ZAGG  offers a variety of iPad / iPhone / iPod accessories, cases and skins. About the contest,  ”On Black Friday, November 25, 2011, starting at midnight (MST), we’ll be giving away an iPad 2 every hour. 24 iPad 2s over 24 hours. Each hour is a new opportunity to enter the giveaway. So yes, you need to go to the giveaway page each hour and enter.

Entering the giveaway will be simple. To enter, just submit your email address. For additional entries, you can share on Facebook and Twitter. A Facebook share is worth two additional entries and a Twitter share is worth one additional entry.”

For more information visit ZAGG – iPad an Hour Giveaway and on Black Friday visit this link to try and win.

We all hear about the massive amount of unemployment in the United States and other countries everyday. I have had many people tell me they have searched job sites on the net and had no luck. Tonight I used the hashtag #jobs and have watched the stream for about 30 minutes. The diversity of jobs and locations is amazing. From Saudi Arabia to South Korea to the USA I saw an extraordinary amount of jobs passing so fast I could barely keep up.

If you are looking for a job or know someone that is you may want to search Twitter with #Job. I tried #work and the results were not great, but it may be worth a shot. I know #career is also another term that gives some decent results.

New To Twitter?

If you haven’t used Twitter before just go to Twitter.com and sign up for an account. With an account you can follow some fantastic people and businesses that do nothing but Tweet jobs all day. Once you are a member use the search box at the top and type in “#Job” and also try “Career”.

Examples of Jobs Tweeted

There are some major changes that have occurred in the last few weeks for me and as a result will change things for SEO Aware. I was offered a job as the Managing editor of SearchEngineJournal.com and I decided to take it.

I have read SEJ forever and have respected what they offer since day one. SEJ offers fantastic information for those who work in this industry and for those that are attempting to manage SEO or Social Media for the companies they work for.

SEO Aware Clients

We will be keeping our current monthly clients and new clients will be chosen carefully. I have begun other profitable ventures as well, so my time is very limited.

I am very excited about this new opportunity and my goal is to make the owners of SEJ proud. Now go read SearchEngineJournal.com!

Melissa – Dork Extraordinaire.

So we totally revamped the SEO Aware site. We wanted an easier navigation, cleaner look and more exciting blog. We like the new look and hope you do as well. Have a great day! If you see anything that isn’t working quite right please let us know.

Melissa Fach

We are honored and thrilled to be Wikio’s #9. Their top 20 are:

1. Search Engine Land
2. SEOmoz Blog
3. Matt Cutts
4. SEO Book
5. Graywolf’s SEO Blog
6. SEO by the Sea
7. Local SEO Guide Blog
8. Raven Tools Blog
9. SEO Aware
10. SEO Smarty
11. SEO Scoop which is now SearchEnginePeople.com
12. SEO Igloo Blog
13. SEO Theory Blog
14. Daily SEO Tip
15. SEO Chat
16. Search Marketing Wisdom
17. All things SEM/SEO Blog
18. SEO Copywriting Blog
19. Clickfire SEO Blog
20. PageTraffic SEO Blog

I am not going to make this an in depth post about Google analytics because there are tons of them out there. This is a post for those that haven’t looked at analytics, have never heard of it or denied someone that highly recommended analytics. (I also don ‘t need comments on what I didn’t think of; trust me we have. I am just not going to write it all out or give it all away)

Your analytics (not just google analytics) are essential because you can get SOOO much valuable information out of them. Below are a FEW of the easier options you can look at in Google Analytics. There is so much more and I am not going to go into each. I am hoping this simple post will show you that the information you could receive is valuable.

I am going to show you some examples from a non-profit we do free work for, BigCatHabitat.org. You can click on these pictures to see them more clearly.

Content Performance

I took the top ten performance pages. With this data I can see that an event at Big Cat this month, the Extravaganza, is getting some great traffic. This is a page we wanted people to visit because they can buy tickets there. We can see that the home page has over 9,000 page views, that tigers seem to be more popular that lions and that the gallery has the highest bounce rate.

This kind of information is important to have! Perhaps there should be more blogging about tigers? Or perhaps we are not doing enough to promote the lions? The gallery isn’t the most user-friendly…perhaps we need to work on that…OR maybe the pictures of the animals on each page are more appealing? This data gives a lot to consider and focus on marketing wise. Just imagine the info you could get from your service or products pages.

One of our car dealer clients was able to track and see that 58 percent of their sales in a month were directly from the used inventory pages on their site. They kind of loved us after that

Visits by Location

With this picture we can break down the numbers by country.

You can see that the bounce rate is low in these top ten countries with the exception of India and the Philippines (which is to be expected). So, this says that our site must have some good information or photos because people are staying. I think the people like to look at beautiful animals and there are plenty to look at on this site. If this is the case then the massive amount of hours spent taking photos, editing photos and adding photos to the site was well worth it, right?

Now we can look at the numbers by state in the USA.

We are in Florida and most of our traffic is from Florida, which is great. It isn’t a bad thing that we have hits from different states because many people are looking for activities when they travel. Many people are looking for organizations to donate to and there are several that are looking for a good home for their excotic animal.

We can break down these states into cities and keywords. With the keywords we can see what they were looking for and determine whether they found it or not. Extremely valuable information for every site.

Referring Sites

Here we have the top ten referring sites. With this data you can see if marketing strategies you are using on other sites to drive traffic to your site is working. You need to look at page views, time on site and bounce rate. If you look at #3 above – StumbleUpon you will see that the bounce rate is very high at 85%. I find that most Stumble traffic is, so I don’t use it as a way to gain traffic because it isn’t quality traffic from what I can see. Your referring sites give you valuable data and can help you see what works, what doesn’t or what you need to work harder on.

Visits from Mobile Devices

It is critically important that your website looks good and functions well on mobile devices. Take a peak at these numbers…

There are 617 visits and only two devices looked at only one page. Perhaps they were looking for a phone number or maybe the site was hard to view on their phone. These are things to consider. However, we see that iPad users are spending a good amount of time on the site- GREAT! iPhone and Droid users are doing pretty well also. We can see by the numbers that we want to make sure that all is working well for iPhone users. There is much to consider.

What I Want You To Understand

Analytics  are really important. If you are not using any analytics you can’t possibly determine if your website is working for you or if your online marketing strategies are driving quality traffic to your site.  You can’t see where you are failing or where you are succeeding. You can’t see what you must work on…you need analytics.

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Going to plug SEO Aware here. We do monthly analytics interpretation reports for clients and work with them each month to develop strategies to meet their goals. If you need some help contact us.

A pic of my favorite tiger at Big Cat Habitat…Tony

See more of Tony

Kristi Davis! She created a YouTube video that showed that she loves and pays very close attention to Lisa Barone. You can find Kristi on Twitter – @KristiBug and her website is www.KristiBug.com.

Congratulations Kristi!

I have talked a lot this month about Social Media:

• Don’t Believe Everything You Hear / See In Social Media
• Your Social Media Campaign is Doomed to Fail
• What Industry Experts Look for On Twitter

Social Media Done Right is Not Easy

I have to say it again, it bothers me immensely to see so many businesses offering Social Media services and they really don’t know how to create a strategy, how to be effective and how to measure results and failures (both are important). I am going to go over the basics of creating a social media plan.

Components

Goals

Whenever you plan anything you must have a goal or goals in mind. The same goes for Social Media. What are your goals? Have you clearly defined these goals? What do you want to achieve? What do you need to receive to make your investment in social media worthwhile? Goals can be about engagement, advertising, leads, conversion, links…really consider why you are getting into social media and review your goals before you start. (always ask yourself, are my goals achievable?)

Target Your Audience(s)

What are your target markets? Who is going to be needing what you have to offer? Where are these audiences? Can you engage them? Create customer profiles and really research and plan strategies that will help you meet your goals. A quick list of what to consider when targeting an audience:

• Age
• Interests
• Gender
• Locations
• Personalities
• Customer Needs

Offer Something  - of Quality!

• Educate your audience – from the beginners to the advanced.
• Solve problems.
• Entertain, but don’t offend!
• Offer discounts or coupon codes.
• Listen and Answer.
• Be real and kind.
• What are your competitors now doing/offering – d0 it, offer it and be better!

Not everything you offer should come from your own site. Show that you know there is quality info out there and provide it. You are not losing business to others; you are proving that you are educated on the subjects you discuss.

Engage

Be engaged with your followers and those that are checking you out to determine if they want to follow you. Always be engaged with those that have questions about your business. You create relationships by engaging and the positive relationships are the key to your Social Media success! You can also use these relationships and interactions to ask questions and research.

Advertise Who You Are, But Subtly

If all you do is talk about yourself, your business and how great you are you will have no followers. People are looking for quality information and relationships…subtly keep your business or self in them mix. Promoting blog posts and specials are an easy and effective way to do that.

Measurement

Things to Think About When Planning

• How much time do you have to be involved in Social Media?
• Which platforms will you use?
• Which monitoring options will you use?
• Are your goals realistic?
• How will you measure success? Each goal should have some form of measurement that tells you whether or not your have succeeded or not. Which social media tools will you use?
• What is your strategy for branding?
• Are your goals achievable?

Melissa Fach – SEO Aware

2011 Must Haves

1. 2011 Must Have #1 – An Attractive Website w/CMS
2. 2011 Must Have #2 – An Optimized Website
3. 2011 Must Have #3 and #4 – Off Site Optimization & Local Search

So I was going some research and googled “female doctors” and Google instant automatically displayed the following…

You can see the search results here –> Female. So, Google says they display great results, but they need to take the time to actually check the basics. Imagine if a child was doing a report on “female lions” and the Google instant automatically displayed the info in the above photo. How does a parent explain that?

On a personal note, I am kind of offended that as a “female” the sum of me, according to Google, is a definition, an orgasm”, a chest massage, female condoms and pleasure.

Any thoughts?