Today, Google’s Webmaster Central Blog announced that Search Query data from your Webmaster Tool’s Account (image below) is now available in Google Analytics. The question, why are Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics integrated? Was initially raised in Matt Cutts’ May 25th Live Panda update. Matt Cutts stated that they were different departments within Google and therefore there were barriers to integrating them. Well, these barriers must have been overcome in the months since the update as the data has now been integrated.

How To  Integrate Google Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics:

Data is not automatically integrated between systems. In order to integrate Search Query Data in Google Analytics, you must be an administrator on both the Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools accounts. Once you are an administrator to both accounts, log into your webmaster tools account and locate the site you are looking to integrate with analytics (be sure both accounts have been verified and are working first).

Next, select “Google Analytics property” from the “Manage” dropdown menu. Then select the analytics profile to integrate with.

WARNING: Be sure the profiles you are integrating are similar as un-integrate the profiles will force you to start over again. If you have multiple profiles (subdomains, etc) for analytics, you will want to integrate with the correct profile as well.

Once you’ve selected the domain, click “Save” at the bottom of the page. You will receive another warning informing you that this association will replace any existing Webmaster Tools associations. You can now log into the “New” version of analytics and under “Traffic Sources” you will see a “Search Engine Optimization” drop down menu. This is where the data will be stored.

Google will provide you data from the Top 1,000 daily queries, excluding the most recent 2 calendar days. Do not be surprised to not see data from those two days. Now you are able to segment and analyze data in various ways.

Currently, my favorite method is to view performance of the last 30 days to the previous 30 days. In this way, you can gage click-through rates from one month to the next. You can assess the ranking improvements from one month to the next by comparing the impression counts as well.

What is your favorite data-set to analyze?

Recently, the Internet giant Google made some few tweaks and changes to the Google Maps and Places interface.

As part of a series of more changes to come, Google featured a new layout of Place Pages which put a stronger emphasis on content from Google users, and less review content from third party sites (other web pages that referenced the business).

This emphasis on Google user reviews shows the recent push by Google, and the rest of the web, to increase personalized contents and give users more ways to rate, comment, share… Information from people that are already customers or that a user can relate to is the most meaningful.

To incorporate these changes, Google added two red large and easily accessible “Write a review” buttons. The reviews now have their own single section on the page and push down links to third party sites and external reviews.

Removing these citations or references from third party websites will have a strong impact on local SEO, as these citations are the local version of links. The same way link builders’ look for competitor’s links, local SEO’s use citations from competitors.

Google announced more changes to come as well. Some of the company’s long-term vision for local search includes the increased personalization of local search results and making these upgrades available on other Google platforms and across different devices.

Google Webmaster Tools have launched some new features. One of the most relevant tools for SEO’s, marketers, and website developers is called Fetch as Googlebot (in the “Labs” section). This tools allows you to chose any URL on a given website and run a test to see what Google sees when it requests that URL from your server. 

For example, if you want to test a home page or new page on your website you can use this tool to obtain the exact HTTP responses that Google receives from your server.  Simply paste the URL into the tool and click “Fetch”.  You will then receive a report showing the page code. 

So how is this different than just viewing the source code?  This tools shows you specific HTTP header info that is no contained in the source code because it comes from the server, not the page.  This allows you to find potential discrepancies in what the server is showing and how the page is coded. 

The Fetch as Googlebot tool is great for:

• Find discepancies in how the page is coded and what the server shows to Google when it requests a page (URL)
• Finding bugs that may exist in the site
• Testing 301 redirects
• Testing the site for potential “hacking”
• Ensuring that your SEO strategy is consistant for page code and how the server is showing Google