A common scenario for Google Analytics users is for a client to request access to the  Analytics for their web site. Sounds like a fair request but what happens if you have multiple Google Analytics accounts? Well, the smart folks at Google have thought about this and have set up a reporting mechanism where by you can permit access for others to look at the analytics of a single site while protecting the data of others. To do this follow this process:

Step 1) You client must have an email that is associated with a Google Account, if not, set it up!!

Step 2) Open up the Google Analytics dashboard and select  your clients web site, when the window opens up, select ‘User manager’

Step 3) When the user manager window opens up select ‘add user’ per below:

Step 4) Enter you client’s email address (which must be associated with a Google Account) and select ‘View reports only”

…and select ’save changes. The process is now complete.

Your client will now be able to login to Google Analytics and access analytics for their own site without being able to access the analytics of you other sites.

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There is absolutely no question that in the rush to get a piece of the social media marketing market a lot of weak products are hitting the market, resulting in a saturation of social media products. There are now 300 plus product platforms that class themselves as Social Media.

I focus on what I consider to be the most important social media networking platforms and I define that in terms of the return on my invested time with respect to my business goals; and my shortlist is:

• LinkedIn personal profile: a professional network from which I have developed business wins. I only network with people I know in some prior business capacity to maintain the value of the contacts.
• LinkedIn company page: the value of this page is that it has great search engine strength and is a tactic to drive off-page SEO.  I connect this blog to this page via Feedburner to ensure that the content gets updated automatically.
• Facebook personal page: while I limit this to only ‘friends, I promote my business activities occasionally. Facebook is my personal playground
• Facebook company page: this is where I use the power of Facebook to promote my business. This page is connected to Twitter, every time I post to this page it sends out a tweet.
• Twitter:  I use twitter both to take part in personal  micro-blogging and to promote business activities via keyword rich tweets. By doing this, I can make my tweets appear on relevant Google searches. This can be powerful if used strategically.
• Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are used to drive the popularity of my articles , which in turn increases my off-page SEO performance.
• Tecnorati is a real-time search for user-generated media by tag or keyword. It is quite a process to get approved by Tecnorati but the effort is worth it for off-page SEO performance.
• Slideshare is used to both to share PowerPoint Presentation but it is also a great tool for the occasional time that you nave technical issues and allows you to pull us a PowerPoint on any computer with  an Internet connection.
• Flickr is a platform that I recommend to my clients to undergo image-marketing program as a tactic to build brand awareness. I do not use Flickr because of the strength of my photography web site but it makes sense for my clients.

While there are hundreds more these are my platforms of choice. At the end of the day it is about return on invested time. D I believe that the status quo will prevail? Absolutely, not I suspect that the mix will change as newer, better products arrive.

To update these, I use the social media icons at the bottom of the blog entry each and every time I make a new entry. Yes, they are not just for your use.! If this is too cumbersome for you or you use many social media networking platforms then I suggest you use PING.FM – this tool, once set up,  permits you to make a social media update and them broad cast it to all of your platforms with the click of a mouse.  While convenient, I am not a great fan as I like to see my posts tailored for each media platform but it is nice to have a choice.

Probably,  IMHO, the most exciting new Social Media product on the market is DandyID. This web-tool simply makes managing and accessing multiple social media accounts easy, real easy. As soon as you login for the first time DandyID will search  the web and find most of your social media accounts and those that it doesn’t find you can add. Once done, you will have all of your social media accounts in one place and to make it completely usably DandyID provide dashboards to access you accounts for blogs (see the right side bar – Connect with George). One really cool feature is widgets are made available in a JavaScript file, which I have incorporated into my email signature thereby inviting people to ‘connect with me’.

Once DandyID have gathered all of your social media accounts they provide you with a ‘How Social are you score’.  I score 87/100, which is pretty high, and it appears that I am much more social than I thought that I was.

DandyID, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, SEO, Social Media Networking, StumbleUpon, Tecnorati, Twitter Hide

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When WEB Design RI performs SEO web site check the most common web site ommision especially a site that was designed several years ago (Sitemaps in this format were fiorst used by Google in 2005),  is the  sitemap.xml file. The sitemap specifications are detailed at http://www.sitemaps.org

If you want your web site to be indexed  by the major search engines and you would like the search engines to be  to be notified of changes to your site then you must include a site map XML file in your web site. These files permit the search engines to  crawl web sites in an intelligent fashion.

Sitemaps are what is known as a URL inclusion protocol where we notify the search engines of all of the URLs that we would like to be included when they crawl our sites and this compliments the Robots.txt files which is a URL exclusion protocol. See my Robots.txt blog entry.

Sitemaps are extremely useful on web sites which are not browser friendly and that use rich Flash or AJAX content.

Sitemaps are used by the largest search engines:  Google, MSN, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

The process is relatively simple:

1)    Create  an XML site map file  – http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ is a free sitemap generator tool  – there are many free products like this

2)    Save your sitemap.xml file to your web site root directory

3)    Upload your sitemap.xml file to your web server.

4)    Create a webmaster account with Google Webmaster, Bing Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and upload the sitemap file.

5)    This step is important and is often ignored: When you make changes, especially the addition of pages, to your website – create an updated sitemap.xml file  and upload the new file  to your web server and the next time your site is crawled the spiders will look for the new pages.

Sitemaps do have limits 50,000 URLs and 10 megabytes , so keep your web site to under 50,000 pages!

Bing webmaster central, google webmaster, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, Yahoo site explorer Hide

One of the more important actions that we can undertake as Webmasters (and Webmistresses) is to manage our sites via the tools offered to us by the major search engines, using the following links

• Google Webmaster tool
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Bing Webmaster central

At each of these sites we can upload our sitemap.xml files  and can perform a myriad of other webmaster management functions. If you are not yet using these tools – click on these links and set up accounts for your sites.

Bing webmaster central, google webmaster, Yahoo site explorer Hide

What is a canonical redirect? For my web site the Canonical URL is http://webdesign-ri.com and this is the primary address for my domain and the address http://www.webdesign-ri.com is considered a different address unless we instruct the server to ‘join-the-dots’ and this process is called a canonical redirect. We use what is called a permanent 301 redirect a method of pointing www.webdesign-ri.com to webdesign-ri.com ( and all pages on the site) such that it is transparent to the user. To see it in action type in www.webdesign-ri.com and you will see webdesign-ri.com appear in the address bar.

To execute a canonical redirect on an Apache server, we must add  a little  code to the .htaccess file. The code below is the actual code from my .htaccess file, to adapt this for your web site simply swap out my domain for yours.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^webdesign-ri\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://webdesign-ri.com/$1 [R=301,L]

.htaccess, canonical redirect Hide

When you make a changes to your web site, the live version often gets out of synch. with the cached version of your site which resides on Google. When the Googlebots crawl a site they store a record, a snapshot in time, into a cache file.In the example above, from an organic Google search, there is a link to the cached copy, now if the link no longer exists the person browsing will be faced with a 404 error ( and not everyone creates a custom 404 page ) and this will also show up as a dead link which may impact your SEO performance.

There is a solution at hand – Google’s URL removal tool, which is part of the Webmaster Tools suite. Simply enter the name of the dead URL and Google will remove it..the process does take a few days but it is a great way of keeping your cached version of your site clean to both give your browsers a more pleasurable viewing experience and assists to optimize your site.

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