Things they are a changin’ in Seattle, and we aren’t just talking about our new offices. The Google Webmaster Central team has been hard at work developing new features and making things easier for webmasters everywhere.

One of the largest complaints I personally have had about Google Webmaster Tools has been addressed finally, multiple user verification. No longer do you have to load multiple verification files, or clutter your homepage with meta tags. There are two new, more convenient options in WMT.

What – you have other issues you want Google to address in WMT? We aren’t going there today … patience. At least that is what I’m telling Rob.

DNS Verification

Google Webmaster Central announced the DNS verification feature at the end of March 2010.

There are detailed instructions over there and a nice tutorial here; I want to cover why this is awesome, and some of its drawbacks.

DNS Awesomesauce

• Doing DNS verification allows you to verify every site under that domain. All subdomains, www and non-www.
• No extra stuff on your homepage or GET requests from Googlebot.
• You get to show off your mad webmaster skills. I mean, really, who verifies by meta tag anymore anyway?

Not Cool, Mr. Google, Not Cool

• Another user noted that your hosting provider could be verifying everyone, but if that were the case, you would be able to see the verification. Google alerts everyone on the account when there is a new verification by another user. (Then you out them to the point that they have no more clients)
• If you are having an issue adding a file or meta tag, this is not going to be easier.
• It takes time for DNS to propagate. Be patient.

Delegation

So my personal favorite is the ability to add someone else to your already verified site without the need for another verification file. This is a blessing for all companies, agencies, and consultants that have had to explain why they want their clients/IT teams to add another file to the server.

Before Addition

When running a test on this new feature, we came across some tricky things that we think you should know. Again, if you want to know how to do this, check out the official release post from Webmaster Central.

• When you add someone, the site is listed on their Verification Home, not their Google Webmaster Tools Home. The new user needs to add the site to their Webmaster Tools page still.
  

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• You can remove them at anytime, just like in AdWords. Just note that as things change over time in your organization, there always needs to be at least one person that has actually verified the site on the account.
  

  After Addition

• They have to have a Google account already, and you can’t restrict their access. So be careful who you add to your account. They get the data immediately, there is no delay when the account has already been verified.

Tracking Goals in Google Analytics is vital to tracking conversions and having a grasp on your performance over time. However, it’s important to remember that Goals can apply to so much more than simply a sale or page view. A client of ours measures a conversion as simply an email being sent to one of their specialists,  whose email details are displayed on relevant pages as the users browses around. Currently tracking and measuring these emails can only be carried out by cc-ing another email address each time an enquiry is sent. With the client’s service being of extremely high value, and an email being the first step to a sale, this primitive way of tracking in not sufficient.

A quick Google Analytics goal creation, followed by some Javascript reworking in your code means ten minutes work can ensure you’re tracking email conversions in a much more sophisticated way.

Step one:

Assuming Google Analytics is installed on your website, head over to the ‘Goals’ section and hit  ’Add Goal’

We’ll need a name that describes this Goal correctly for future reference and the Goal type must be set to ‘URL destination’.

In Goal Details we need to set the ‘Goal URL’. This is essentially a fake page simply in place for tracking, and can be anything you like as long as it remains the same in your JavaScript code (see below),  for now we’ll just stick with a variation on the Goal Name. Goal Value is optional and can be left blank, however if you can apply a Value to each email enquiry sent for yours or your client’s business – then stick it in here.

Step two:

With the Goal in place we need to apply some simple JavaScript to our email address html to ensure each email click is tracked. So where a typical email address might appear like this:

<a href=”mailto:johnsmith@email.com”>Email John Smith</a>

We need to apply some javascript so the code looks like this, ensuring the URL in the javascript code is exactly the same as the Goal URL set in Analytics:

<a href=”mailto:johnsmith@email.com” onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(’/mailto/email’);”>Email John Smith</a>

Ok, so now for the hard part – applying this code to every email address across your site. Our client literally has hundreds of different email addresses across the website and editing the html code for each of these manually would be a colossal waste of time. By putting our development hat on for a few mins and learning a little jquery, we can edit all these email addresses across the site in no time!

Sticking the following code into the header of each page ensures each anchor with a href that starts with ‘mailto:’  has the page tracking code appended to it:

$(document).ready(function() {
$(“a[href^='mailto:']“).each(function(){
pageTracker._trackPageview(’/mailto/email’);
});
});

Read more about the attributeStartsWith selector here.

Step Three:

Sit back and watch your email conversions being tracked!

I love data. I really do. So you’d think that the latest announcement from Google about the new organic traffic impression, ranking and CTR data would be right up my street!

Unfortunately, as with so many of the other data points in Google Webmaster Tools the data they give you is shoddy, innacurate and largely a waste of your time to analyse it. Why 70%? It’s a number I plucked out of thin air. See how annoying innacurate data is?

Here’s the stats for the Distilled site in GWT:

And here’s the Google Analytics data for the same time period:

See the discrepency? Let’s compare some of the top keyphrases (impression/clickthrough data is from GWT, visit data from GA):

I’m not going to go into a big analysis of the two sets of numbers because they’re clearly quite a way off still.

Two interesting things however that I draw from this:

1) Find long-tail keyphrases

The number of keyphrases that GWT is reporting is larger than GA but quite a way – analysing what these keyphrases are which you’re getting impressions for but not traffic might be interesting. I say might because in actual fact once you get into the long-tail GWT just starts to obscure the data with “<10″. Well 0 is less than 10 right Google?

2) Ranking Factors A-go-go

The REALLY interesting thing for me with this data is that GWT has a good track record of releasing data on things which affect your rankings. Crawl issues, duplicate content, site speed. You see the pattern? And now they’re releasing CTR as a big metric. I strongly believe that CTR either already is, or will soon, start to impact your ranking position. Looking at this figure as an aggregate across your whole site and comparing to similar sites in your industry I think it would give Google quite a reasonable perspective on which sites are and are not “brands”. And if this is the case, then CLEARLY they’re not going to give you the exact data. So my view on this is that you should treat CTR seriously, but that you shouldn’t rely on the data in GWT too much (other than perhaps a benchmark over time?).

What’s everyone else’s opinon on this?

Note – a few things I think I should mention. Firstly, be careful about restricting your data to web search. Image search queries aren’t picked up by default within GA, you have to set up a special filter to grab these, so that might explain some discrepencies (I’ve taken that into account in the above data). Secondly, I’ve looked at a lot more data than just one site but I’m not sharing all of that here as most of them are client sites. Suffice to say I’ve yet to see anything accurate.

Its been less than two months since we announced that we were to open Distilled Consulting, our American wing.

Our new office is now open, and Rob has moved to Seattle where he’s been busy with some great clients and with recruiting an expert SEO team. We’re proud to announce our first new member: Kate Morris has joined the Distilled team as an SEO Consultant.

Kate joins us after a year on her own as an independent search marketing consultant. Kate is a speaker on the conference circuit with shows like PubCon, SMX London / East, and Affiliate Summit East / West under her belt. She brings with her a wealth of experience, bags of enthusiasm, and a sense of humour (humor!), all of which are incredibly important at Distilled.

We are super excited that Kate is joining our team, and look forward to the impact she will have on our clients. Kate shares many of our fundamental beliefs about how to define and execute online strategies and is already embedded in the SEOmoz way of life which saves us a job.

Kate had the following welcome to add.