What is Google Analytics

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free statistics tracking and analysis service that allows web site administrators to analyze traffic flow on a web site. Although most hosting solutions come with similar software, it may not be as easily understood or as easily navigated as Google Analytics. One of the more impressive features of Google Analytics is the ability to flag certain pages as “goals.” This is specifically beneficial to e-commerce web sites. However, regardless of the purpose of a web site, Google Analytics can help make that web site better.

Whenever someone visits a web site, a variety of information is stored on the server in the form of access logs. These files are simple text files that are formatted in a specific way to allow programs to analyze the stored information and present it in a way that can be more easily understood. This data includes the IP address of the computer, the amount of data transferred, the URL visited, the time and date of the visit, the operating system and the browser used by the visitor to the web site. The most common information used to tell whether a web site is doing well is the number of visitors. This is certainly valuable information, but it tells us nothing about what visitors are doing when they visit a web site. Standard statistics software will guess at how much time people spend viewing a specific page, but this is also not as valuable as the information collated by Google Analytics.

Since HTTP connections are not persistent, it's impossible to actually track a visitor's path through a web site. An HTTP connection is a simple two-way communication between a computer and the server that ends as soon as the data is transferred. The visitor's computer makes a request, and the server sends some information back. The computer and the server do not have any additional contact until the visitor requests more information from the server. There are other types of connections used to create a persistent connection to the server, but those are not used for browsing web sites. This causes a number of problems for web site developers, and there are a number of solutions to overcome it. In the case of web site statistics tracking and analysis, a visitor's path through a web site can be built by comparing individual requests to the server and gathering requests that share a number of pieces of information. If a number of requests come from a single IP address, it is a good guess that they are all from the same user. In this way, statistics software like Google Analytics can build the paths that users take as they browse a web site.

For each “goal” you can configure a set of funnel pages that lead up to the “goal” page. By analyzing how many users follow the funnel, you can analyze where people are stopping, getting lost, or just leaving your site. Analyzing this data will help you make your web site more effective in helping people to reach the “goals.” In addition to goal tracking, Google Analytics will help you analyze web site loyalty, bounce rates and visit depth. Loyalty means, what percentage of your visitors are repeat visitors. This is also related to the percentage of new visitors you are seeing compared to the number of repeat visitors. Bounce rates show you what percentage of visitors only view one page before leaving. Visit depth will show you how many pages visitors request before leaving.

One of the biggest advantages Google Analytics provides over other analysis software is ease of use. With a few clicks, you can define any range of dates from which statistics can be viewed. You can also easily navigate from general data to more specific data. Everything from bounce rates to conversion rates (how many visitors reach the goal) can be easily found by a few clicks. Google Analytics can also help you understand each report that you see. Helpful tips can be viewed at the bottom right hand corner of many pages that give short descriptions of the data included in the report and sometimes even what the numbers could mean for your web site. To learn more please visit: http://www.google.com/analytics/

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Web 3.0

What is Web 3.0?

In our survey we clearly defined Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 so that those taking the survey all had the same frame of reference. The definitions we used in the survey are below:

• Web 1.0 is defined as organizations publishing content to people to inform them. In learning, this would be best illustrated by an instructor-led classroom, where students absorb what is pushed to them.
• Web 2.0 is defined as people publishing to each other to inform, work and socialize with one another. In learning, this would best be illustrated by a dispersed team collaborating on projects via social networks, group workspaces and/or communities of practices.
• Web 3.0 is defined as people and machines publishing to and interacting with each other to inform and augment each other's work. In learning, this could be a learner who is recommended courses or solutions by the system for work or browsing he may have conducted. The content presented to the learner could be augmented with multiple layers of content, i.e., mobile application with location-based information augmenting a map.

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SMM ( Social Media Marketing )

1)What Is SMM

Social Media Definition

Social media is a two-way conversation to facilitate continuing dialogue, and communication with an intended audience. It is about building and nurturing relationships. It allows community interaction using web 2.0.

Social media includes: Search engines, social networks, blogs, Vblogs, micro-blogs, message boards, instant messaging (IM), webcasts, email and podcasts, it is created by the people for the people.

Social Media Marketing Definition

Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention, generates online conversations, and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. The message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.

2) SMM Process

In planning the marketing for your business we:

Set Goals--objectives that you want to accomplish.

Define a strategy--create a custom strategy that matches your goals and objectives.

Execute--implement the plan and track results.

Questions we find answers to:

The first step in setting the goals we consult with your business to find the answers to the following basic questions before tackling the business profiles on the different social media networks/ platforms or channels:

Who is your audience and what is its persona's characteristics?

 Where do they hang out online?

Are they a part of any online communities that the business should join?

What do they expect from a business like yours: solution providing, a unique product, customer service?

How do we engage the audience emotionally and appeal to their sensitivity and senses?

How do we approach the audience, in what format, and with what content? Also, most importantly what are the keywords used by the audience its members discuss your industry or business?

Who will be assigned to engage in the online discussions with the audience and how will they channel the leads, inquiries, comments and to who?

Define a clear measurement of the results?

3) SMM Services

We don't limit ourselves to "big" ideas. We care about the "right" idea. Instead of the "shiny object", we define the smart, inspiring concept that will support your strategy and earn you major, measurable results.

Before you do anything, we'll help you limit budgetary, functional, and reputational risk by identifying what will and won't work for you – and the people you're trying to reach. We'll also get your team up to speed on social media best practices. 

We collaborate with you at every step of the process to provide smart solutions specific to your unique brand, resources, audience, and existing content channels. So we can comfortably, easily execute and manage them over the long haul—and get results.

Benefits Of Social Media Marketing:

·             It's affordable

·             It's viral

·             Improves your brand reputation

·             Increases traffic to you website which generates more leads and new business

·             Helps your brand establish a strong connection with your audience

·             Connects you with leaders in your field

·             Builds credibility

Social Media Marketing Services Include:

Social Media Audit:

This is an in-depth analysis of your company's presence across the various social networks and a strategy for ways to improve it. Not every organization's customers are on Twitter or Facebook, we determine what social media networks will work best for your company and industry.

Social Media Marketing Strategy:

Every marketing effort needs a plan before you begin. Creating a Facebook or LinkedIn profile isn't social media marketing, but developing a strategy to leverage those social outlets and build relationships with your customers is. We will work with you to assess your needs, outline opportunities and prescribe specific actions for long-term social media success.

Social Media Profile Creation:

We will identify the social networks where you should be participating and where people are talking about you. We'll also help you create and manage your own social media profiles to attract visitors and leverage the two-way conversation.

Online Reputation Monitoring:

Customers rely more and more on "word of mouth" information when weighing their decisions for products and services; they are conducting online searches to investigate company reputations before finalizing their choices.  We will monitor your organizations reputation, promote your brand, and proactively respond to both positive and negative mentions.

Social Media Networking Training:

No one knows your services and industry better than you, we give you the knowledge to participate in the social media community and start building connections with your customers, employees, business partners and how to conduct competitive analysis on what your competition is doing.

Monthly Social Media Marketing Report:

Next Generation Marketing Solutions, Inc. prides itself in providing transparecy to our customers.  We want you to know what is going, what we have accomplished and how things are going.  By providing you with a monthly report of your social media campaign, you will always have the information there in front of you so youcan make the best marketing decisions as possible.

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SEO Check List

Understand your market
Keyword research will play a big part in understanding your market. Don't guess what your potential clients are searching for, find out using keyword research. Your keyword research will drive your site's content and getting this right is essential. Don't just chase keywords with huge search volume. Unless you are lucky thousands of other sites will also be chasing them and ranking for them could be tough. Look at the long tail of search.


Make your website search engine friendly
Make sure each page has a unique title element, make sure each page has a unique meta description element, make sure each page has a unique meta keywords element (this one isn't critical but it's still worth doing). Use HTML H elements to organise your page content logically and use a CSS based design, not table based. In short use simple web page quality control. The majority of the sites we review miss these basics.


Have a link building strategy
Links to your site are vital. You can build links by asking other sites to link to you or you can attract links by creating content others will want to link to. Don't expect quality sites to link to your site unless there's a good reason. Link building is a vital aspect of search engine success.

Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO ?

Search engine optimization SEO is the way to get your website to work best with different search engines such as Yahoo, Google and Bing for getting huge gains, ranking opportunities doing keyword research. It is a mission for increased visibility in search engines through quality links, social popularity, relevant copy and domain trust.

Search engine optimization is a useful technique that helps search engines find out and rank your website greater than the other websites in response to a search question. Hence, SEO helps you in getting traffic from different search engines. Search engine optimization is the best technique of getting huge traffic to your website.

There are many processed involved in SEO to help you in getting the traffic to your website and increase the Google page rank. Many people use this useful technique to make their website visual in many search engines. SEO technique introduces your website to a number of people and as a result you get huge traffic.

Why SEO is so important ?

If you have just started your online business then it is very necessary that you get it search engine optimized. The big reality is that the internet has become a very cut-throat market place. There are almost thousands of web sites that are trying to get the attention of different visitors. Most of the sites are yet found from search engines according to many specialists and the issue is only nearly ten sites come in the first page if you enter a relevant keyword.

If your site is in the second page and not in the first page for that particular keyword then it does not get the traffic that it requires for becoming successful. Hence you must opt for SEO which is an efficient service, which helps your site accomplish top ranking at different search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Hence SEO has huge importance in getting success in online business. It is only search engine optimization that makes your site visible in online business. It also explains why your site needs SEO. It is an ultimate need.

Other reasons behind why is SEO important are many. Almost 91% of internet users make use of search engines for navigating the web. Nearly 85% of search engine users neglect past the first forty results. 8 out of 10 searches are done by many people from the topmost search engines. 8 out of 10 searches are done from search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. Nearly 77% of people who use internet make use of search engines very often as compared to other online media as a leading tool to find out different web links, e-mail links and surpassing banner ads.

Great SEO tips for your site

If you want to successfully run your SEO campaign then you need to follow SEO tips. To get the traffic for your website and get the profits in your online website marketing business, you need to follow a few easy to follow search engine optimization tips that are given below.

1) You need to do a keywords research. It is one of the crucial steps in SEO campaign before you start. You need to completely research all of the keywords you wish to make use of. It makes a great difference in your stragety.

2) Do not commit the mistake of using the similar Meta tags for each page. Meta tags must be perfect for every page. Even, ensure to make use of the keywords and write an effective title.

3) The current trend favors ethical SEO; hence you need to create quality and unique content for different web pages so that users can easily navigate through them.

4) You should avoid having low quality links. Rather than obtaining links from link farms, you should research status of those sites before getting links from them. You can use Alexa ranks to know the status of the website. It is the best way to check the popularity of the site and even the page rank of the site.

5) Never overdo reciprocal links as reciprocal linking is valuable only if done in small number and if the links are related to your site. Even, ensure to have a diverse set of links including articles, blogs, forums and social bookmarking. Never use the links with the similar anchor text. There are many search engines that do not like links, which make use of the similar anchor text.

6) You need to make website updates on regular basis. If you do not update your website regularly then it is of no use. You need to update latest news, current information and fresh content to your site on regular basis. Updating your site regularly is one of the best ways of catching the eye of search engine robots.

7) You should look for your competitors. It is always best to know what other website owners doing on their site and what they are doing to get good quality links.

8) You should design your site SEO friendly. You do not need to follow a set SEO strategy while designing a website. You should avoid heavy flash, plenty of graphics, as search engine robots crawl text but do not crawl images. The keys of getting success in online business is to make good meta tags for web pages and insert fresh and helpful content. If you are not designing your site and hiring somebody else to do that work then you need to search for an expert SEO and website designer.

9) Make use of text links rather than images. Text links have great importance while making use of JavaScript as spiders do not follow JavaScript.

10) You need to keep localization in your mind. Many advantages are there of reaching out to the local audience. Apart from getting local customers, including region-based keyword phrases will surely help you as you need to face less competition for that particular keyword.

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Web Technologies

Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now

Every year, we see scores of innovations trickle onto the web — everything from new browser features to cool web apps to entire programming languages. Some of these concepts just make us smile, then we move on. Some completely blow our minds with their utility and ingenuity — and become must-haves.
For this list, we've compiled the most truly life-altering nuggets of brilliance to hit center stage in 2008: the ideas, products and enhancements to the web experience so huge that they make us wonder how we got along without them.
Nitpickers will notice that a couple of these technologies arrived two or three years ago. Others aren't even fully baked yet. But each innovation on our list reached a level of maturity, hit the point of critical mass, or stepped in to fill a burning need during 2008 that resulted in it significantly changing the landscape of the web.
Here's to the technologies currently making the web a better place than it was 12 months ago.

Identity Management

Few things carry more value than your digital identity, and yet most web users have only a tenuous grasp of it. That's because on the social web, identity is no longer just who you are. It's who you know, how you know them and how much you want them to know about you. On the web, your identity is explicitly tied to your relationships, both with your friends and with the websites you visit.

Three great technologies came to fruition this year to help you manage these complex interdependencies: OpenID, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.

These ID systems all offer a way to take control of your social capital, that cache of "friend data" you carry with you as you sign up for and use different web services. They also all offer a more tangible advantage — an easy way to log in to any website using one set of credentials. You get one virtual ID card that gives you access to hundreds of websites. As a bonus, you don't have to go through the painful process of filling out a profile and adding or approving friends on every new blog, community or social network you want to join.

The end of 2008 saw a flurry of activity around identity. Facebook Connect, which currently lets you log in to a few dozen high-profile websites using your Facebook ID, went live the first week of December. Google's Friend Connect and MySpace's MySpaceID, similar systems that aren't yet as widely adopted, launched soon after it.

There's a hitch, though. Facebook Connect, while elegant and easy to use, is built on proprietary code and isn't compatible with the offerings from Google and MySpace, which are built using OpenID and other open source standards.

We should expect this battle for your personal data play out over the next year, maybe longer. But 2008 will be remembered as the year that identity stepped into the spotlight.

HTML 5

One of the most important technologies on this list doesn't fully exist yet — HTML 5 — but in 2008, key features started to trickle out.

HTML 5 will eventually replace HTML 4.01, the dominant programming language currently used to build web pages. But the governing bodies in charge of the web are still drafting the details, and nobody expects HTML 5 to fully emerge as the new standard for at least a few more years.

But HTML 5 is no vaporware. Many of the changes to the way the web operates as outlined in early versions of the new specification are already being implemented in the latest browsers, and some of the web's more adventurous site builders are already incorporating HTML 5's magic into their pages.

HTML 5 will be great step forward, standardizing things like dragging and dropping elements on web pages, in-line editing of text and images on sites and new ways of drawing animations. There's also support for audio and video playback without plug-ins, a boon for usability and a worrisome sign for Adobe's Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight and Apple's QuickTime. The language will also give a boost to web apps, as there are new controls for storing web data offline on your local machine.

Want Gmail on your desktop? HTML 5 makes it possible. Alas, the blink tag isn't invited to the party.

Lifestreaming

A new breed of social app has arisen to help us manage the mess of information overload — the lifestream.

Not long ago, keeping track of your friends on the internet was pretty easy. Everyone belonged to Friendster or MySpace and that was it. Now, the web is littered with thousands of social sites, each with its own special purpose — Flickr for photos, Last.fm for music, Twitter for tweeting. Even the most rudimentary services are tied to the social web. Renting a movie, buying a book or writing a blog post? Let all your friends on Netflix, Amazon and Blogger know about it.

Keeping tabs on your friends now is all too easy and all too much, all at once.

Sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and Digsby serve as social-network-activity aggregators. They're like virtual funnels. Dump in all the notifications, feeds and updates from your various networks, and the services will bring it all into one master stream, relieving you of the responsibility of visiting a dozen or more sites to learn what your friends are up to, what they're listening to, who they're snogging and so on. Controls let you dial back the flow by sorting and filtering the flow, pruning it down to only what matters most.

Many such services have emerged, but FriendFeed, an elegant and simple site designed by a crew of ex-Googlers, is our favorite.

Oh, and don't expect to be able to add Facebook to your lifestream. The network lets all sorts of data in, but precious little out.

Firefox 3

Firefox has been around since 2004, but when version 3 of Mozilla's browser arrived in June 2008, it got everything right. Mozilla's browser is faster and more secure than ever before, and it's open source, so you get the feel-good factor, too.

One of the most highly anticipated software releases of the year, more than 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 on the first day. Third time's a charm, indeed.

The genius bit of engineering was bringing search front and center — just type what you're looking for in the location bar, and FF3 searches your history, bookmarks and the web to bring you the page you want, lightning fast.

Performance enhancements made it one of the web's fastest browsers — especially for surfing the recent swell of web apps — and improved security features made it one of the safest.

Mozilla continues to build upon the concept with its Ubiquity add-on for Firefox, which lets you search and interact with any number of web services by typing text commands into the browser.

It's still the second-most-popular browser after Microsoft Internet Explorer by a wide margin, but Firefox 3 is the feisty favorite of the web's elite.

Google Chrome

Its debut release in September was not expected, nor was it greeted with as much fanfare as the arrival of Firefox 3 a few months prior. But Google's browser was instantly recognized as a potential game-changer, both among browser-makers and within the world of web apps.

Chrome is a browser built to empower web applications.

Its killer feature is a new approach to page rendering that isolates web applications inside each of the browser's tabs — a crashing web app might cause a single tab to go south, but that won't affect anything outside that tab. The rest of the browser remains stable.

When you're doing mission-critical work in a web app and the browser crashes, it isn't an annoyance, it's a deal breaker. E-mails are lost, documents have to be rewritten, web forms need to be filled out again. Chrome's ability to sidestep a full crash strengthens Google's bid to replace desktop apps with its own web-based alternatives.

Chrome reached official 1.0 status in December. It's Windows-only for now, but we should expect official versions for Mac and Linux soon. It's also still very young. Future releases will have support for add-ons, offline syncing of web data through Google Desktop and — knowing Google — probably a few other bells and whistles nobody's thought of yet.

Location Awareness

In 2008, location-based information ceased being a fancy add-on and instead became a requirement of any serious, successful web service.

Hit a button on your laptop or phone to tell a web service where you are, and it tells you what restaurants are close by, where the new Bond movie is playing (and when, and if there are tickets left), and which of your friends are within shouting distance if you need a date.

The tipping point arguably came when a wave of GPS-equipped mobile web devices hit the market. The iPhone 3G, the T-Mobile G1 and the latest Nokia N-series devices all have GPS built in. They also all have real web browsers and the tools necessary for access to web APIs, opening the door to more-relevant search and localized mobile services.

On the iPhone, you can use Yelp's app to get a list of nearby venues, restaurants and hangouts with the touch of a button. Or, in the case of Google's local-search app, you can simply speak your request and get local results. An app like Say Where queries multiple search sites.

The benefits aren't limited to mobiles, either. Social networking sites and desktop search apps can take advantage of new technologies like Yahoo's FireEagle, where users can update and store their location data, or browser plug-ins like Google Gears or Firefox's Geode, which users can set up to report their location automatically.

Whether they're using a desktop browser or an iPhone, users now demand the high levels of relevance and convenience on the web that location awareness affords.

The World Wide Web Consortium, the web's governing body, has stepped up and formed a think tank to develop a set of standards for handling users' geodata that ensures privacy and interoperability. The W3C Geolocation Working Group hopes to have its first recommendation filed by the end of 2009.

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