MickMel SEO

BlogStorm has an excellent post today about something very simple you can do to help protect your site.

The problem, as they see it:

Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.

I agree with them — it’s a substantial issue.  The bigger problem is that many sites don’t realize they’ve been hacked for a quite while; often they only realize it when their traffic from Google dries up.

If you get hacked, Google will stop sending traffic to your site but they won’t tell you about the problem.  However, you can build a few simple Google Alerts to notify you instead.  BlogStorm suggests you set up and alert that looks like this:

viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:mickmelseo.com

If you get hacked even a little bit, one of those terms is bound to appear.  If it does, Google will let you know about it very quickly and you can dig in and fix the problem.

I’ve used Google Alerts for a while now to notify me of any news items that might have slipped past my Twitter and RSS reading, but this is a new take on it.  It’s simple and effective.  Great tip!

GreekBrief.TV has a short video clip that introduces Woopra, a new analytics client. It’s similar to Google Analytics, StatCounter and others of that nature, but does a few things very differently:

• Stats are delivered to a client that you install on your PC.
• Stats are shown in real-time, with details about each visitor.
• You can initiate a chat session with visitors on your site!

The site is open and you can create an account, but you are not yet able to add any websites or download the software, so I don’t have any firsthand experience to share. Once I get in, I’ll be sure to post my thoughts.

I don’t expect that this will replace Google Analytics, but I think it might complement it very nicely. Check out the video below for a bit more about Woopra.

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

About two weeks ago, Google added an option to include your Analytics data into their beta benchmarking program. Today, that data is now available for use for those that opted in.

From analytics, you simply go to [Visitors] –> [Benchmarking (Beta)] and the data will appear. By default it compares your site to “All sites of similar size”, which is of little value. You can click the [Open category list] to choose a category for your site, after which it will compare you to sites of a similar size within that category. Much better!

Most categories have a handful of subcategories, and look something like this:

• Entertainment
  • Music
    • Lyrics and tabs
    • Musical Instruments
    • Music Streams and Downloads
  • Movies
  • TV
    • TV Programs
• Home and Garden
  • Home Furnishings
  • Home Improvement
  • Gardening
  • Home Appliances
  • Homemaking and Interior Decor

All told, there are 28 top-level categories and untold numbers of sub-categories.  I wondered how Analytics would determine what sites to benchmark mine against, and there is the answer.

For an example of the data you get, here is a screen from our church website, showing data similar to our weekly trends (high on Monday, slow decline through the week):

The data goes back as far as February 8. It’s kind of a shame, as I was curious how other NFL sites looked around the Super Bowl when compared to mine.

How do you think a webmaster could best use this data to improve their own site?

Google Analytics is something that I use on every site of mine.  A few of them employ other analytics beyond that, but they all use Google Analytics for a baseline.

Today, Analytics is adding “industry benchmarking” to their site.  If you choose to opt-in, this will do two things:

1. Share your site statistics with other sites (anonymized, of course).
2. Allow you to compare your data with other sites in your industry.

Why should you care?  It makes it easier to determine whether your stats are up/down because of an industry-wide trend of if it’s something unique to you.

For example, suppose your traffic yesterday was much lower than normal.  You could open analytics and then see that all of the traffic in your industry was lower.  From there, you could figure out why (holiday, etc) and not stress out about it so much.

This feature will require you to opt-in — it won’t be enabled automatically (which is a good thing, privacy-wise).  I’m still not seeing this option available in my Analytics, so please post in the comments when you see it in yours.