the website focusing on the areas and services that the business is specialized in. Generally a meta description contains around 200 characters.

Meta Keywords is simply a comma separated list of targeted keywords for the page. In these days Google not consider it, but some search engines are considering this tag for relevancy.

Content Optimization
There are 4 parameters which we have to consider while optimizing any website.
Keyword Density: Ideally it should be 2 to 3%
Keyword Prominence: Keywords should be used in first as well last sentences of the content. The concept is “Keywords should be nearer from start as well end of the HTML page.”
Keyword Proximity: The distance between the two occurrence of the same keyword in called keyword proximity.
Semantic Keywords: Also use Synonyms and related words in content.

Image Optimization
Search Engine spiders can only read text but not images. So we need to use some special tags for the images in order to give them some meaning for web crawler. We use Alt text and file names to optimize images.

H-Tag Distribution
Header 1 should be used to define the most important section of your page.
Header 2 and 3 can be used for Page/Post titles or other important sections of the pages.
Keywords should be included in these H-Tags. We can also use Bold (strong) and Italic tags for content formatting.

Internal Linking Structure
Try using good Anchor Text when linking to other pages. Include the appropriate keyword in the anchor text which gives the outbound link a ‘proper meaning’ and value.
Anchor Text is defined as “Words Used behind the link”.