Google Analytics Setup

Before I start to market mrjohan.com I will set up Google Analytics. I want to see:

• how many visitors I have on my site
• how they find my site, direct traffic, referal sites, search engines...
• witch pages they visit on my site
• from what countries/city they are from
• how different marketing campaignes attract visitors
• and a lot more.

Here is a short video how to set up Google Analytics for your site,

By following this video you can set up Google Analytics for any site pasting in the tracking code before the closing </BODY> tag.

I used Google Sites to make Mr Johans' webpage and the steps are sligthly different in step 3, "Put the tracking code on your website". If you use Google Sites you link your site to Google Analytics this way:

1. Log in to your Google Sites Account and choose Manage Site from the More actions drop down meny.

2. Choose General from Site settings.

3. Check the checkbox Enable Google Analytics for this site. Paste in your Analytics Web Property ID in the textbox below and click Save changes.

You find your Analytics Web Property ID on the first page after logging in to your Google Analytics account. It should be something like this: UA- XXXX-1

You can test if your tracking works in the same way as shown in the video. The tracking should start to work in 24 hours.

In the meantime you can go to Google Conversion University and have a look at the video tutorials. Lot of information here but you can always come back to review. This is a site worth bookmarking!

Another great site is Google Analytics Channel on YouTube. Bookmark this page too. 

Now we have a site where we can start to track visitors. We are ready to start testing search engine optimization and different ways to market our site. And most important, we can see how our marketings efforts attract visitors and follow their behaviour with Analytics.

Google Sites and Domain.com

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Mr Johan Holiday Service, Hua Hin Thailand: http://www.mrjohan.com/

In this blog we will use "Mr Johan Holiday Service" as a test page. Mr Johan is a small company in Hua Hin Thailand and the main business is holiday rentals, houses and 2 rooms at our homestay. We also have a small scale laundry service for our guests.

We are familiar with HTML, php, mysql... but we chose to use Google sites to make our homepage. Our goal is to market our site and we don't want to waste time to build our simple site from scratch.

After finishing the first version of Mr Johan's homepage we wanted a short web address for our homepage. Our URL on Google sites, http://sites.google.com/site/huahinjohan/ is too long and to hard to remember. We decided to register mrjohan.com with domain.com. A short and easy to remember web address to put on business cards and printed adverticements.

So far everything was easy and fun but next challenge was to point our new web address to our site on Google sites. But we figured out how to do after a lot of testing and reading on different forums. Here is a short how to guide to connect a site on Google sites and a domain hosted by domain.com.

1.  Google site, for example http://sites.google.com/site/huahinjohan/ choose/klick

• Sign In
• Click More actions button
• Click Manage site
• Click Web address
• Write a web adress, www.example.com and click Add

2.  Domain.com

• Sign in to your account after you have bought your domain name
• Click on your domain name, in our case mrjohan.com

• Under Other Services... Add Service
• URL Forwarding
• DNS Management

• When URL Forvarding and DNS Management services are added click
• Manage for DNS Management
• Write www in the Sub domain box in front of the CNAME box
• Write ghs.google.com in the CNAME box 
• Click the Update button
• After a few hours your Google site should open when you write your domain name in your browsers URL address field, in our case www.mrjohan.com.

We also want to be able to navigate to a naked domain. In our case mrjohan.com without www is our naked domain. To do this go back to domain detail page and click:

• Manage for URL Forwarding
• In the destination box, write your domain name, has to be with http://www,
  in our case, http://www.mrjohan.com/
• Use URL Forwarding Unmasked
• Click the Update button
• After a few hours your Google site should open when you write your naked domain name in your browsers URL address field, in our case mrjohan.com.

Go back to domain detail page and make sure your name servers on domain.com are set to the following (see picture below). This in order for DNS management and URL Forwarding to work.

This tutorial was made for a site on Google sites and a domain hosted on domain.com but the procedure is similar on for other webpage and domain hosts.

Yes, now we have a site and an easy to remember domain name, we are ready to play, to market our site on Internet.

Happy New Year 2011 and see you then!!! Mr Johan and papa Göran

Introduction

A comprehensive short video as a start for this blog.

Merry Christmas

Mr Johan SEO blog

Mr Johan

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody! This is a new blog from Mr Johan and we will write about SEO, Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing. The blog will start in january 2011.