Its intuitive user interface provides you easy access to all data, allowing you to quickly obtain the key information you need for your website. Google Analytics keeps track of how all visitors found your website including exact keyword searches from different search engines and which other websites linking to you referred visitors to you. Google Analytics allows you to track the effectiveness of your marketing programs, email marketing, pay per click networks, unpaid organic search, and much more.

Google Analytics is also integrated with Google AdWords. Google Adwords will display an ad for your business on Google search results pages and their advertising network on a pay per click basis; that is, you only pay Google an advertising fee if people click your ads directing them to your website.

Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords optimizes your online marketing campaigns by tracking your sites landing page quality and conversion goals. By using Google Analytics, you can determine which ads are performing well, and which are not, providing the information to minimize or select appropriate keywords for Adwords campaigns.

The following are 10 essential features of Google Analytics:

1. Google Analytics allows you to compare data about the performance of your site at two different time periods. It also allows you to chart the data immediately to get a better view of your site. It shows you the performance of your site based on area, city or country metrics.
2. Providing referring sites and search results metrics are the basic features of any analytics program, but with Google Analytics you can get statistics not only on the number of visitors a link partner is sending, but the quality of the traffic.
3. Once you have your business goals, for example sales & marketing, setup in Google Analytics you are able to determine and thus control vast amounts of data with regard to what’s working and what’s not in your marketing strategy.
4. Google Analytics allows complete Adwords integration. This means it provides data on each group, campaign, and keyword. Specifically, you can look at each of these areas and see the number of displays, clicks, your cost, conversion, etc.
5. It enables you to customize the rich features provided in your Google Analytics dashboard. You can move the most often used reports to the dashboard for fast access by just clicking the “Add to Dashboard” link.
6. The Google Analytics dashboard feature allows you to schedule and automatically send recurring email updates to yourself or other recipients within your business using multiple formats.
7. Google Analytics shows you the popularity and effectiveness of each link on every page of your site. These powerful and graphical reports display the effectiveness of your site design in a visual model.
8. Google Analytics‘s naviGAtion summary report shows where your users go from the homepage, or how most of them get to your contact page. If people aren’t following your desired naviGAtion, it means you probably need to correct some things on your page to compel users to click on the areas you desire.
9. Google Analytics tells you what search keywords people are using to find your site. If certain keywords are proving hot, you might want to consider catering Google Adwords keyword buys, content, and offers to them. It tells you how your customers find you.
10. The search engine traffic metric illustrates which search engines are sending the most traffic to your website and how well it’s converting into sales. This will help you optimize your marketing spend and SEO efforts.

In addition to the 10 reasons mentioned above, Google Analytics also has a “Report Finder” to help you search for your archived reports, helps you view your website’s bounce rate over time, shows connection speed data which helps you determine how to prioritize and optimize your site’s design and load time, and much more. To start using Google Analytics navigate to http://www.google.com/analytics/ . You can either register using your existing Google account, for example if you already have a Gmail account, or sign up for a new one. Google Analytics is a feature rich, free application that every website owner should consider integrating into their site.

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
SEO Web Development & Custom Web Site Design Company

http://www.itegritygroup.com

Steve Kozyk is the CEO/ Founder of ITegrity, an SEO Web Development & Custom Web Site Design Company based in San Diego California. ITegrity focuses on many types of web development & design including health care web site development, corporate web development, small business web development, church web design, and Realtor web site design.

There are numerous tools available on the Internet to help online surfers with web searching. One of the most valuable and useful tools is the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa was founded in April 1996 and was designed to provide an interactive web navigation system. Did you know that Alexa is owned by Amazon.com? It is also possible to make your own personalized Alexa toolbar with your Amazon.com affiliate code.

The valuable information about a webpage, and of course a complete website, provided by Alexa is truly amazing. So, how do you add an Alexa toolbar to your browser? It’s very simple. First, go to Alexa.com, then click Download Alexa Toolbar at the top right hand corner of the page. Next click on the install option provided on the following page. After you’ve finished installing, the toolbar will appear across the top of your browser.

There are two main features offered by Alexa toolbar:

Traffic Ranking: One of the most helpful features provided by the Alexa toolbar is traffic ranking of any website. Alexa toolbar tracks how people use the Internet and turns this information into ranking statistics for each site on the Internet. By now, most web marketers know that the Alexa.com ranking of their site is important. It gives an independent measure of your monthly unique visitors. Ranking 1 has the most traffic and so on. For example on the basis of most visited site in the world, Yahoo is currently ranked one by Alexa. This information helps you determine how well your advertising campaigns are going, how your rivals are doing and how to keep your website one step ahead of them. The Alexa information is also used by other search engines so you benefit from an increase in you search engine results page (SERPS) rankings as your site progresses up the rankings.

Related Links: Another vital feature of Alexa toolbar is it provides links to additional websites that are similar to the one that is being viewed. When you start searching the term on your favorite search engine, it gives a list of urls’ closely matching your search term in the search engine result page. This feature allows you to view a list of similar website without much of an effort – great for competition analysis. Also, you will be able to see a new set of related links on the toolbar that may be same or different from the earlier ones, which allows you to save time you would have otherwise spent for searching.

There are additional features that come with Alexa toolbar like a popup blocker, search engine entry box, a link to Amazon & Alexa website, and additional information about the current Alexa ranking of the website that you are visiting.

In conclusion, the Alexa toolbar is a valuable tool for determining a website’s placement or position in the Internet world. It is interesting to note that Google also uses Alexa’s information for ranking and indexing websites. Whether you just want to use the Alexa Toolbar’s features for general web browsing or for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) analysis, I recommend going to http://www.alexa.com and installing the Alexa Toolbar in your favorite web browser.

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
skozyk[at]itegritygroup.com
www.itegritygroup.com

Alexa Toolbar- How to Add it to Your Browser and Why You Want to Do It

It’s a worldwide accepted fact that Google is the most popular search engine amongst thousands of Internet search engines. But if you have to pull up Google’s home page every time you run a search, you’re wasting time. Google Toolbar was designed as a tool to make the Internet surfing easier and help people find the information they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.

Google toolbar offers major benefits and other miscellaneous useful features, which are listed below:

Google Search Window: Take Google’s search window with you anywhere you go on the Internet. This built-in search window makes it incredibly easy to make a quick and efficient search regarding anything you happen to be reading. It helps people find the information they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.

Pop-Up Blocker: Pop-up ads – the little advertisement windows that sprout like weeds in your garden that “pop up” in your browser window and are a real impediment to productivity. It’s best to use a pop-up blocker, which prevents these annoyances from opening as you surf the web. The Google toolbar has a built-in pop-up blocker that provides relief from this perpetual pest.

Auto Fill: The Google toolbar’s auto fill function can save you scads of time filling out order forms and other pages on the Web. The feature lets you store your name, address, and other information in one place securely on your computer. This allows you to automatically have any form filled in based with your saved personal information and drastically speed up the process of filling out forms and applications online.

Additional Features: Google is continuously making updates and upgrades to the functions represented on the Google toolbar. Now they have options for spell check, a word translator and an autolink feature that instantly provides a map of a given location, bookmarks, a VIN number that gives a vehicle’s history, ISBN numbers to book history, etc.

Google Toolbar for Internet web browsers is a feature provided by Google Inc. and it can be installed in almost any browser including Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox. It provides you a Google search bar directly in your browser window. To install Google toolbar in your browser, first you must make sure you have an eligible operating system like Windows. It can be installed by navigating to: http://toolbar.google.com and following Googles installation instructions.

After you’ve installed Google Toolbar, you will notice it has a shortcut to the Google Bookmark page and Page Rank indicator. The Page Rank indicator denotes a web pages importance according to Google. Website pages are ranked on a scale of 0-10. Zero being the least important and ten the most important. Google Toolbar also has a feature that allows you to login quickly to your blog or Gmail account.

Google is also offering a new version of the Toolbar for enterprise environments. With this new version, a business can distribute customized toolbars to their users pre-loaded with custom buttons for Intranet sites, employee directories, and frequently used information sources.

These are just a few of the useful features provided by Google toolbar. It should be clear that Google Toolbar is a must for anyone who uses an Internet browser on a regular basis for faster and more efficient Internet surfing experience.

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
skozyk[at]itegritygroup.com
www.itegritygroup.com
Google Toolbar- How to Add it to Your Browser and Why You Want to Do It

Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry was born in Lansing, Michigan and Sergey in Moscow, Soviet Union both in 1973. Larry and Sergey first met at Stanford University, one of the world’s leading research and teaching institutions located in Palo Alto, California. A recent University of Michigan graduate, Larry 24 years old at the time, was considering attending Stanford for graduate school. While attending a Stanford student orientation, Larry was hosted by Sergey, a volunteer, to tour the campus.

When did Google become a company? What year was Google created?

The initial concept for what was to become Google was conceived as a research project by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford, in January of 1996. Soon after forming their new friendship while at the Stanford computer science school, Sergey joined Larry to begin working together on the research project, a search engine nicknamed “BackRub”.

The google.com domain name was registered in September of 1997. Google Inc. was formally incorporated by Page and Brin almost exactly one year later in 1998. Their first office was located in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California.

What is Google named after? Where did the name Google come from?

Nearly a year after beginning their collaboration on the “Back Rub” search engine, Larry and Sergey decided it needed a new name. Having strong mathematical and science backgrounds, they eventually brainstormed on terms from these fields and came up with the word “googol”. A mathematical term, a googol is 10 to the 100^th power, or the numeral 1 followed by one hundred zeros. The name Google is simply a play on words of the term “googol”. Larry and Sergey chose this word to illustrate their goal to create a search engine capable of organizing a seemingly never-ending amount of information on the internet.

What do the letters in Google stand for? Why is it called Google?

The letters don’t actually stand for anything specific. Google is just a misspelling of the word ‘googol”.

Who owns Google, Inc?

Google is publically traded company on the NASDAQ, Google Inc. (GOOG:NASDAQ). As of January 2009, most of Google, Inc’s owners are institutions such as brokerages, mutual funds, and other financial services companies. Even though Larry Page and Sergey Brin are individually both billionaires appearing on the list of top 20 wealthiest Americans, they aren’t majority owners of Google, Inc.

Contact Google via telephone

Contacting Google by phone is not recommended and they’ve purposely made it difficult to locate Google’s customer services numbers. The best method to contact Google is via email as they usually will get back to you quite quickly. If you do however have a question that needs immediate attention, you can try contacting them at Google’s main phone number. Google’s phone number, fax number and corporate address is :

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone: (650) 253-0000
Fax: (650)253-0001