This site is all about New Jersey web design and integrating websites with SEO search engine optimization… but our latest NJ SEO case study features our favorite “Work for Food Project” ever. Tiffany Diner is practically a historic landmark with Bergen County NJ residents and you would be hard pressed to find anyone who has ever lived in the area that has not had a few great meals here. Like many NJ Greek Diners, the owners knew a lot about food and a lot about print advertising but internet marketing was a new topic. Web Design WorkPlace took this business from no website to over:

• 12,000 unique visitors a year
• almost 40,000 Google LOCAL impressions a year
• ranking # 3 on Google for the phrase:   NJ diner competing with over 85,000 web pages that have those words in their title (10-25-09) !!
• rank # 3 on Google for the phrase:   New Jersey diner competing with over 16,000 web pages that have those words in their title.
• Google # 1 for the phrase:  NJ diner and restaurant

Web Design Workplace Nikon Photography

We’ve taken well over 2,000 pictures at the Diner and there are probably more than 300 on the site right now. We use all Nikon Digital SLR and Nikon lenses. One of the great features we put into this site is the ability for users to click 3 times on each photo to blow them up to huge proportions… 3800 pixels wide in some cases. This has attracted Google Images to grab lots of our classic NJ Diner photos to use for their galleries and subsequently, a lot of other websites are using our photos. In this case we’re flattered and not worried at all about infringement. We are sharing the love of NJ Diner food with everyone who wants to take a look.

Google Local Business Center – This is very important for internet marketing.

Lets take a look at some of the stats. First of all, for a brick and mortar business many times the critical number we want to achieve is a high Google Local impressions count. When a searcher types a geographic location and then an area of practice, sometimes Google or Yahoo or Bing will return a local map and the top 10 businesses on that map that are relevant to the search phrase. The map is always “above the fold” meaning searchers see it first, without paging down. And it’s totally FREE to get placed in the Google local listings. It’s the greatest thing IMPO (in my professional opinion) to hit search in the last 3 years. You actually don’t need a website to get listed on Google local but it helps in a number of ways.

Google Analytics – Bounce Rate and Time on the Site

Not all NJ SEO’s use Google Analytics but Web Design Workplace does. We use it for 2 key factors, the bounce rate which is the percentage of searchers who land up on the site and bounce off it without looking at other pages, and the time on the website. If the average time users are on the site is less than a minute you know you’ve got some problems. Maybe the site looks bad or maybe the site is ranking for the wrong phrases and people are getting there by accident.  When users are staying on the site between 1 and 5 minutes that’s a good sign that you have a nice looking site and the users getting there are supposed to be getting there and they like what they read or see. Google Analytics always gives us a total unique visitors number that is half of the number we get from the server logs so we take both sources with a grain of sale and use them both for ballpark estimates.

Here are the server logs

(from AWStats package running under Plesk Dashboard on Unix Hosting from HostGator)
See our unique visitors is double the number we get from Google Analytics. Can you guess why? Google Analytics relies on a piece of javascript code at the very end of every web page in your site. If you don’t have that code on every page of course those stats are lost, and if you land up on the web page and you can’t execute javascript code (search engine spiders for example) you are not counted as a unique visitor. So raw server logs are always going to show more or many more so called unique visitors than the filtered number you get in GA.