The world is changing. Fast. What used to work does not seem to be effective any more and not grasping this can cost a business a lot of money.

Let me explain. Five years ago we still used the Yellow Pages to look up a business. Now most of us reach for Google, the Yellow Pages propping up our computer monitor while Yellow (the corporation) post eye watering losses. The search giant Google has gained a foothold in all our lives, not least the lives of our businesses.

When your customer Googles you, only half remembering your business name or putting in what sketchy details they can hurriedly think of - do you come up in the search? Because if you don't your competitors will. Those who are more tech savvy and have employed good SEO techniques in their websites, (or a good SEO consultant,) will come up ahead.

I'm amazed to find a lot of businesses don't give their websites much attention, they don't want to spend the money. To me, that's crazy. It's like spending a million dollars on a fabulous building - except the front door is a tatty old wooden thing with a hand written sign tacked to it saying "Go Away".

I look at web stats every day. It's part of my job and having a head for patterns in numbers and geeky stuff like that, I look for the story behind the numbers. How many visitors didn't bother to go past the front page? How long did people linger? This is the feedback a business owner needs to have at their fingertips. How many of those visits are converting to sales? What do people use the website for? All grist to the mill. A website is not a static thing, it needs adjusting to suit the changing winds of the market.

If you are feeling lost by all the technological changes, for goodness sake get a consultant who can help you! There are a few of us out here :-)

I know what its like to learn something new, I do it all the time. I am totally addicted to learning new things, actually. One of the hardest parts for me is getting those basic (and I mean really basic) bits of information on which the rest of the knowledge builds. Those snippets of information are often missed in tutorials. Its like, "well everyone knows that!" And I feel stupid for even asking. I find that once I can get a toehold with these foundation facts I am well on my way.

So I am starting with a series of articles on Google Analytics, as this is a great resource which is also free. I set my clients up with GA and I know that some (not all) struggle with getting their head around it and some (not all) give up.

I am publishing the articles through www.ezinearticles.com and have been given the heady status of "expert author". One among hundreds of thousands it seems, the most prolific has written 22,001 articles. Goodness me!

Here is the link to article number 1 in the series "Google Analytics - Too Much Information?", to be followed shortly be "Google Analytics - Delving a Little Deeper".

The purpose of a website is not be be found on search engines, but without being seen there isn't a lot of point is there? Paradoxically the more that people try and 'game' the search engine pot of gold the more they are at risk of being penalised by Google. I have been reading about the blacklisting that can happen to websites who's webmasters resort to 'dirty tricks' such as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is, just like it sounds, a method of stuffing lots of keywords into the code that don't form part of the content of the site. Affiliate adverting is another practice that Google dislikes strongly. (You may have seen the adverts - to get rich quick, work from home on your computer ...etc - don't go there!)

There are other 'tricks' that Google doesn't take kindly to, like link farms - sites which are just a huge list of links. It's not a good idea to get linked on one of those sites as you can be judged by the company you keep, as it were.

There are a lot of sensible things one can do to improve your websites visibility, however, without falling foul of the all seeing, all knowing 'eye in the sky'. Keeping your content clear and concise with the searchable keywords scattered prudently and infrequently through your text is one, and keeping it relevant to what your website is about. Putting 'Michael Jackson' in the text simply because it's a newsworthy topic that is likely to be searched is probably not going to do a lot of good. Not using pictures as links is another handy tip. The bots that crawl the web don't read the links in pictures, so put your link before the picture.

So the next philisophical question is: If a website has a video of a tree falling in the forest, and Google doesn't find it, does it still exist?