The question of "getting ranked higher in Google" comes up all the time in my initial conversations with farmers looking into getting a website. I covered this a long time ago in a blog post entitled "Getting Right with Google", but I think it is worth stressing again:
The single best thing your farm can do for your search engine rankings is to get other sites to link to your site.

These are called inbound links and they are the currency of the web. They drive search engine results as well as human visitors to your page.

It is worth your time to build these links. As a farm, you have a lot of opportunity to build links with the online farm directories that are out there.

Today, I'd like to highlight the EatWild Grassfed Directory which does have a fee associated with the listing. The fee is a one-time $50 listing fee. Eat Wild claims 8,000 visitors per day and 3 million total, which is a lot of potential customers for your farm.

Remember to list your website. As I was looking through the directory, I noticed one Small Farm Central farm that is listed in the directory, but does not have their web address linked. This means potential customers will not find the farm's website and there is no extra Google juice given.

Eat Wild now offers some nice Google Maps of the farms that are listed which helps customers find farms geographically. The screenshot above is of the Google Maps.

Does anyone have experience with EatWild? Do you get a lot of new customers coming from this site? I have heard good things in the past, but please leave your thoughts in comments if this has worked well for you.

The Google Analytics Dashboard

Last week, you installed Google Analytics on your farm website. If everything worked correctly, the software has been quietly collecting statistics about your visitors. Now let’s look at that data and see how it may affect your web marketing.

The Dashboard

Login to your Google Analytics account and the first screen you will see is “The Dashboard” which gives you a good overview of what is going on with your site.

At the top right of the screen you will see a date range such as Apr 5, 2008 – May 5, 2008. Click the gray arrow to right of the dates to select the range of data you will see throughout the analytics software. As you get more data, you may want to view data for a single day or for a whole month.

One very useful tool is comparing date ranges. This is only applicable when you have a bit more data in your site, so if you just installed last week, just keep this in mind. When you click the down arrow to the right of the date range, select a date range and then in the “Comparison” drop down menu instead of “site” select “date range.” Then you can select the comparison date range that you would like to look at.

See the screenshot below for how this will look. The original date range will be shown in blue while the comparison is shown in green. Hopefully throughout the months and years, traffic on your website is growing and this is a great way to determine success over time.

One question that people often ask is: how many hits should I be getting? I suggest thinking in trends – as long as traffic is steadily increasing, you know you are you going in the right direction with your web marketing.

The comparison feature is very valuable for this type of assessment. If you are following some of the basic marketing tactics that I suggest: keeping your website fresh, sending your web address with each email in your footer, distributing your web address at markets or wherever you connect with the public, sending a weekly mailing list, you can’t fail over the long run.

Just keep doing the right thing every day by connecting consistently with your customers and the time you spend on your website will pay off.

Going further

Now go further into the software – there is a pretty amazing amount of detail you can get on your visitors. Take a look around. Keep these terms in mind as you look around:

Bounce Rate - Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site…

First Time Unique Visitor - The number of Unique Visitors to your website that had not visited prior to the time frame being analyzed.

Keyword - A keyword is a database index entry that identifies a specific record or document. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.

Referrals - A referral occurs when any hyperlink is clicked on that takes a web surfer to any page or file in another website; it could be text, an image, or any other type of link.

Unique Visitors - Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.

View more terms at: http://empoweryou.ca/2007/04/22/glossary/

Is there more?

There is a lot more to talk about with Google Analytics, but I’ll let this be directed by the readers. As you look around are there any specific questions you have on how to use the software?

Since you spend precious time keeping your farm website fresh, you need to determine how effective your website is in engaging visitors. What sites do they come to your site from? What are they searching for on search engines when they visit? Do they visit from bookmarks or email referrals? How long do they stay when they visit? What pages do they like the best?

All of these questions can be answered using a web analytics package. The standard these days is Google Analytics mainly because it is free, but also because it is a very impressive piece of software that provides lots of detail on your website and it integrates well into other Google services.

Over the next few weeks, we are going to delve into using Google Analytics to understand the visitors to your farm website. What's bounce rate? How many visitors a day is a good rate? What is a referral? Click here to get updates right in your inbox when we update the blog.

Installing Google Analytics on your website

The first step is getting Google Analytics the data it needs to track visitors to your site. The basic concept is that a small piece of code needs to reside on each page of your site. Obviously, this process differs based on how you developed your website and who hosts it. It may be difficult to do this if you developed your website yourself in pure HTML, but if you use Small Farm Central (or have advanced functionality on your site) it is easy. I am going to describe this process in relation to installing analytics on a Small Farm Central site, but the steps will be the same for any site except how the code is added to your pages.

1. Go to: http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html and sign in with an existing Google account or create a new account.
2. On the resulting screen, click "Sign up."
3. You will be asked for your "Website's URL." This is the address that your customers type in their browser to get to your farm website; such as http://www.yourfarm.com. The default for the account name is fine.
   
4. The next two screens will ask for your contact information and for you to agree to the user agreement.
   
5. The last screen gives produces the code that needs to be included on each page of your website -- you will see "Legacy Tracking Code (urchin.js)" about 1 inch down the left side of the page. Copy all the text in the textbox below which should look something like this:
   
   <script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
   </script>
   <script type="text/javascript">
   _uacct = "UA-5555555-1";
   urchinTracker();
   </script>

Add the code to your website

Now we are ready to get the code on your website so the analytics package can start to record your stats. This process is different depending on how you developed your website; of course if you are running a Small Farm Central website, it is very easy. What follows is an explanation for farmers that are using the Small Farm Central system.

1. Log in to your control panel as usual.
2. Navigate to the "Script block" section of the control panel:
   Display / Template settings / script block
3. Paste the code from above into the text box provided, click submit. If there is any code existing in the text box, do not alter it. Simply paste below the existing text and click submit. Now the code will be included on every page requested by your visitors.

Take the time to add Google Analytics to your website now; in the next few weeks I will describe how to interpret your results. So, if you add the tracking code to your website, you will have something to look at when the go further into how to use the stats. Click here to get updates right in your inbox when we update the blog.

(Photo by el7bara)

You may also be interested in:
Getting right with google and other farm website visibility techniques
But I grow food not blogs - starting your farm blog
Add an interactive map to your farm website