Google announced on 20 October 2009 a new feature for Google Analytics. This is the Intelligence Engine. The Intelligence Engine seems to be aptly named, as it is a very intelligent feature indeed!

So, what does it do?

Intelligence Engine has default alerts to hand feed you useful information that previously you would have had to spend a long time gathering. So, this is a time saving feature that many SEOs and Search Marketers will be incredibly grateful for as we can spend more time fixing the potential problems rather than finding them.

Watch this Google Video for a tutorial

You can see that the ability to define your alert sensitivity is incredibly useful and interesting, as this will allow you to control the number of automatic alerts appearing in the intelligence reporting page – this gives you control to view as much or as little information as you need.

Further to this you can create advanced segments to discover high converting segments that you probably should track separately. The usefulness of having this one click away shouldn’t be underestimated.

You can also create custom alerts. This could be to track visitor segments that you are most interested in, for example if you operate in a few regional areas you would want to track visitors from these areas because they are your target. You can get this information delivered to you by email, so you don’t even have to keep checking your analytics every day.

This new feature hasn’t yet been rolled out across the board so I haven’t actually tested its effectiveness myself. However, I can see that once it does become available it will allow me to monitor my sites much more easily, fix problems before they become massive and generally give my customers a faster service. Can’t wait!

There are many, many lists of “101 free SEO tools that you must try” but who wants to try 101 of them? I know I don’t have time to test 101 tools, however useful they may be to others. So, I’m giving you a list of the free tools I use every day to test the performance of web sites. I use these 5 every single day. Of course I have other paid tools that I use as well.

1. Google Analytics
   Without this excellent tool I know I can’t measure successes (or failures). If you don’t install Google Analytics on your website you’ve got no way of knowing how well your site is doing. How can you tell if that new page you added is bringing in the visitors? Or if your new contact form is user-friendly enough for your visitors? Well you check your analytics of course!
2. Google Webmaster Tools
   Google have fairly recently updated their webmaster tools and now they are even better than before. Webmaster Tools give you so much information about your site, like how they crawled it, if error pages came up, if they encounter any deadlinks etc. You can also submit an xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, which is helpful in getting your site indexed, I recommend updating the xml sitemap every time you add a page to your site, then resubmitting it through Webmaster Tools. I would highly recommend this tool.
3. XML Sitemap Generator
   This leads me into the next free tool that we use every day here are Creare. The xml sitemap generator does exactly what it says on the tin. XML sitemaps are useful for the search engine spiders because it gives them the information they need to crawl the site effectively. We set the priority to “Automatic Priority” this gives the index page a higher priority than internal pages. Once you’ve generated your sitemap, upload it to your server and tell Google that it exists (see previous point above)
4. Google Adwords Keyword Tool
   We use this free tool to help us decide where to place keywords on a site. The search volume results tell us which keywords re more competitive and therefore need more effort in terms of both internal optimisation and external optimisation.
5. Yahoo! Site Explorer
   This tells us how many links our competitors have and the value of those links. This is extremely important for getting links because we can target sites where we know they give out links quickly and easily. Of course this isn’t the be all and end all of our link building campaigns, but it certainly helps us a great deal.

So, this is my top 5 free Search Engine Optimisation tools, every single one of these is incredibly useful and I can’t imagine doing my job without them.

What tools do you use to help with your search engine optimisation?

Have you tried all of these tools? If not, will you?

If you are involved in search engine optimisation, the chances are that you are aware of an application called google analytics, if you have no idea what it is however, read on.

Google Analytics is a free service that is offered by Google that gives detailed and comprehensive statistics on the visitors to a given website. It is able to track visitors from all the different types of referrers such as search engines and links from other sites. Users are able to track where in the world the people who visit the site are from, what phrase they used to find the site etc. Google Analytics is also able to give users a fast insight into pages of the site that are not performing, allowing them to rectify the situation at an earlier stage rather than letting the issue become worse.

Google analytics is inserted into a website by using javascript code that is supplied by Google. This relatively simple process involves the placing of the information just before the last body tag on each page that you wish information to be gathered from. By using a separate line of code, it is also possible to see how many times a PDF file has been downloaded from a site. This can be useful for checking on the relevancy of information that is being provided to the public from a site.

While Google Analytics can be said to be highly accurate most of the time, there are some issues that highlight gaps in its abilities. Some programs, such as Firefox’s NoScript addon can block the tracking code. This can lead to inaccurate results, where more people may have visited a site than is being displayed. Users deleting or blocking cookies on their systems can also have a deleterious effect.

For those companies with an account on Google, the webmaster tools are invaluable. From a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view, the ‘Analytics’ tool is one of the best and most helpful.

When a company has a website designed for them, the design company can set them up with Google reports- every month a report will be sent to the customer, detailing the traffic to their site, the number of visits, the keywords and the bounce rates, to name but a few.

Search engine optimisation will improve your rating in these reports.  Because SEO is about ranking as highly as possible in Google search results, a small pie chart on the ‘Analytics’ page gives you the percentage of traffic that comes from search engines; obviously you want this percentage to be as high as possible in order to show that the SEO process is working.

The ‘bounce rate’ details the percentage of people who have visited the site and clicked straight off without looking at it. The higher the search engine traffic, the more likely it is that your bounce rate will be lower. If people have landed on the site through their search choices, it is highly likely to be what they are looking for and they therefore are unlikely to leave the site straight away.

Essentially, the Google webmaster tools are there to help you view the progress of your site and its SEO.