Using Your Website Content is a Two-Step Process
Let's get right to the point: Website content is the heart and soul of your website's success. The content you write can be informational, commercial or a current event. Its purpose can be for entertainment, marketing, research, specific industries, online advertising or search engines. It can be objective or subjective. Whatever the case, effectively using your content is a two-step process. The first is to leverage the content in order to drive traffic. The second is to measure it for success.
Organic search is the best strategy available for driving traffic using your website content. It is no longer a secret that search engines like content and feed off it to determine rankings. And it's not just content that gets search engines excited about crawling a site. It's "fresh" content that keeps the robots coming back for more. With the advent of 'real-time content' in search listings, search engines, Google in particular, will seek out the best and most useful content on the Internet for any given keyword query. Updating your website content and blogging regularly will not only help fulfill the appetites of hungry search engines but also increase your chance of higher rankings and more traffic as a result.
Believe it or not, focusing on your site's navigation is a good way to keep the traffic on your site. Yet, somehow, this important element of design that serves as a gateway to the content on your site is often overlooked. Your visitors, impatient and ready to abandon a website at the first clue of getting lost, are quick reminders of how important navigation is. Following simple 'rules of thumb' like keeping the navigation simple, consistent and prominent will keep your traffic flowing from one page to the next.
The second part is to examine the fruits of your labor once you are confident that your traffic is moving seamlessly throughout your site and is reading unique, fresh and relevant content. In Google Analytics, we can measure the navigational analysis of any desired page by reviewing the navigation summary, entrance paths to the page, external sources who referred traffic to a page or the keywords that drove traffic to a page from a search engine. Let's take a look.
The 'Navigation Summary' view shows how visitors found your content and what page then went to next.
The 'Entrance Paths' view shows the path visitors used to get to your content, what pages they viewed next and the page they eventually ended on.
The 'Entrance Keywords' view shows the top keywords people used to find your page in the search engines.
The 'Entrance Sources' view shows how visitors reached your page.
If you have ever taken dance lessons then you know that particular dances have several steps, which, for the uncoordinated amongst us like myself, can be difficult to remember. This dance number has a mere two steps. Though, both equally important if one is succeed at understanding how well their website content is performing.
