Ever wondered what the prominent keywords were that your visitors use to reach your site?

Google Analytics will happily show you those. With the amount of visitors per keyword of course (amongst many other metrics).

But what if you wanted to know which separate words were most used throughout all search queries? Create a tagcloud:

1. Go to the Traffic sources >> Keywords report.
2. Be sure to select a good amount of visits by stretching the date range to e.g. a year.
3. Append &limit=50000 at the end of the URL. This is some hack to get all keywords in the export and be sure to append it to the end, not before the hash (#) character or anything.
4. Click the export button at the top of the report and click CSV.
5. Open the file in an application that understands the standard CSV-format. I have to open the file in a text-editor and replace all comma’s with semicolon’s before I can open it in Excel.
6. Copy all keywords (not the numbers behind them or the general data above them).
7. Visit a tagcloud creation website and paste the data.

You can argue that the number of visitors per keyword is not taken into account but in the end that may not be what you are looking for. In case you want to know which keywords are most often used in different search phrases, this creates a pretty good image.

Below is the result of all searches that reached this website in 2009:

(click on the image to enlarge)

Thanks to Avinash Kaushik for another great post about Analytics Insights.

Want to start your own business and work from home?

Inc.com published a list of 9 examples of people who started a successful business from their home.

One of them is a self employed insurance broker who offers live webcam chat through his website. You do not need to know anything about insurance to imagine this can have a positive effect on customers who do not have time to make an appointment with him.

Enjoy the read!

Like everyone has done these days and some (like me) are still doing: a random review of 2009 and a preview on 2010.

2009 (in order of magnitude)

• My first ever energy-efficient lamp broke (I must have been using it about 7 or 8 years). So these things can die!
• The basement scene with John Malkovich and the fitness owner in Burn After Reading was probably the best movie scene I ever saw.
• Together with Jan from JAMA Webcreations I built the most user friendly content management system in the world. Be sure to contact Jan for a demo and partner with us.
• I got hooked (if I wasn’t already) on a lot of Google applications: Analytics, Apps, AdWords, Mobile Gmail and Wave.

2010

• While I must admit it isn’t that hard as some people want it to be, I will stop testing projects in Internet Explorer 6. It doesn’t make that big of a difference since IE 7 often has the same quirks.
• I plan to move all hosting to Linode. Their service just can’t get better. E-mail accounts will probably be handled by Google Apps.
• I hope to (re)launch a considerable amount of the projects I work on (on a Linode of course).
• Maybe I should also try to get the Zend Framework certification but I also want to take the Google AdWords and Analytics exams.

Have fun in 2010!