What is Website Analytics?

Website analytics provides small business owners with useful information about your website and the visitors that land on your website. Website analytics works by placing code on your web pages to trap information such as how many visits to your site, where the visits came from, who referred your site, how many pages a visitor clicked on, how long a visitor spent on your site and much more useful information that provides small business owners with rich insight into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.

How would I use this Information?

There are many reasons and uses for collecting data with analytics. Armed with knowledge a small business owner can learn and adjust time management, marketing, target marketing and ROI (return on investment) from purchased advertisement. Let’s take a look at real world examples.

Good or Bad Investment?A small business owner makes a purchase for an advertisement from x company. The ad cost $500 for a marketing campaign of 30 days. After the 30 day run the small business owner logs into account at x company and it shows 250 new views, wow, seems effective on the surface but there aren’t any new sales or increase in phone calls, why? With an analytics report you can see how many referrals actually clicked through to your website from the advertisement to make a purchase of a product or service.  Armed with information the small business owner learns there were 0 referrals from the ad, now that explains why there were no new sales or phone calls and the business owner now knows it was a bad investment with no ROI.

Effective use of time!Let’s look at a second example using social media. A small business owner has a Facebook, Twitter and Merchant Circle account to drive traffic to the website to sell products and services. For a 30 day period the owner spends 40 hours on MC and 10 hours each on FB and Twitter. At the end of the 30 day period the owner logs into their accounts to look at the stats. MC shows 755 new views, FB shows you reached 3,700 people and Twitter shows nothing so again on the surface the small business owner thinks MC and FB are doing great. Now armed with analytics the business owner runs a report and finds out that only 1 person actually clicked through to the website from MC, 18 from FB and 42 from Twitter. With this information at hand a small business owner can see a reallocation of time is necessary between the social sites to maximize traffic to the website. In short, spend less time on MC and more time on the social sites producing traffic. Note: these are only examples and not meant to guide anyone from using one social site over another.

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Web Hosting - What is it & what do I need?

Sea N Sun provides many types of hosting plans including shared hosting, virtual dedicated servers, dedicated servers, dedicated hosting IP and SSL certificates that can be purchased at our online store.

What is all that and what do I need?Once you purchase or if you own a domain name (i.e. your_small_business_name.com) and plan to build a website you need someone to host it. Hosting provides individuals, small business or organizations with the systems you need to store files, information, images, video, or other content that is accessible to everyone using the Web.

Shared HostingShared hosting is basically your website sharing disk space on a server controlled by a company or individual with many other websites.
More information on Shared Hosting

Virtual Dedicated ServerVirtual dedicated servers are basically a single server that is divided into parts to create more than one server or “virtual server”. Your website lives alone on your part of the server and the virtual server is controlled by you or your small business.
More information on Virtual Dedicated Server

Dedicated ServerDedicated servers are basically a single server that your website lives on alone and is controlled by you or your small business.
More information on Dedicated Server

Dedicated Hosting IPDedicated hosting IP is basically an address assigned to your website. Most websites are on shared hosting where they all share the same address. If your small business needs to have a web store, intranet or process credit cards then you will need your own address (IP) as most require it.
More information on Dedicated Hosting IP

SSL CertificatesSSL certificates are used for secure data transactions. If your small business plans to setup an online store or process credit cards etc then you will need to purchase SSL certificates.

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What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a broad term consisting of many elements from how a search engine works to how a web page is designed. There is no brief way to explain SEO but hopefully hitting on a few key topics may help.

Google®, Yahoo®, Bing®Search engines (Google®, Yahoo®, Bing®, etc.) all work and are built different from each other and are proprietary. They all use programs called spiders, crawlers and robots that are essentially the same. These programs crawl around the Web collecting information and cataloging data from every website that is not blocked on the Web. All this information is stored in massive storage areas called databases. The data collected is then arranged and the search engine company applies their own method of ranking and retrieval to this collected data. A page ranking or scoring is determined by the search engine company.

Web Page RankingWeb page ranking or scoring is based on quality considerations of elements such as page structure, Meta tags (the code that makes a web page work), page content, link structure, usability, keywords and key phrases. These elements are only a few of the key elements used in optimizing a website.

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