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At first glance, it might seem like Google Analytics offers everything you could possibly want or need, for analyzing your website visitors. Plus, it’s completely free to use, so why even look for an alternative?

Unfortunately, a closer look under the hood reveals that there are a few things GA does not do well at all. Depending on your business model and your needs, a different analytics solution might serve you far better and be a lot more useful to your business.

Read on to discover the drawbacks of using Google’s own system and learn about the best Google Analytics alternatives.

One of the New Rules of SEO is that Google now has a user engagement feedback loop that helps them understand if the user is getting what they expect to see for any given query.

While we can’t be certain exactly what these signals are, it is widely suspected that bounce rate is an important ranking factor. In this post I’ll define exactly what bounce rates are and describe when a bounce isn’t actually a bounce.

Plus, you’ll discover why the bounce rate data shown in Google Analytics is mostly useless and see what you can do to fix this problem.

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Search engine optimization has always been a moving target. Algorithms change, people’s expectations of websites and web content change and SEOs need to adjust accordingly to keep up.

The Google Panda update of March 2011 and many of the subsequent updates have shook up the SEO world to a greater degree than any updates before that (at least since I’ve been involved in SEO). As a consequence, there’s quite a bit of conflicting and misleading or simply out-dated information about SEO floating around right now.

In this article, we’ll take a close look at exactly what the new SEO landscape looks like and what you can do to rise to the top, once more.

Google does not want good content.

I know you’ve been told otherwise. I know that “Google wants good content” is a phrase repeated over and over, often by people who should know better. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true and believing it could be dangerous.

In this post, let’s examine what Google really wants and what that means for you.

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For small businesses and bootstrap marketers, it’s easy to feel persecuted by Google. From banning AdWords and AdSense accounts to Panda updates and from blocking keyword referral data (unless you’re a paying AdWords customer) to an increasing big-brand bias in the search results, it seems like Google is out to get small websites and small businesses.

That might not be literally true, but there’s no doubt that Google’s main goal is to make more money for Google. Being nice to small businesses doesn’t enter the equation for any decisions they make. And that makes relying on them too much a bad idea.

What then, are small businesses and individual SEOs to do? Is there a way to break out of the cycle of constantly trying to adopt to Google’s latest change, only to get smacked down by the next one?

There is. And it’s called the New Traffic Paradigm.

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At the time of writing, the number one suggestion in the Votebox is about online security. How can you keep your site from getting hacked and taken down, or worse, being “injected” with malicious code that might even affect your visitors in a negative way?

If you own many websites, chances are that you’ve had one or several of them compromised at some point and that’s never a pleasant experience.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the exact steps you can take to secure your WordPress websites, as quickly and easily as possible.

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In many ways, marketing is about making yourself, your product or your brand noticeable. If you can stand out from the crowd and offer something unique or superior, half your marketing is already done.

The good news is that there is one simple factor that will contribute to you standing out from the crowd more than anything else and in this post, I’ll tell you exactly what it is.

Watch the video below to see what I mean: