by Sage Lewis This is a question I get asked all the time. Get the final answer right here. Inspired from this article at Search Engine Roundtable Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Do Keywords In Your Domain Matter?

by Mike Moran Some of you might know that I like to take Augusts off. While not completely off the grid (I still clean out my e-mail—although I don’t reply much—and I still moderate comments on my blog), I don’t write any blog posts (on my blog or here at Search Engine Guide), and I stay off Twitter. I also don’t read any blog posts or check out what others are saying on Twitter—it’s a social media fast. Each year, it’s interesting to find myself picking up a newspaper again. This year, I did something a bit different, because I actually returned to work on August 25th because of a client need, but I continued to stay away from social media for the last week, just to see what it was like. It’s one thing for me to avoid social media while I am on vacation, but what would it feel like during my work day? Image via Wikipedia Well, the verdict is in. It felt very strange. As easy as it is for me to drop out of social media while on vacation and just hang with my wife and play with the kids, once I am back at work, it felt very odd to not know what is going on . I mean, I had been away for three weeks on vacation, so I really had no idea what was happening, but to be working in that kind of darkness was a different experience. The first thing I had to do was to fly to a distant city and make a speech on Internet marketing to hundreds of people. In doing so, I was gripped by this semi-insane fear that I couldn’t make the speech without knowing what is going on . I mean, what if someone asked a question about something that just happened and I didn’t know the answer? Of course, the speech went just fine. Internet marketing apparently hasn’t changed all that much in the last month (even though apparently the Web died while I was away). But I also noticed how much I wanted to say, with no one to tell. I usually tweet about where I am traveling, so I had to resist the impulse to tell people about my trip last week. People would send me links to things to read—not only didn’t I read them, but I didn’t tell anyone about them. I’ll probably catch up over the next week and tweet some of them. But it was the blog ideas that just kept coming. And I wasn’t writing any of them. Usually, I post to my blog once each day (usually I am the writer of the article, but I also edit contributions from some other excellent contributors), so every day it is a struggle to get that done. I take for granted that nice people out there are actually interested in hearing what I have to say. It was strange to have a few work days where I wasn’t publishing anything. (Frank Reed published several posts on my blog while I was away, but I didn’t have any work to do while on vacation.) I now have dozens of ideas for blog posts. most accumulated during the last week at work, with only a couple from my vacation. So, while my vacation definitely recharged my batteries, my social media fast during my first week back from work filled my creative coffers. Perhaps many of you post just once a week, or even less frequently, so this is not an issue for you. And while I’ve never felt like I am running dry for ideas, going a few days without having to write anything has been an eye-opener. So, I still haven’t completely caught up on what’s been going on, but I will soon. My social media fast has proven to me both how important social media is and how important it is to take a break now and then. Some have told me that they only look at social media during defined times of the day (I know some who do this with e-mail, too). I never understood that before, but maybe I am starting to. Anyway, I am glad to be back, and I’m honored that a few of you actually want to listen to what I have to say. Thank you. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Adapting to a Social Media Fast

More and more people are surfing the Internet from their phones these days. Take a look at the following graph. It shows the number of monthly visits to googlestore.com from Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry devices over the past 2 years. There were 277 visits in Sep, 2008. But in July of 2010, there were over 13,000 visits! Given this kind of growth, it makes sense for many businesses to set up a mobile device-friendly site. If you’ve been considering whether to create a mobile site, you may want to check out the Mobile Devices report in the Visitors section. You can see how many visits you received from each mobile operating system, how many pages they visit on average, how much time they spend on your site, as well as see conversion and ecommerce information. In next week’s Back to Basics, I’ll show you how to create your own trend graph like the one in this article, so you can really dig into the numbers for your own site. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Back-to-Basics: How much mobile traffic do you get?

More and more people are surfing the Internet from their phones these days. Take a look at the following graph. It shows the number of monthly visits to googlestore.com from Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry devices over the past 2 years. There were 277 visits in Sep, 2008. But in July of 2010, there were over 13,000 visits! Given this kind of growth, it makes sense for many businesses to set up a mobile device-friendly site. If you’ve been considering whether to create a mobile site, you may want to check out the Mobile Devices report in the Visitors section. You can see how many visits you received from each mobile operating system, how many pages they visit on average, how much time they spend on your site, as well as see conversion and ecommerce information. In next week’s Back to Basics, I’ll show you how to create your own trend graph like the one in this article, so you can really dig into the numbers for your own site. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Back-to-Basics: How much mobile traffic do you get?

More and more people are surfing the Internet from their phones these days. Take a look at the following graph. It shows the number of monthly visits to googlestore.com from Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry devices over the past 2 years. There were 277 visits in Sep, 2008. But in July of 2010, there were over 13,000 visits! Given this kind of growth, it makes sense for many businesses to set up a mobile device-friendly site. If you’ve been considering whether to create a mobile site, you may want to check out the Mobile Devices report in the Visitors section. You can see how many visits you received from each mobile operating system, how many pages they visit on average, how much time they spend on your site, as well as see conversion and ecommerce information. In next week’s Back to Basics, I’ll show you how to create your own trend graph like the one in this article, so you can really dig into the numbers for your own site. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Back-to-Basics: How much mobile traffic do you get?

The other day a person contacted me about wanting to help me with ad retargeting on one of my sites, but in order to do so they would have had to have tracked my site. That would have given them tons of great information about how they could retarget all my site’s visitors around the web. And they wanted me to give that up for free in an offer which was made to sound compelling, but lacked substance. And so they never got a response. Given that we live in “the information age” it is surprising how little people value data & how little they expect you to value it. But there are still a lot of naive folks online! Google has a patent for finding under-served markets . And they own the leading search engine + the leading online ad network. At any point in time they can change who they are voting for, and why they are voting that way. They acquired YouTube and then universal search was all the rage. Yes they have been pretty good at taking the longterm view, but that is *exactly* why so many businesses are afraid of them . Google throws off so much cash and collects so much data that they can go into just about any information market and practice price dumping to kill external innovation & lock up the market. Once they own the market they have the data. From there a near infinite number of business models & opportunities appear. Google recently became the #1 shopping search engine . How did they respond? More promotion of their shopping search feature. All those star ratings near the ads go to a thin affiliate / Google value add shopping search engine experience. Featured placement for those who are willing to share more data in exchange for promotion, and then over time Google will start collecting data directly and drive the (non-Google) duplication out of the marketplace. You can tell where Google aims to position Google in the long run by what they consider to be spam. Early remote quality rater guidelines have highlighted how spammy the travel vertical is with hotel sites. Since then Google has added hotel prices to their search results, added hotels to some of their maps, and they just acquired ITA software - the company which powers many airline search sites. Amongst this sort of backdrop there was an article in the NYT about small book shops partnering up with Google. The title of the article reads like it is straight out of a press release: Small Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market . And it includes the following quote Mr. Sennett acknowledged that Google would also be a competitor, since it would also sell books from its Web site. But he seemed to believe that Google would favor its smaller partners. “I don’t see Google directly working to undermine or outsell their retail partners,” he said. “I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.” He added, “I wonder how naïve that is at this point. We’ll have to see.” If they have all the sales data they don’t need to make recommendations. They let you and your customers do that. All they have to do to provide a better service than you can is aggregate the data. The long view is this: if Google can cheaply duplicate your efforts you are unneeded duplication in the marketplace. Look at the list of business models Google publicly stated they were leery on : ebook sites get rich quick comparison shopping sites travel aggregators 3 out of 4 ain’t bad. But they even on the one they missed, they still have an AdSense category for it.

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Free Data

There are so many blogs on search marketing. Then there are so many forums. And Tweets. So much SEO noise, and so little time. So how does anyone make sense of it? The deluge can be overwhelming for the experienced SEO, let alone the poor beginner. If you are just starting SEO, here are the ten areas you should spend most of your time on when you’re starting up. 1. Stop reading Blogs/Forums/Tweets/Facebook . Too much noise, takin’ all your time “SPAM = Site’s Positioned Above Mine” - Greg Boser 2. Before your do any SEO, define your niche. What service does your website provide? Who are your readers/customers? What can you provide that your competitors don’t? How are you going to deliver your services and make a profit? There’s no point ranking well for a business that doesn’t work at a fundamentally level. “Search is a “reverse broadcast system.” In a broadcast system, advertisers spend lots of money to reach a mass audience, hoping to build desire for a product or service. But most of the audience is not interested in their pitches. Search is the reverse. Each search is an expressed desire, something that someone at a particular time actually wants. Advertisers can tune in to the “desire-cast” that’s going on.” - Danny Sullivan 3. Set business-specific goals and include a time frame. “I want to make x in 12 months”. “I want 20,000 RSS subscribers in 6 months”. It’s important to be specific. It’s difficult to measure goals that aren’t specific i.e. “be popular”. Never let your ads write checks that your website can’t cash. - Avinash Kaushik 4. Create interesting content. If you know your audience, you already know what content they will find interesting. If you don’t, revisit #2. I’m not even sure myself - Matt Cutts 5. Links. You need links Not just the Google-juice, PR-passing kind. Links are the arteries of the web, Traffic travels across links, so all links, crawlable or not, no-followed or otherwise, are valuable. Asking for links from people you don’t know is pretty much a waste of time. It’s a better idea to create fantastic content, then link out to the popular people who can spread the word. They’ll follow their inbound links back to you. Make sure that what they find is remarkable . The urgent can drown out the important. - Marissa Meyer 6. Do SEO. All that stuff you’re no longer reading in #1? It all boils down to this: put keywords in your title tag , write on-topic content, make sure your site is crawlable, get links to that content, get people to talk about you . Repeat. We’re trying hard to find user needs that aren’t being met at all- Larry Page 7. After a month, look at your keyword referral logs. Take those terms and plug ‘em into keyword research tools. Create a list of 30 keyword terms that your audience would find interesting. Those are your article headings. Write 30 articles. Repeat. 8. Look at your competitors. Your competitors are ranking well for a reason. They’re being mentioned elsewhere for a reason. What are they doing that you’re not? Reverse engineer their sites i.e. who links to them, find out what articles they publish and find out who is talking about them, and why. Emulate them, then go one better. Either that, or stop competing with them directly i.e. define a slightly different niche. We are currently not planning on conquering the world - Sergey Brin 9. Get social. Social media is often over-hyped, but the principles, and numbers behind it, are sound . Getting mentioned is the new link building. It’s about building connections between people. Google has a problem. Using links as a measure of relevant content doesn’t work as well as it used to, so you can be sure Google will be using an evermore complex set of signals. These signals will involve the connections people make with your site. That’s really what Google wants to know - who is most relevant. Consider the many different ways people can connect with you, and enable those connections. 10. Start reading the blogs/forums/twitter. The irony, of course, is that I’ve linked to some truly great resources and thinkers If you’ve followed the ten steps above, you’re 80% of the way there. The final 20% will take a while longer, and that’s where the minutae comes in. Keep in mind that some of the most lucrative SEO information isn’t likely to be published in the public domain. Cultivate personal networks to get this information. This is true of any business endeavor. Network

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The Inside Line On SEO

Ever wondered how to price your SEO services? Your products? Have you set your prices at a point where you can get the best possible returns? Pricing seems simple, but there’s a bit of an art to getting it right. In this article we’ll take a look at different ways to price, a few strategies to use, and why you might want to avoid charging everyone the same price. Why Pricing Strategy Matters Obviously, if we get our pricing wrong, we’ll miss out on business. In order to increase profits, we could devise new services and products. However, by adjusting our existing pricing strategy on goods or services we already provide, we can squeeze out extra revenue with little effort. To get greater returns from pricing, companies typically find ways to charge different prices to different customers. Cost Plus Pricing Cost-plus pricing is a common pricing method. Pricing of a good or service is determined by working out the total production cost, then add a profit margin. There’s nothing wrong with this method - cost-plus pricing is widely used - however it does present a few problems. One problem is that cost-plus pricing doesn’t take into account the role of competitors. If we offer a SEO service at $15,000, arrived at by the cost-plus method, but our competitors offer the same service for $10,000 then our pricing clearly won’t work. We must price in accordance with the market. Cost-plus pricing doesn’t take into account fluctuating demand. If demand for your products/services suddenly goes through the roof - say because you’ve been interviewed on nationwide television - they become scarce, and price should rise to reflect this scarcity. Another problem is that it doesn’t take value, as perceived by the customer, into account. Imagine that you’ve created a widget that enables a machine to work at twice the output it did before. The value to the customer is considerable, as they can now double their output with little extra investment. The total cost of building the widget may be low. Cost-plus pricing would typically underprice such a widget. Value based pricing would charge in line with the total value it creates for the customer i.e. the increased value of their output. In terms of SEO, are you charging enough for your services if you charge a few thousand dollars, whilst your clients make millions? Thinking of pricing in terms of value provided to your customer is a key to increasing profits. Let’s look at a method to accurately calculate a price for your goods or services. Pricing Calculator In the The Art Of Pricing , you can find the following method for setting prices. Step One: Price & Availability Of Substitutes Are there any substitutes for your product? If so, how are they priced? Step 2: Characteristics Relative to Competitors What features do you offer that your competitors do not, and vice versa? Do you customers value these features enough to pay extra for them? Do customers value other characteristics, such as brand, established service levels, reputation, locality etc? Step 3: Income Can your customers afford your prices? Are they less able to afford your prices than they once were? Are there times of the year they can afford it, and other times where their purchasing power is constrained? Step 4. Price/Strength Of Demand For Related Products What are the associated overheads of owning your product? For example, if you sold cars, there are other costs involved that make up the total cost of ownership, including running costs, insurance and maintenance. Step 5 - Market Environment Has your product suddenly become high profile? Has demand increased/decreased considerably in a short period of time? This type of approach takes into account a number of variables when setting price, namely affordability, value, market conditions, and competition. Some Issues With Value Pricing Pricing, without taking into account overall business strategy, is a mistake. For example, say there is a natural disaster where people lose their homes. A hotel may jack up the rates to ridiculous levels because it knows demand will surge, however the long-term value of the brand may be damaged if the hotel gets a reputation for price gouging. Some companies may want to price at a level that gains them clients, but not revenue. For example, in order to build a reputation in the market, new SEO agencies sometimes provide services at a discount, or free, in order to get a few big name clients on their books. Pricing Tricks Let’s take a look at a few common pricing methods in practical terms. The Law Of Three: If you go into a shop to buy a washing machine, you’ll likely be faced with a range of models. Nothing odd about this, of course. The shop is trying to cover all bases. However, there is often something more subtle going on. Most people will buy middle of the range. The middle of the range feels “safest”. So, a shop will often have a ludicrously expensive model, and a very cheap model. The actual model they want to sell you is the priced in the middle of those two extremes. If the shop didn’t offer a ridiculously expensive model as a basis for comparison, the middle option becomes the expensive option, and you’re more likely to set your sights lower. When you offer SEO services, try doing the same. Offer a bells and whilstles version that is highly priced, a mid option, and a cheap option. Typically, your customers will select the middle option. If you only offer two options, people typically choose the cheapest. Auctions: Perhaps not applicable to SEO, but if you’re selling products, the auction system can be a great way to achieve better prices. Entire books have been written about the psychological effects of auctions, but it all boils down to the fact that people place different values on products based on their own needs. Those who want the product the most, pay the most. Versioning - Offer slightly different versions of the same thing. See Apple and their iPad pricing. The cost of production of each model is probably near identical across the range, but by offering different versions, they can figure out who is prepared to pay more. Versioning can often be more extreme when setting a wide price range. Conferences tend to offer coupons off retail price for early attendees, but so long as the full price has been seen publicly by some folks, this lends a perception of value that can be used in subsequent marketing & packaging. Some companies might run an in-person conference which charges thousands of dollars, and then afterwards, sell you a download version of it for a few hundred dollars, all the while anchoring on the “fact” that you just saved $1,000+ with your purchase. The “crucial” networking & intimacy benefits which were used to promote the in-person event soon disappear and the concepts of value and convenience (instant download, no travel required, etc.) are brought to the fore. Segmented Pricing - Perhaps your buyers can’t pay the entire cost up front, but they can buy using other arrangements, like a monthly fee. Some clients might prefer bundle offers where everything is done for them, whilst others want to mix and match parts of your service. Offer different options so your client can fit their budget to your offering. Differential Pricing - Offering coupons can grab those buyers who are very price sensitive, or looking to buy only if they perceive a genuine bargain. Your other customers won’t bother with coupons, so you can successfully run two different pricing strategies, one discount and one full price, by using coupons. Markdowns - Obvious, but powerful. You advertise the usual price, but a line through it, and offer it at a reduced price. What’s not so obvious is when markdowns should be used. Markdowns don’t work so well on luxury items, as this can compromise their exclusivity value. Not much point owning a high-end garment is everyone has one. Notice that luxury items either don’t display their price, or, if they do, its typically stated in rounded figures i.e. $1500. Budget items price in dollars and cents i.e. $39.95 or slightly under the next increment i.e. $99 as opposed to $100. The format of the price signals exclusivity, or lack thereof. But Is This Fair? Offering one price to one group, and another price to others may seem unfair. This is something you’ll need to weigh up for yourself. However, keep in mind that if the differing price points reflect different levels of value, then the customer is deciding what they value most. If they want the full service, they should expect to pay full-service prices. If they want the lowest price, they may be prepared to wait or sacrifice some features. The customer decides what they value, and votes with their cash. And they can always say “no”

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How To Price

When Teoma launched in 2002 GoogleGuy made the following comment : “I just have one question. Are the Overture results on top an April Fool’s Day joke, or is that for real? ” Since then Google has put ads above their organic search results, done selective self-serving within their “organic” results, and built a business that is pulling in over $20 billion a year. It turns out aggressively carpet-bombing the web with ads is no joke. But the net effect of that success is that many people know the value of links. SEO is a zero sum game , and so if you don’t engage in heavy self promotion you will remain obscure on Google’s linkless internet : no one links honestly any more. all links are suspect. no one links freely any more. those that do link freely are considered naive. page rank is specifically worth money. links are currency. articles that once contained great links - no longer link to story targets. On the web ideas (and business models) spread quickly. So as companies learn that Google encourages and pays you to pollute the web with garbage that is what many people will do. Google goes so far as to explicitly state what not to do, and many people view that as a checklist of opportunities, as it wouldn’t be on that list unless it worked . The lack of community and camaraderie within the SEO industry both remarkable & unsurprising give that the SEO industry is a bit of a canary in the coal mine in terms of adopting new best practices (or worst practices, in some cases). At the lower end of the market people are operating like robots, mechanically spamming in a way that sure feels like crapping on the virtual living room floors in established public forums . Just yesterday I read a blog post listing me amongst a list of resources where everything recommended had a link - except for our site. The lack of link was so bizarrely out of place that they literally had to explain why they didn’t link to our site. Crazy stuff, especially from an SEO “professional” who claims to like and value your work! As attention becomes more scarce, many people are willing to do anything to get a bit of it. Meanwhile Google has no issues funding that very “linkless” web pollution by paying the likes of Demand Media to syndicate their ads, and encourage the use of rel=nofollow on links while trying to build out the model for digital sharecropper overlords. Google has pushed so far on nofollow that content spam is the single most profitable SEO business model going today . The end result of this business decision? Google becomes its own nemesis by funding spam : This triple occurrence of Optimization by Proxy creates a self-reinforcing cycle where the made-for-adsense website owners are rewarded with cold hard cash for their efforts. What’s worse, this cash flow has been effectively subtracted from the potential gains of legitimate content producers. One can say that the existence of Google search/adsense/adwords makes all this commerce possible in the first place, but this does not make the downward spiral of inefficiency disappear. What is even more strange about the above quoted article is that a Google search-quality engineer submitted it to Hacker News using “Sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content” as the title & wrote the following: All of the fascinating things about signals are confidential for all of the reasons listed in the article, and Google has been sued so many times by sites that think they should rank better than they do that I can’t really give examples. I think it’s safe to say though that there are a lot of people worried about and thinking hard about what the web is turning into and how to rank it appropriately. Most of the content is no longer written by devoted hobbyists, people no longer link as often to things they like, and much of the content on the front pages of reddit, digg (and sometimes even hackernews) was put there by people trying to make your search results worse. Given that Google pays for the creation of content and is the most profitable distribution channel for many webmasters, few businesses have anywhere near Google’s influence on “what the web is turning into.” The smaller the corpus of voters there are the fewer people you need to influence to manipulate the search results. And so stuff like this becomes popular: But if you have a live and flourishing link graph then efforts of spammy delight won’t be able to compete anywhere near as well against the best sites. The problem is the best sites often remain in obscurity & even when they spread through social networks most of those links use nofollow. The powerful element of links is that they give search an informational bias . Most other forms of user feedback (even awareness) are to some degree driven by ad budget, which would give the results a commercial bias that would cut Google’s AdWords revenues. Years ago on porn search Matt Cutts stated “One thing to consider is that our rankings (because of PageRank and the link structure of the web) often lean more toward information sites. You usually have to look a little more deliberately to find porn on Google.” And last year a Google search engineer on Reddit stated : “Incredibly, we take an active role in ignoring porn search. As in, we neither care nor not care about whether our changes affect the search for porn. I’m quite impressed myself at how good it is given this, and sometimes I wonder how much better it could be…” The point being that Google can choose to be a passive reflection of the web, but they choose *not* to and have impacted the web by perverting the link structure. Even Google engineers admit “people no longer link as often to things they like” - this is not due to ” scalable algorithms ” - but due to a long history of calls for spam reports , calls for paid links reports , threatening to remove PageRank , pushing rel=nofollow out for a niche purpose and then claiming it to be a panacea , associating (non-Google!) link selling with bogus cancer cures , creating the AdSense API, excessive emphasis on domain authority, claims like “we are packrats at Google. We never seem to throw out information about the link structure of the web. :)”, etc. Yes any new webmaster can quickly rank any trashy content in Google - not on their own site - but on one owned and controlled by a Google arbitrage partner like Demand Media. Google engineers focused on making their own jobs easier (by making links easier to get) rather than encouraging and promoting the advancement of the corpus of content & links/votes they rely on. The fundamental question for search is if the ecosystem is healthier with many micro-parasites or fewer macro-parasites. I always promote diversity as a good thing, but capitalism typically promotes homogenization to increase yields. That will work for Google right up until… some of the large arbitrage players form their own ad network, or sign an exclusive deal with Bing quality publishers pull out of search and people prefer to ask their own communities what is good rather than searching to find bland 3rd grade answers wrapped in AdSense …at which point Google will start promoting other sites & building a new model. Or they will become irrelevant. But Google is not required to go through that pain. They could undo the years of FUD that destroyed the link graph by stating the importance of outbound links, and then putting a bit of weight on it. It is something that was hinted at in the past , but the focus on making links harder to get has undermined the utility of using links as *the* measuring stick for quality because “people no longer link as often to things they like.”

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How to Fix the Broken Link Graph

Google Analytics is not simply a product but also a growing ecosystem of developers, tools, users, and partners. Today at the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, Brett Crosby made several announcements that highlight this ecosystem. All Google Analytics customers have access to a worldwide network of Google Certified Partners (formerly known as Google Analytics Authorized Consultants). And now the ecosystem is growing further with developers who are creating a variety of applications on the Google Analytics platform. Today, we’re announcing the Google Analytics App Gallery . Among the current list of 32 apps, you’ll find tools like Excellent Analytics, which lets you work with your Analytics data in an Excel spreadsheet, and the Analyticator for Wordpress, which automatically implements Google Analytics across your entire WordPress site. There are many more applications in the gallery, so go take a look. And if you’re a developer, you can learn how to publish apps in the App Gallery here . Google AdWords is another important part of the ecosystem. Website owners drive traffic using AdWords, and use Google Analytics to understand the performance of that traffic. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs. For a 3-minute overview of what you can accomplish with the new reports, check out this video . Also, developers can now access AdWords information via the Google Analytics APIs. This makes it much easier to combine your AdWords and Google Analytics data for both analysis and automation. We’re very excited to see third party applications that use this capability to offer new functionality to advertisers. For details, check out this article, which includes a code sample and more, on Google Code . Also part of the AdWords/Analytics ecosystem, AdWords Search Funnels was announced one month ago, and today is available in all AdWords accounts. We’re also making two short tips videos available ( tip 1 and tip 2 ) that illustrate just a couple of the ways you can use Search Funnels. Finally, supporting the ecosystem of all websites using Google Analytics, the new faster page tag comes out of beta. The asynchronous tracking snippet will soon be the default snippet when you set up a new profile. This new page tag will speed up your site and every site that uses Google Analytics across the web. If you want to upgrade from your existing tag (which we highly recommend), you can learn how to do that here . We’ll follow up with deep dive posts on each of these topics next week. Thanks for being part of the ecosystem. Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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The Growing Google Analytics Ecosystem