What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.
Specifically for business owners, it reports and analyzes user behavior on your site. Google Analytics shows the number of people visiting your site, unique visitors, popular links to your site, keywords searched, top search engines, duration of visit and exit sites.
Power Site and Google Analytics
All Power Sites come with Google Analytics code pre-installed. During the launch of your staging site, you'll be provided with a username and password to log into your account.
Website Evaluation Tool
Fast Track uses our proprietary tool, Site Evaluator, analyzes your existing site on over 100 key metrics. We will tell you how you can improve your site’s visibility, traffic, and revenue. For a free site evaluation, click here.
What is a Domain Name?
A domain name is your address on the web. It's what users will type into their web browsers to go to your site. For example, google.com and fasttrackteam.com are domain names. Before you can use a domain name, you must register it with a domain name registrar to ensure that no one else can use it.
What is a Content Management System?
Content Management System (CMS) is a web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to add, edit and manage a website's content, structure, and functionality. Not only do content management systems help website users with content editing, they also take care of a lot of "behind the scenes" work such as:
- Automatically generates navigation elements and site hierarchy
- Makes content searchable and indexable
- Keeps track of users, their permissions and security settings
- Allows the ability to change and update content
...and much more.
If you would like more information on Power Site's CMS, click here.
What is Website Hosting?
Briefly, website hosting is a place where you can store your web content (i.e., HTML files) and allow web users to access these files via an internet connection. Physically, a web host is nothing more than a computer or set of computers with high-speed internet connections. A “web hosting provider” is the company that provides the web hosting to you, typically through a monthly fee. Web hosting shouldn't be confused with website domain names. Web hosting and a website domain are totally two different things. In layman's terms, a web host is like a house where the house owner can store furniture (web contents) on it, while a domain name is the address of the house. Web hosting is the "storage space"; while a website domain name is the "location" of your website.
For information on Fast Track's website hosting services, click here.
What is SEO?
According to Wikipedia, Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As an internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines targeted audiences prefer. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
If you are looking for assistance with SEO, click here for an overview of our services.
Why do I need a CMS (Content Management System)?
Up until recently, changes to websites were done primarily by web developers themselves. This meant that, whenever a page required an update, the changes had to be sent to a developer to post on their behalf. The process doesn't facilitate timely delivery of web content, nor does it enable businesses to keep their sites up-to-date.
In a CMS, pages and content can be added via a browser interface without requiring users to understand “web” languages such as HTML and CSS (although knowing these languages makes the process even easier). The structure and content of the site, or the CMS is in the hands of the administrator, as it can shift greatly to meet a variety of needs.
Any site that has content that changes more than a few times a year is a particularly good candidate for conversion to a CMS.
What is a Blog?
A blog is a means of journaling online. Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company.
A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts).
What is Social Media Integration?
Social media accounts, such as company pages on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, into your website can provide value in a number of different ways. It can provide a funnel for first-time website visitors to subscribe to and engage with your brand, it can encourage social sharing by website visitors through their own social media accounts, and it can have a significant positive impact when it comes to your website’s rankings in search results.