Aug 042013
 

If you’re looking to convert many keywords to modified broad, there is an easy way to do it in Excel.  Simply create a new spreadsheet, paste the following line into cell B5, and drag the lower-right corner of that cell down as needed.  The equation is:

=IF(LEN(A5)>0,CONCATENATE(“+”,SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A5),”+”,””),”]”,””),”[“,””),””””,””),” “, ” +”)),””)

Now, just enter the keywords you’d like to convert into cells A5 and below, and you will be good to go!

This equation removes quotation marks and square brackets, inserts a plus sign before the first word, and before every word with a space within your keyword.

You can also download a spreadsheet with the equation already loaded.  It’s good for several hundred keywords at a time.

Jul 312013
 

There may be times when links to your website can actually hurt your Google ranking.  The ideal way to resolve this problem is to contact the owner or webmaster of the offending site and request that your link be removed, or at least be updated to include the nofollow link attribute.

Obviously, this will not always be possible, so Google has an advanced feature called “Disavow Links” which allows you to, well, disavow any (exceedingly negative) links that you may wish.  You should use this tool with caution, as a misuse could relatively easily impact your web rankings in a negative way.  Used properly, however, it can restore or prevent negative impacts from unwanted sources.

Jul 252013
 

If you’ve looked at the “Audience” overview report in Google Analytics lately, you have probably noticed that the primary dimension is no longer “Mobile”, and the rows are no longer simply “Yes” and “No”.  Indeed, up near the top of the page, you can see a note from Google:

Analytics-Mobile-Update

Note from Google: “We’ve changed this report. We’ve add Device Category as the primary dimension in this report, so you can see data about the different types of devices visitors uses: Mobile, Tablet, or Desktop. The previous version of this report only displayed a Yes/No option to indicate if a mobile device was detected.”

Google’s primary idea here is to push the use of Advanced Segments to analyze traffic from various devices.  While that option is useful, sometimes it is clearer to simply see an uncluttered comparison of your mobile and non-mobile visitor behaviors – as in the previous version of this report page.

In order to emulate the old report – and, perhaps, even build upon it – we can create a basic Custom Report within Analytics.  To get started, click the “Customize” button near the top of the report page:

analytics-customize

Now, give the custom report a name, like “Mobile/Non-Mobile Comparison”.  To get the essence of this report, we will remove the “Ecommerce” metric group, and set the “Site Usage” metric group to only include “Visits” and “Pages / Visit”.  The key to our report is in the “Dimension Drilldowns”.  Here, change the option to “Mobile (including Tablet)”

analytics-custom-mobile-setup

After clicking “Save”, you can now view the report, and plot those two rows, just as before:

analytics-custom-mobile-view

 

As far as this being even more powerful than the default mobile device report from before: note that we can set all sorts of different metrics in the custom report configuration.  This enables us to control the mobile and non-mobile data that we are comparing, and allows us to easily view the information relevant to us on a single page.