Google Analytics Updates — Next Stop, “Event Tracking”

The Google Analytics team just announced some nice updates. Yes, the interface has been translated into Thai, Filipino, Indonesian, Czech, Hungarian, and Portuguese, but there’s another story happening between the lines about the switch from “urchin.js” javascript to the new “ga.js” standard, which doesn’t require tagging an entire Web page just to measure a single action. The big news is how the switch to ga.js javascript will change how Google Analytics users plan and optimize their online marketing.

The change in script reflects the fact that “page views” are dead (although some have replaced them with zombie metrics). Additionally, this round of GA updates makes it easier to track ecommerce transactions and see how metrics relate to each other. But you can’t see how visitor actions relate to each other — yet.

Now that visitor action can be called “events” and tracked with ga.js tags, it’s going to be much easier for GA users to see how a series of actions tie together. Fortunately, Google has built an “event tracking” interface to help you take advantage of the more robust ga.js script. For now, it’s in closed beta, but when it launches, the reports will look something like this:

The challenge for marketers, analytics specialists, and anyone who’s a little of both — either by training or necessity — is to realize that standardized metrics aren’t enough. Event Tracking isn’t about measuring how many times visitors complete one-off actions. (If you do only that, the feature will be, in most cases, meaningless — or “cool,” which can be even more misleading.) Nope. Event Tracking is about measuring scenarios.

Since it’s designed to help you measure the relationships between actions and content, the to-be-launched Event Tracking interface should encourage GA users to do a better job of planing the visitor experience and to not be content with the same old generic data.

Looks like 2008 will be good year to be in the scenario planning and optimization business!

Source - http://www.grokdotcom.com/2007/12/14/google-analytics-sets-stage-for-event-tracking/

Basics of Website Design Service

There are many people who are interested in having an internet presence, however are looking for a just a cheap basic website. This article describes how to find a very cheap web design company.

There are many people and companies offering a web design service. It should therefore be quite simple to find a very good deal. There is a market for a basic web design service and in my opinion you should be able to obtain a website for under a £100. Please feel free to contact me if you are unable to.

There are various times of the year when web design companies are likely to offer some great deals. This is normally in the summer or at christmas time.

Companies who are just setting out in offering a web design service will often offer very reasonable rates at the outset, basically to build up a portfolio. Once they have established themselves they then tend to increase the amount they charge. Therefore you need to get in quick while they offer a professional service for a very small fee.

A number of years ago, I even heard about one person who for a very short period of time was building websites for free! This is an extreme case though.

A former workmate of mine called Peter was looking to have an internet prescence for his small business a couple of years ago. He did not have a huge budget, however was looking for a person or company to create him a professional looking website which would be search engine friendly at an affordable price.

Source - http://www.thelogocreator.com/blog/basics-of-website-design-service/

10 Ways to Gain Access To Blocked Websites

In our schools and offices, some sites specially social networking websites like MySpace and facebook are often blocked. While visiting these blocked websites on the Internet, your IP address is being logged with each file you download with your web browser.

Using following 10 basic ways you can unblock those websites and gain access by bypassing the filters and keeping your identity safe from being logged.

1. Web proxies

Many free online services allow you to access blocked websites through a proxy server. An anonymizer or an anonymous proxy is a tool that attempts to make activity on the Internet untraceable. It accesses the Internet on the user's behalf, protecting personal information by hiding the source computer's identifying information. There are literally thousands of anonymous proxy servers out there. Like; Proxy.org, HideMyAss.com, Vtunnel.com, Anonymouse.org. See the Master List of all Web Proxy Servers by Proxy.org


2. VPN connections

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is like a tunnel over the public network. The advantage of using VPNs over web proxies is that VPNs are more secure because they are using advanced encryption and allow you to access all the applications (mail, chat, browser etc) in complete anonymity and not only the web sites. The most known free VPN are, UltraVPN and ProXPN.


3. Hide IP software

These are easy to use and even if the main functionality is to hide IP address and unblock websites, there are applications that can provide you more than that – like cleaning online tracks, testing proxies, manually adding proxy etc. Usually if you choose a free software, then this will provide you a minimal number of proxies and no other features than hiding IP address. Among Free IP Hiding tools, UltraSurf, NotMyIP, IPHider are most popular ones.


4. Firefox add-ons

FoxyProxy is a small add-on for Firefox that allows users to access blocked sites. Offcourse (above discussed) IP hiding software are there which you can use to access blocked website but when you are in an office environment or school where you are restricted to install a program and you need to access certain blocked sites, then this add-on to the browser is a quick solution.

You may also check other similar addons, like SwitchProxy or AutoProxy.


5. Translation services

You can also use Web Translation Service to unblock a website. Insert the link of the blocked website in the translation field and select a different language (other than English) in "Translate from" drop down box and select English in "Translate into" box. This may not work everytime but it still works sometimes.


6. Google cache

Google takes a snapshot of each (indexed) webpage examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you search anything on Google and click on the "Cached" link (below each search results) on the search results page, you will see the web page as it looked when Google last indexed it.
So, you can use cached pages of website that is blocked to you.

In the Google search field type cache: before the URL of the blocked website. For example type cache:http://www.tipsotricks.com


7. Internet Archive

Internet Archive allows you to view blocked websites through the Wayback Machine. This will retrieve all pages of a specific website indifferent if the website is blocked. Open Wayback Machine, put the desired address and view the old and indexed pages of websites.


8. Web2Mail service

Web2Mailis a free email service that can send to your email address specific web pages. You sign up for an account and get set to receive complete HTML websites (with Images and Graphics) by email.


9. Change the http of an URL into https

This is probably the easiest way to access blocked websites. Offcourse, this might not work every time but still this is the fastest one.
Just put the address of the blocked website like:

https://www.yourdomain.com


10. IP address of the website instead of URL

To use the IP address of a website instead of URL, you must first find its IP. To do this open command prompt and type: “ping domain.com”, you'll get the IP address of the website. Note the IP and put that in browser's address bar. This method has relatively higher chances of getting access to blocked sites.

Source - http://www.bloggersbase.com/internet/10-to-gain-access-to-blocked-websites/

Google is Testing Live Updating of Search Results

In recent days Google has been testing a new form of search result that will change as you enter a new letter into the search query bar.

The results are essentially a streaming search page that uses Google Suggest technology to change the search results as you change what you are typing.

For example, if you are to start typing something like “life i” it may show the search results for the search term “life insurance.” If you delete the “i” and start typing “life c” then it will show results for the search term “life coach.” This is all without hitting enter as you normally do when searching for topics on Google. Look at the video demonstration below:

Google is known to do a lot of testing with it’s search results and this is one of many recent steps towards delivering faster and more relevant results. According to a Google representative, Gabriel Stricker, the company can be running as many as 200 search experiments at a time and this is one of them.

The first person to take notice of this new SERP is Rob Ousbey, who mentioned it on his blog at Ousbey.com.

The story was later confirmed by TechCrunch after contacting the Google representative. Sources close to Google are apparently type lipped on whether they would be integrating this feature into the results in the near future. Because Ousbey is one of the very few people to notice this it is safe to assume it is being tested on a very small fraction of Google users.

It’s been suggested that limited bandwidth or CPU may cause issues with this new live search technology. There are also questions as to how this will integrate with Google’s Ad Words program.

Source - http://www.bloggersbase.com/internet/google-is-testing-live-updating-of-search-results/

Amazing Things - Google dance & Googlewashing

How many SEO guys among us are aware on google dance? Do you know what this is? Ok, i am here going to discuss the method explicitly below.

We all are aware on the fact that Google always going to make updates on it's alorithm or certain technical arenas. For the guys who are in the SEO field, it's really for them to know about the Google update. Tjis update minorly or majorly affect your website ranking factors. In general, Google makes changes on it's algorithm majorly one time in a month (sometime it has been observed that Google have made major algorithm change after 3 months long time) and this change is not so easy to take place, some time it requires more than 24 hours at a streach to get the change of the algorithm.

Google uses 3 internal servers like: http://www.google.com/, http://www2.google.com/, http://www3.google.com/ ................
Actually, this is very interresting topic and outside the Google company, nobody knows what they are and how they take place and when the two more servers run. Only Googler know about the fact in detail and they never disclose thiis fact to anybody outside the Google. When the major update takes place in the prime server, the other two servers depicted above run simultaneously and the most interesting part is that, at that moment a particular keyword or keyphrase shows 3 different ranking in the above 3 servers, i mean, there obviusly are rank differences for the above 3 servers, and how interesting it is!! and this method is known to us as "Google Dance"; "your particular keyword or keyphrase dances in ranking for 3 different servers".

...............................................................................

Another very crazy thing which can turn you even mad is "[B]Googlewashing[/B]", it is simply copying your original content ditto and pasting it in your duplicate site line-by-line. Suppose, you have written an article after a well made research and just uploaded to your site, immidiately you have seen another guy have just copied it thoroughly without a single line change and put it into his/her own site and it's been cached before your own one, how disgusting is it! and that person got the milage kicking you on your ass.

By Googlewashing, you become a total full in the eye of search engine as your credit goes to another person, who haven't give 1 min effort to gain such a long credentials. Googlewashing can kill your compititor or vice versa.

Source - http://seodiscussions.blogspot.com/2010/04/amazing-things-google-dance.html

Yahoo! Organic Results Switch To Bing

Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products announced today that Bing now officially powers Yahoo's organic search results in USA and Canada, saying "Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come."

What does this mean for you?
Yahoo will still power their own search advertising (PPC) platform until later in the year when Microsoft Adcenter is integrated. This integration is expected to be completed in October, just before the holiday season, so start planning your paid search holiday campaigns to run on Adcenter, and bear in mind that there is likely to be new cost-per-click pricing to contend with. You will need to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Furthermore, as the Bing and Microsoft Adcenter integration is rolled out worldwide to all Yahoo Search properties you are likely to see a steady increase in paid search inventory on Microsoft Adcenter. An increase in advertising inventory naturally brings more advertisers which will bring a more volatile auction for clicks. Cost-per-click costs on Adcenter are likely to rise as inventory increases.

Resident SEW expert, Melissa Mackey, detailed some of the interface and account management changes you can expect to see in this post: Microsoft-Yahoo Alliance For PPC Advertisers


* Negative keyword expansion beyond 1026 characters

* Negative keywords at ad group or campaign level

* Campaign performance dashboards

* Web import options of any format - Google, Yahoo, or MSN

* Significant upgrades to the adCenter Desktop tool

* Search network controls - can choose just owned & operated properties, or search partners

* Reporting upgrades, including removal of the 92-day time limit

* Enhanced conversion tracking options, including revenue tracking

Resident SEW expert Alex Cohen, also commented on the change, saying "You will not be able to bid separately on Yahoo vs. Bing after the integration... For the first time, we'll have a viable and scalable alternative to Google. That will attract more advertisers, more advertising budgets and, thus, more competition for auctions."

What does it mean for the industry?
It's nothing new for Yahoo to have it's search results syndicated by other players. Before Yahoo had their own crawler, their backfill results were powered by Inktomi, AltaVista and finally Google (in that order). SEO strategies to gain traction on Yahoo, remained focussed on those engines rather than Yahoo itself.

However, Yahoo does sit on a a goldmine of end user data about search behavior, which Bing now stands to benefit from. End user data is considered to be one of the strongest signals to search engines on how to perfect the algorithm and search experience, so we might speculate that Bing is likely to improve their own index.

What is also likely to happen is that mobile search queries on Bing are likely to increase. Yahoo has made many moves in emerging mobile markets, especially in South America and South East Asia.

Shashi Seth, told us last week that "Yahoo Remains Committed To Search" which he drove home further in the blog announcement today, stating, "Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike. We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network... we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come."

Source - http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/100824-172703

What’s a bounce rate?

It sounds fun, but your site’s bounce rate has noth­ing to do with tram­po­lines, bal­loons or pil­low fights. ‘Bounce rate’ is a term used to describe the per­cent­age of new vis­it­ors to a site, then leave without vis­it­ing any other pages. Essen­tially, they’re ‘boun­cing’ off.

What your bounce rate means

Your site’s bounce rate could be telling you a num­ber of things about your web site content.

If your bounce rate is low — under 40% — then it’s telling you that your site is enga­ging and invites users to explore fur­ther. That is, you’re doing a good job — keep it up!

If your bounce rate is high (over 50%, for example) it could mean that:

• vis­it­ors are not being engaged by your site’s content
• they’re encoun­ter­ing some­thing that drives them away — like an error, a broken link, or con­fus­ing text
• your site is not what the user was expect­ing. This can be the case if you have an advert or link on another site that is mis­lead­ing. If a user clicks on a link expect­ing to see dog groom­ing inform­a­tion, they’re going to be very sur­prised if they arrive on a site selling ham­mers. Chances are they’re going to hit the back but­ton — and quickly!

Source - http://www.cleverstarfish.com/whats-a-bounce-rate/

Analytics: hits, pageviews and visits

It used to be com­mon to track web site ‘hits’. But this is not a valu­able met­ric, and rely­ing on it could lead you astray. In this art­icle we’ll explain the dif­fer­ence between hits, pageviews and visits.

Hits explained

A web page is made up of lots of dif­fer­ent pieces. When you watch a page load — espe­cially on a slow con­nec­tion — you’ll often be able to see this quite clearly. The page builds bit by bit: first the struc­ture, then text, then other ele­ments. Large images often take longer to load than the rest.

Each piece of the site is a sep­ar­ate file, and every request to each file gen­er­ates a new ‘hit’ on the web server. Load­ing a single page could gen­er­ate any­where from 1 to 50 (or more) hits.

Pageviews

A pageview is a much more use­ful met­ric. As the name sug­gests, it tracks the num­ber of times a page is viewed.

If your site works well, you will find users vis­it­ing mul­tiple pages. This is why, although valu­able, a pageview met­ric is not a true indic­a­tion of your web site’s traffic. A high pageview count is great, but a high vis­itor count is even better.

Vis­its

A visit is the most use­ful met­ric of all. Each num­ber of vis­its tells you the num­ber of single people spend­ing time on your site in one sitting.

For example, let’s say I visit your web site in the morn­ing, and look at 5 dif­fer­ent pages. This rep­res­ents one visit, five pageviews and a large num­ber of hits. But, unless I count how many images and other assets are on the page, I’m not going to be able to eas­ily estim­ate the num­ber of hits.

Later that day, I fire up my browser and return to your site, look­ing at 3 dif­fer­ent pages. This rep­res­ents a second visit, three more pageviews and again, a large num­ber of hits. My activ­ity on your site has gen­er­ated two vis­its, eight pageviews and a lot of hits.

Unique and return­ing visits

Vis­itor stat­ist­ics are split between unique vis­it­ors and return­ing visitors.

What is the dif­fer­ence? A unique vis­itor is one that has never been to your web site before. A return­ing vis­itor is someone who has come back to your site.

A high num­ber of unique vis­it­ors and a low num­ber of return­ing vis­it­ors may indic­ate that your web site’s con­tent is not enga­ging enough to keep bring­ing people back.

Con­versely, if your unique vis­it­ors’ rate is low, you might want to think about ways of bring­ing more people to your site.

The best vis­itor met­rics have high num­ber of both unique and return­ing vis­it­ors. That would tell you that you are not only draw­ing people in, but you are good at keep­ing them com­ing back.

Meas­ure it, improve it

It is good to keep an eye on each part of your web site stat­ist­ics. Whatever you can meas­ure, you can improve! Know­ing the dif­fer­ence between hits, pageviews and vis­its is the first step towards bet­ter under­stand­ing your web site visitors.

Source - http://www.cleverstarfish.com/analytics-hits-pageviews-and-visits/

Unethical/Unsavory On Page Techniques

Natural On Page SEO:

Your Search Phrases should be emphasized in a natural way for both the visitor and the search engine spider. Do not "KeyWord Stuff" your web page, by repeating the search phrase over and over again in your webpage. This will often resuly in a Search Engine "Penalty" and move your sites ranking Lower in the results.

Unethical/Unsavory On Page Techniques:

There are several different techniques known as "black hat" or "unethical" On Page Techniques. Some SEO companies engage in these type of activities and should be avoided. Sooner or later the search engines will catch up to these unethical techniques and the likely result will be your site being demoted or banned from the search engines. We recommend the following unethical seo techniques should not be used.

Negative ON Page SEO Techniques Include:

• Avoid Using "hidden" or invisible text on your page for the purpose of higher search engine placement. For example the words/text for search phrase "Widget" in the html, the font color has been set to White. The background of the page is also white. Therefore the textual content is actually there, however the words are "hidden" from the surfer. This is frowned upon by search engines and frequently results in your site being penalized.
  
• Avoid Using Negative
  htmltags. Div tags, Div tags are division tags. Unscrupulous seo services may insert them into your page with negative x/y coordinates to place content outside of the visible page for the surfer, but the text itself is in the html page. The search engine finds the keywords in the text, yet the surfer does not see it. Again a technique to be avoided and not recommended under any circumstances.
  
• Avoid Cloaking or Sneaky Redirects. Cloaking refers to serving up 2 different types of content based on the visitor who is visiting. Is the visitor a regular websurfer, serve up this page. Is the visitor a search engine spider? Serve up this OTHER page specificly for the search engine spider. The other page being served up is typically garbled textual content with no meaning to a human, and is stuffed with various keywords and search phrases. Again this technique is not recommended and will likely get your site penalized or banned from search engines.
  
• Avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content means you create one web site, with content on topic a, and then repeat the content over and over again on multiple websites. In theory you could create one website, achieve high ranking on it, and then clog up the search engines with the same content duplicated on multiple domains. Again this is not recommended and should be avoided.

Source - http://www.discountclick.com/help/seo/on_page.asp

How to Benchmark in Analytics

We have a lot of changes going on at SEOmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes.

You know what we realized? There sure is a lot of data. While I have always appreciated the reporting features in GA, I find that too often people take the reports at face value and fail to go deeper. It’s unfortunate since it is in those deep dives that you usually discover the data that can change your current course of action. So this post is going to tackle an approach to analytics that is often overlooked and (thanks to Google and their silly naming convention decisions) is rarely used to its fullest capacity. Get excited folks we are going to talk about benchmarking {Woohoo! Insert audience applause here}.

All of you excel spreadsheet lovers out there know plenty of ways to extract data and pinpoint specific red flags or recent successes. In fact, most people use analytics to simply analyze the current state of their account. While this is certainly a priority, it really is one dimensional. Instead of stopping there, why not go further? Why not better understand where your data was, and how you are measuring up? In fact, why not use this data to help inform your internal decisions as a company? It’s like an analytical epiphany—“using past and current data to help guide you moving forward.” Glorious.

While many of the analytics platforms out there have given us a number of ways to compare historical data to current data, we are still limited to two distinct time ranges (for the most part). It’s great to see those two ranges stack up against each other, but that still leaves a lot to be desired. Without going further you miss the "interaction" between those two distinct time ranges.

Benchmarking your data is a great way to discover more about this, often overlooked, gray area. Benchmarking simply means you set a standard at which you compare something else to. When used for data mining, it means you plot two distinct variables (time ranges, metrics, dimensions, etc.) over a period of time and then use these “benchmarks” to infer conclusions when making decisions.

You can then see a more complete picture of your site’s momentum. In my opinion, understanding your site’s momentum is one of the most powerful metrics an analyst can calculate. If you can say with authority that you know how your site is doing and how it will likely be doing in the next week, month, few months, etc., you are in an ideal place. With data like that you can take more calculated risks.

Source - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-benchmark-in-analytics