Whenever you post a blog or an article or a page you tag your new webpage to allow users to find your content, we know this but why is this important? If you have a good article, and you send it to a person, share it, Tweet it, or anything similar, those tags come into play. This is how you gain credit for your work! You need this ‘credit’ to prove the value of your work!
What do I mean by tagging? You need what is ‘UTM parameters’ in your URLs. UTM parameters are simply tags that when someone clicks on your links, those tags are sent back to Google Analytics for tracking.
For example:
yourexamplewebsite.com/?umt_source=cooltag&umt_medium=anothertag.
The problem with this as you can see that it does not look very good, if you see a massive long link like this on a website it does not look very attractive but you have to do this! Why? Well you spend all your time and resources on analysing data but it would be on data that is inaccurate, this method is more accurate and representative of the amount of hits your content gets. You can see all of this on Google Analytics in an easy to interpret format making analysing your data and formulating strategies so much easier but more importantly…effective! This was you can follow trends, see where your content is successful and adapt to maximise the exposure of your content. Why invest so much into a web design agency, good content and analytics if you are not utilising all of it together to its full potential? You are mad not to because you are wasting money.
So now that you have links that have UMP parameters, where would you use them? Everywhere! Email signatures, Twitter, Facebook, banner advertisements, newsletters, RSS feeds, social adverts or anything where you want to measure the interests in your content. You need to understand that this is a fantastic quantitative tool that gives very good representative data that will see you get more ‘bang for your buck’ when it comes to marketing efforts as you will be making well informed decisions based on real data.
Another important thing to consider is to get clever with your tagging, the better your tagging, the more useful the data as it will categorise the tags. For example if you post links on social media, put a tag in the link that will allow you to know where the link was clicked from. This will allow you to discover things like where your content is popular, but also compromise some apps that you might get for Twitter and Facebook. These apps count as referrals as opposed to a direct visit, meaning you’ve lost your tag.
We all agree that long links just randomly placed does look very ugly; we all come across new blog sites where they bombard you with links to try and get exposure. What I would suggest is incorporating them into text (hyperlinks) and into images or media though intuitive web design. This way you still maximise your SEO efforts and the big ugly links are hidden giving a more professional user experience.
One last thing you need to remember: you need to play around with this as the tactics to get the best results constantly vary, but it is definitely worthwhile!