WebSpawner.com Blog

Make it easy for your website’s visitors to find any location - your business, your school, or a favorite attraction - by adding a Google Map to your website for free in just a few simple steps.

1. Open a window in your web browser and go to the Google Gadgets directory at http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open.

2. Locate the Gadget called “Google Map” (usually in the top row) and click the button below it labeled ‘Add to your webpage.’ A preview map showing Google’s location in California appears.

3. Under Display Settings enter an appropriate title for your map… “The World-Famous Space Needle” for example. Change the map size as you like by adjusting the Width and Height pixel values up or down, and click to select a Border style.

4. Under Gadget Settings enter a location name in the ‘Address Name’ box (for example, “The Space Needle”). Enter the physical address in the ‘Address or Zip’ box (”400 Broad St., Seattle, WA 98109″ for our example). Select a ‘Zoom’ level from Address (close up) to Nation (far away), and select a ‘View Type’ of Map (streets and names), Satellite (aerial photography), or Hybrid (combination view). Click the ‘Preview Changes’ button to see your revisions. When satisfied with the map preview, click the button labeled ‘Get the Code.’ The HTML code for your map will appear in a box as shown below:

5. Click in the box and select all of the code (use Control-A on Windows computers or Command-A on Macs), then copy the code (Control-C on Windows, or Command-C on Macs.

6. Open a new browser window (keep the map window open in case you need to go back to it) and log in to your WebSpawner webpage account at http://www.webspawner.com. Select your desired webpage and click the ‘Modify’ button or click ‘Create’ to start a new page. Scroll down to the ‘Body Text’ step and click in the box, then paste the copied code (Control-V on Windows, or Command-V on Mac). Complete the process by clicking ‘Continue’ at the bottom of the form, and then click ‘I Like It’ at the page preview to publish your changes.

Your website will now include your embedded Google map. Visitors of your website can even interact with the map - zooming in or out and changing the View Type as desired - without ever leaving your website!

The Google Gadgets directory also contains other interesting features that you can add to your website in the same manner… simply select the desired Gadget by clicking ‘Add to your webpage’ and enter your desired settings, then get the HTML code and copy and paste it into the Body Text area of your website. Add a clock, calendar, weather, and much more to make your site interesting and informative for visitors.

The other day I was looking at the web-stat graphs for one of the websites we manage. I noticed a recent spike in traffic and looked at the referrer details to see where it was coming from… The majority of it was from a recent post in Google Groups.

Apparently, some people had been trying to get ahold of the web site owner and weren’t getting a response. The owner quickly dug through his spam box and located the attempts to contact him - responded to those requests and regained the otherwise lost business. He even generated a few sales in the process.

The experience brings up a few quick suggestions, to avoid the same situation yourself.

1. If you utilize a spam filter in conjunction with your email, make sure that you frequently check your spam box, scanning it for legitimate mail. Spam filters aren’t fool proof, sometimes it will see a legitimate inquiry into your product or service as spam.

2. Set up a few email filters related to your product or service. For instance if you sell blue widgets, create a filter for the words “blue widget”, “quote”, “request”, etc. and have it go directly to your inbox, bypassing the spam filter. Yes, you’ll get a bit more spam showing up - BUT, you’re also less likely to miss out on some important inquiries.

3. Use a service like Google Alerts to stay alert to new links to your website from the world wide web, blogs and newsgroups. It is easy to set up. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and fill out their simple form supplying the keyword phrase you want to watch (in this case use your company or product name), the email address you want the alerts delivered to and the frequency with which you’d like to receive them. Confirm the Google Alert request by checking your email box, click thier confirmation url and your set - a personal search bot ala Google.

If you’re reading this post, you probably have a website, which hopefully is receiving some traffic. If your website has a visit counter, you have some indication of the traffic volume (actually, a counter simply records the number of times a web page is accessed since the last counter reset). But what do you REALLY know about your traffic? Do you have any idea where the visitors to your website are located, or how they found your site? Are they new or returning visitors? When do they visit?

The answers to these questions can provide a better understanding of your traffic, which in turn can help you make better decisions about updating and promoting your website. Get these answers and more with real-time traffic reporting and easy-to-read graphs by using WebSpawner’s Web-Stat Traffic Analysis tool. Setup is simple; it takes just a few clicks to begin collecting traffic data.

Web-Stat provides a wealth of great up-to-date traffic information to help you get to know your visitors:

WHERE are they from?

• Country of origin - provided as both a graph and a list - indicates the geographic location of the last 100 visitors
• IP # and domain of origin - lists the unique numeric IP address and domain name of visitors’ internet connections for the last 100 visitors, allowing you to see which ISPs (Internet Service Providers) they use to access the web

WHO sends them to your site?

• Referrer summary - graph indicates which search engines visitors used to find your site
• Referrer tracker - graph shows the number of visitors received from each search engine referrer by weeks
• Keyword analysis (detailed) - lists the keyword phrases that visitors have used to find your website in search engines over the past month, broken down by search engine
• Keyword analysis (global) - provides the keyword phrases that searchers used in the past month to find your website, listed across all search engines
• Tracked referrers detail - shows the exact keywords and search engines used to find your website for the last 100 visits, and provides you with a clickable link to see the same search result listings that your visitor found before visiting your site
• Non-tracked referrers detail - provides search details for the last 100 visits which could not be tracked to a specific search engine referrer
• Gateway pages - graphs the visitor traffic for each “gateway” or entry page within your website

WHEN do they come to visit?

• Traffic for last 30 days - graphs all traffic for the last 30 day period, breaking it down into first-time visitors, returning visitors, and total visitor traffic
• Traffic since creation - graphs all website traffic received since the creation (or last reset) of the Web-Stat account
• Traffic per month - graphs the traffic by months, showing the first-time, returning visitors, and total visitors for each month, allowing you to identify your busiest months
• Traffic per day of the week - graphs the total traffic your website has received, broken down by days of the week to indicate the busiest traffic days
• Traffic per hour of the day - graphs all traffic received, broken down into 24 one-hour periods, to show the busiest times of the day

WHAT equipment do they use?

• Operating system - graph shows both the total number and overall percentage of visitors using each major computer OS or operating system, allowing you to see how many visitors are Windows, Mac, and Unix users, among others
• Browser - graph indicates which web browser applications and versions are being used by your visitors, indicating how many visitors are using the latest versions or the oldest software
• Screen size - graph provides a breakdown of all traffic by the size (or more accurately by the resolution) of their computer monitors
• Screen color depth - graph reflects the number of monitor colors being used by your website’s visitors

Web-Stat is the easiest way to learn more about your website traffic. Need proof? How about a FREE Web-Stat trial with absolutely no obligation? Start recording your traffic details today by going to the orange ‘Web Site Statistics’ tab in your WebSpawner Members Menu, then click the ‘Web-Stat Traffic Analysis’ link and follow the simple instructions. In just a few clicks, you’ll be well on the way to having more knowledge of the visitors that your website attracts.