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• Google’s SearchWiki, Customized & Personalized Results · 15 Feb 2009
  In the search engine optimization business there are several recurrent discussions with new client prospects. The most common one by far is around why conversion reports should be used for search metrics rather than traditional ranking reports. Jaws drop when people hear that two different Google users may see different search results for the same [...]
• SEO Session: Up Close With Google Blog Search · 14 Feb 2009
  Google Blog Search is Google’s vertical search engine which focuses exclusively on blog content. While overall usage is probably pretty low, results from Google blog search are starting to appear in Google’s web search as part of their “Universal Search”, more generally known as blended search. Blog content can appear in Google’s standard web search [...]
• In-house SEO: SEO Reporting & Scorecarding for Management · 14 Feb 2009
  One of the nice things about web marketing is the wealth of data available to use in decision making processes. Web marketing data also helps in getting and maintaining management support for SEO activities. This SMX West session focusing on in-house SEO considered what data to present to management, when to present it and how to [...]
• Google, the spy we love · 9 Feb 2009
  Passing through the Frankfurt Airport on my way from Milan to SMX West, I couldn’t help but notice the front page of Germany’s weekly newspaper, Die Zeit (The Time). Google. Der Spion, den wir lieben. Google weiß alles. Der Internetgigant aus Kalifornien macht uns das Leben leicht. Zugleich aber folgt er uns im Netz auf Schritt und [...]
• My website has disappeared from Google. What do I do now? · 3 Feb 2009
  One day you note a fall off in the traffic Google sends your website. As Google is the main source of your traffic, as is the case for many websites, alarm bells naturally start ringing. Investigating, you realize that the site does not appear at all in Google or has poor visibility at best in [...]
• Extra long descriptions showing up in Google search results: test in progress? · 23 Jan 2009
  Several Italian SEO practitioners have noted seeing Google search results with snippets about double the normal length1. Google’s query result snippet (the result summary or description) is usually around 150 characters or so. It may be the contents of a page’s html meta description tag, especially if the tag contains the search keywords, or an abstract [...]
• Page views value little in the monetization of a website · 20 Jan 2009
  The title might be a bit provocative, but the topic is important for companies which want to insure their website is a profit center rather than a cost center. The number of page views tracked by a web analytics system is often a weak indicator of website monetization potential. With the advent of monetization programs [...]
• Google Crawling and Execution of JavaScript: where are we at today? · 10 Jan 2009
  For a long time, Google’s advice to website developers was to keep things simple to ensure search engine spiders could successfully crawl and process website content: Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, [...]
• SMX West 2009: Do you know the way to San José? · 5 Jan 2009
  One sign that a profession has matured is in its ability to support a dedicated conference where professionals can hear and learn from presenters as well as interact with other practitioners (and potential clients & vendors). Search Marketing has had its very own conference since Danny Sullivan started the Search Engine Strategies (SES) series 10 years [...]
• So many aspiring SEOs! - the SEO Quiz results are in · 26 Dec 2008
  15 questions, 5 weeks and 5 books: almost 700 people took the 2008 SEO quiz challenge. Note to the reader: this article was originally posted on our Italian blog on December 2nd. The quiz targeted an Italian audience; we’ve published this translation in order to allow a wider audience to follow search marketing developments in Italy. Why [...]
• 15 questions, 5 weeks, 5 free books: the SEO quiz is here · 26 Dec 2008
  Note to the reader: this article was originally posted on our Italian blog on October 28th. The quiz targeted an Italian audience; we’ve published this translation in order to allow a wider audience to follow search marketing developments in Italy. It seems that the summer fun is now over, but not so fast: it’s time to [...]
• Search engine marketing acronyms: what are they talking about? · 22 Dec 2008
  That Americans like acronyms is not really a surprise to those who have worked for an American company. Acronyms are extremely useful as a conversational shorthand especially when working with unwieldy terms like search engine optimization. SEO is just so much easier to roll off the tongue. The problem with acronyms is that it is [...]
• Did you mean: porn or why not all keywords are suitable for SEO. · 9 Dec 2008
  In the not too distant past when we spoke of search engine marketing, we focused mainly on search engine rankings (SERPS) or, in other words, of being top in Google. A nice phrase, concise and effective. Visibility in search engines is very important, no doubt. But in the top spots in Google for what? Here lies [...]
• SEO for a Blog - All roads lead to RomeCamp 2008 · 13 Nov 2008
  One of the things that I really like about the Internet is that anyone who has a minimum of familiarity with a computer can communicate their ideas to a wide audience. Once upon a time the platform of choice was a personal site at geocities, clarence city or the like. In the meantime the blog [...]
• Social media measurement and an example, this SEO Blog · 7 Nov 2008
  Recently a friend asked me for some pointers on the measurement of social media, such as blogs. I have found that Jeremiah Owyang has a lot of interesting things to say on this topic, as exemplified by has article What should we measure and the document Tracking the Influence of Conversations: A Roundtable Discussion on Social [...]
• Improve search engine and keyword reporting in Google Analytics, a SEO strategy · 7 Oct 2008
  In three short years 1 Google Analytics has become an important tool for many companies looking to get more out of their presence on the web. Google Analytics’ wide range of website reports, from traffic sources to conversion rates, provide invaluable insight into a site’s business performance for an initial cost which is difficult to [...]

• List of over 550 search engines and sources of traffic attributable to web search · 7 Oct 2008
  The following is a list of search engines and significant sites incorporating a search engine, such as ISP portals, which provide site traffic attributable to web search. The list can be used to verify if your Web Analytics system recognizes all the sources of organic search traffic and keywords important in your market – or [...]
• Search engine detection in Microsoft adCenter Analytics · 7 Oct 2008
  Microsoft is the other main player, after Google Analytics, in the area of free Web Analytics tools for the analysis of browser centric web data. Microsoft’s adCenter Analytics is the successor to the former LiveSTATS thanks to Microsoft’s acquisition of DeepMetrix in April 20061. Why search engines offer Web Analytics Certainly the name Microsoft choose for [...]
• Are directories still useful for SEO and in increasing web site traffic? · 23 Sep 2008
  An ongoing question in search engine optimization (SEO) projects regards which directories might be useful for increasing incoming traffic to a web site and as a means in obtaining better search engine visibility. The question arises due to the importance that was once attributed by search engines to some directories and by the desire to [...]
• Enhance your blog or website with Google’s Site Search. Measure the results in Google Analytics. · 15 Sep 2008
  You’ve done it. You’ve created a successful web site with compelling content. A loyal community of readers keeps coming back for more. SEO efforts have paid off too, with lots of traffic from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and minor search engines. Time to sit back with a fine Real Ale or a glass of Monteregio di [...]
• Who’s using Google for their organic and paid search results? · 1 Sep 2008
  An important consideration for Google AdWords advertisers is to understand just where their contextual ads might appear. Google notes that AdWords ads can appear on the: Google search engine Partner search engines (e.g. Aol, Ask.com, Libero / Arianna, Virgilio / Alice) Google owned web content sites (e.g. Gmail, Google Groups) Third party web content sites (practically any site wishing [...]
• Funny business searching for Milan-Rome flights in Google – AdSense Arbitrage at work. · 25 Aug 2008
  The traditional August break in Italy is a wonderful time to work on projects which linger on the back burner during the rest of the year. Last August led to the release of a free keyword selection guide (in Italian); this year’s focus is a Course on using the AdWords PPC paid search marketing program. While [...]
• Web Text Search is Hard. Image indexing is even harder. Just ask Cuil. · 19 Aug 2008
  A new search engine, Cuil, has launched, in an attempt to become the next Google. Cuil was founded by people with experience from Google, AltaVista and IBM – sufficient enough to get the mass media’s attention in the dog days of summer. Rather unfortunately Cuil decided to tout it’s index size as a primary feature. As [...]
• Marketing the best of a bad situation: gracefully communicating downtime news on the web · 27 Jul 2008
  The other evening Camillo Di Tullio, a.k.a. Dr Who, asked me via IM if I was having problems accessing highly trafficked social media websites like Facebook or LinkedIn. In that particular moment, I wasn’t, but his question stuck a particular cord. We’ve seen many downtime issues with major Internet sites lately. Website downtime, planned and unplanned, [...]
• Links and Algorithms behind Blog Statistics: BlogBabel reopens. · 20 Jul 2008
  I couldn’t help but notice the reopening of Italy’s primary blog classification service, BlogBabel. Just over a year ago I wrote about BlogBabel: “While it is worth keeping in mind that BlogBabel’s ranking is just one measure of the importance of a particular blog, Ludo deserves kudos for the transparency in which BlogBabel’s rankings are calculated.” Since [...]
• BLVD Status Analytics in free public beta test · 11 Jul 2008
  I found an interesting announcement over at 97thfloor.com of a new Web Analytics tool, BLVD Status. Two significant impediments have historically hindered the uptake of Web Analytics by businesses. The first has been cost. Professional Web Analytics systems have been fairly expensive, both in server and hosted forms. The second issue has been the great quantity [...]
• Search engine Ask.com no longer crawling the web. Weakly powered by Google? · 9 Jul 2008
  Many search engine optimization professionals have long hoped that Ask.com, the scrappy search engine underdog, would give the big three (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) a run for their money. In July 2006, we saluted Ask.com by documenting their little known Ask.com API data interface. Unfortunately, Ask shut off external access to this interface in March 2007. Ask’s [...]
• Are Italian publishers still diffident when it comes to Internet Book Search? · 3 Jul 2008
  This was the question posed to Santiago de la Mora, Google’s European Partnerships Lead, Books, at Editech 2008: Editoria e innovazione tecnologica, Milan, 27 June 2008. In the article that follows, I’ve attempted to paraphrase Santiago’s presentation of Google’s Book Search based on notes I took during the session. Santiago started by noting his agenda would [...]
• Flash is still a problem for SEO (and the web) despite Google announcement · 2 Jul 2008
  I just discovered that someone on a Web Analytics discussion group misconstrued the recent Google announcement of better Flash search engine crawling support to mean it is now good to use Flash when developing web sites. Nothing could be further from the truth. While Google’s move is welcome support for all the legacy Flash websites still [...]
• People, Internet and Enterprise Business, all without mentioning Google. · 26 Jun 2008
  Last Wednesday I had the fortune to attend a world class conference on social behavior and technology applied to medium and large sized businesses. Not in San Francisco. Not in Boston, where I worked for 4 years. Not in Milan, even. In Varese. Right, Varese, once known more for shoe production. The conference, the International [...]
• Psst: Your Competition is ignoring Internet Search Marketing, are you? · 15 Jun 2008
  The inside scoop on how you can get a competitive advantage by including organic search engine visibility in your marketing mix. One of the primary goals of traditional advertising is to create demand for a product or service. An advertisement awakens latent demand by bringing attention to the product or service, or strives to create demand [...]
• Search marketing is different: how to gain a competitive advantage by insuring a successful SEO project · 15 Jun 2008
  In a related article, I consider how Internet search marketing remains a niche focus for a few early adopters despite laser-like targeting and measurement abilities. As a relatively new media, search engine mechanics and user interaction with search engines remains a bit of a black box for many marketing professionals. In the following discussion, I [...]

• Are you an accomplished woman vying for a place in President Obama’s Cabinet? · 8 Jun 2008
  As Barack Obama prepares his challenge against John McBush, one of his many challenges is to engage and motivate the many constituencies which supported the Hillary Clinton candidacy. It is unlikely that the white racist contingent will rally around Obama’s message of hope any time soon; American is not yet Dante’s paradiso on earth, despite what [...]
• 9 SEO Security Tips for Wordpress · 13 May 2008
  In theory, this is a marketing blog, focusing on search engine optimization, web analytics and other web marketing topics. So what does Wordpress security have to do with Google and SEO? Well one downside of the extended web ecosystem is that the same idiots who jump the queue in the supermarket will try to exploit your [...]
• Remove Wordpress version information from your blog and feeds · 13 May 2008
  By announcing to the world the version of Wordpress you are running, you greatly simplify the work of a hacker. Peter Westwood’s post documents how to suppress output of the Wordpress version number in feeds and blog posts. I’ve packaged his code in a very rudimentary Wordpress plugin which will hide the version number in [...]
• Astra2Connect and Tooway close the Internet digital divide with satellite to home service, maybe. · 2 May 2008
  Regular readers of this blog be warned – this article is about the internet infrastructure needed to insure Internet users are online in the first place. We can perform all of the search engine optimization (SEO) we want, but if our target audience isn’t online due to lack of access, our results are going to [...]
• Search engine optimization for websites in multiple languages · 15 Apr 2008
  A common issue facing companies and organizations with an international presence is how to deploy multilingual sites across one or more Internet domain(s). In other words, should one put all the sites on a .com or .org domain, perhaps taking advantage of directories on the web server to separate each language? Is this the best [...]
• Top level domains, subdomains or directories for Search Engine Optimization of multilingual websites? · 14 Apr 2008
  Companies targeting multiple linguistic markets on the web have a lot to think about when planning their Internet strategy and execution. Ideally, search engine optimization should be part of their strategy considerations. In this article, we look at a technical marketing issue of website localization: how should a company distribute content targeted at different markets [...]
• Google Analytics’ Web Statistics Benchmarking Service · 6 Mar 2008
  Last summer I looked at the different web statistics available for benchmarking the competition. From a marketing point of view, the result wasn’t very good. Poor methodology and a lack of transparency mean that most publicly available web statistics are worse than useless: by providing a false sense of confidence, they can lead to bad [...]
• State of the Net, Udine 2008 · 11 Feb 2008
  So what is the state of the Internet in Italy in the year 2008? Armed with an ambitious, varied agenda spanning two days, speakers from Italy and abroad tried to answer this question during the conference STATEoftheNET, held February 8 and 9 in Udine. We didn’t need to wait long for an answer. Stefano Quintarelli, in [...]
• Become my friend, at least on Facebook · 31 Oct 2007
  For a long time I’ve resisted the tempation to create a profile in Facebook – one can’t be everywhere, no? (Andrey Golub being the exception!) Certainly there aren’t a lack of places online to find business partners. However, I recently received an e-mail from an American woman I met at a meet-up of SEO (search engine optimization) [...]
• Social media to solar power: RomagnaCamp offered it all · 9 Sep 2007
  Fresh back from this weekend’s RomagnaCamp, I’m taking a brief break from a “posting hiatus” to report on the event. After a quick touristic visit to Ravenna on Friday, I caught the bus for Marina Romea. This turned out to be auspicious as I was able to met Giuseppe Lamuraglia of e-net, a company which [...]
• Now there are 6 ways to keep website content out of search engines · 28 Jul 2007
  Several months ago a client inspired me to write a comprehensive guide to keeping website content out of search engines. Usually website owners are focused on the opposite side of search engine optimization, insuring web content is well indexed. Yet, as many can attest, search engines can be all too efficient at finding documents they [...]
• Are we still lying with statistics in the internet age? · 2 Jul 2007
  In the course of a search engine optimization project, I’m often asked during the competitor analysis phase why one website ranks highly in Alexa, while another ranks highly in an other statistics supplier’s top websites survey. As our two part article Web statistics for internet market research: pick a number, any number illustrates, there are a [...]
• Web statistics for internet market research: pick a number, any number · 2 Jul 2007
  How to perform competitor research using web statistics while avoiding lies, damned lies, and …statistics? Comparison with competitors is a fundamental element of business; even innovators need to know how far ahead they are in their market. The Internet seems to offer fertile terrain for capturing accurate marketing statistics on website usage and position relative to [...]
• Google ever present in Desktop Search with release for Linux · 29 Jun 2007
  More than two years after Google launched its Google Desktop Search for Windows application, limited initial support for the Linux platform is available. Of the top three major search engines which offer desktop search software (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft), Google is the first to try to win the hearts and minds of both Macintosh and [...]
• Brand Confusion with Trenitalia’s Website · 21 Jun 2007
  Marketing professionals know that brands are worth big money. A brand name and logo serve as an instant shorthand to convey a mental image of a product or service. Companies invest extensively when developing and launching a new brand name. Once launched, brand names are fiercely protected. Looking for Trenitalia? It was thus with surprise that I [...]
• Web Analytics Optimism in Italy · 24 May 2007
  Last November Luca Meyer organized the first Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) in Milan, in conjunction with the IAB Forum interactive marketing event. All of six people were present to represent the Internet’s accountability side in Italy. A pitiful number when you consider the thousands of visitors at the IAB Forum. Since the Milan WAW, Giovanni Lorenzoni has [...]

• Getting the most out of business oriented social networking services LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo and Neurona · 20 May 2007
  In just a few years, businesses oriented social networking websites have taken off. The industry leader, LinkedIn, counts more than 10 million members despite only being available in English. To take advantage of a professional social networking web service, a user completes a professional profile and invites professional contacts to connect to the profile. Most sites, [...]
• Searching the World’s Information in Google’s Universal Search · 17 May 2007
  Over its short life span, Google has been diligently carrying out its stated mission of organizing the world’s information including web pages and documents, blogs, images, news, finance, videos, books, products & catalogs and local places. Each of these data types has had its own distinct search interface. Internet users could access any of the specialized [...]
• Google rolling out much improved Google Analytics V2 · 11 May 2007
  Google is in the process of releasing a significant update to the free web analytics tool it launched to wide acclaim in November 2005. Although we’ve appreciated the professional feature set in Google Analytics, especially given the cost, the user interface was cumbersome at best. As time went on, Google Adwords features were continually patched on, [...]
• How do search engines, such as Google, handle JavaScript and CSS? · 10 May 2007
  A frequent Search Engine Optimization question is “how do search engines such as Google handle JavaScript and CSS?“ Historically, search engines processed web pages much like an old text video browser such as lynx. A search engine only “saw” what the simplest browser could display – simple html. Much for this reason, search engine optimization consultants [...]
• Harnessing the knowledge of the masses with Google · 8 May 2007
  One of the common problems of writing in a foreign language is that of using the right expressions in the right context. As an example, is the English expression child’s play, a simple task or act, gioco di ragazzi or gioco da ragazzi in Italian? While linguistic websites will undoubtedly provide the answer, sometimes the most [...]
• Keep out: an often overlooked part of Search Engine Optimization · 6 May 2007
  Rare is the web professional who doesn’t know that building a great website isn’t usually enough to guarantee its success. Sites have to be visible in search engines for the keywords and phrases web navigators are most likely to associate with the site’s content. An entire industry has grown up around SEO, search engine optimization. [...]
• Blog statistics with BlogBabel at ZenaCamp in Genoa, Italy · 1 May 2007
  Expats in Italy need to stay on top of professional and daily happenings locally while still engaging in the wider world. This task is made difficult by the vast quantity and quality of resources available in English (my native language), as exemplified by the BBC. Unfortunately, their Italian equivalents, such as the ad-infested [...]
• Internationalization of Web Sites at ZenaCamp, Genoa (Genova) · 29 Apr 2007
  At yesterday’s ZenaCamp in Genova, I gave a presentation on the main issues that are frequently encountered when creating sites for an international audience: Language Accented Characters and Symbols Language Variants Culture A particular focus was made on user issues, such as providing a page in the right language to a site visitor while allowing them to override the choice [...]
• 8 Ways to Optimize Video for Search Engine Visibility · 12 Apr 2007
  If you had not already noticed, there has been an explosion of video on the web. Greater availability of broadband connections, coupled with the rise of video hosting and sharing sites, such as YouTube, has made online video accessible to the masses. In addition to classic search engine optimization, marketing professionals now need to consider how [...]
• Audio & Video Multimedia Search Engine Optimization · 12 Apr 2007
  As broadband usage is increasing, many websites are increasing the audiovisual content available to attract and retain Internet navigators. Unfortunately multimedia, such as images, mp3 podcasts and video, presents a plethora of visibility problems for traditional search engines. Search engine indexing and retrieval technology is tuned for text-based content, such as html files, not multimedia (also [...]
• 8 reasons to avoid Flash (or Silverlight) like the plague when designing a website · 9 Mar 2007
  At a recent Legal Marketing Italia seminar, the question arose as to why a company’s web site doesn’t rank well, even for the company’s name. In Italy, the most common problem encountered with websites is the use of Macromedia / Adobe Flash to develop most or all of a company’s website. This case was no [...]
• Keep sections of web pages out of Yahoo! with class=”robots-nocontent” · 6 Mar 2007
  There are occasions when some content on a web page just shouldn’t appear in search engines. The most frequent example is repeating header and footer details, such as site copyright information. This site uses the hcard format to provide contact information site visitors can save in a vcard for use with a PIM such as [...]
• 6 methods to control what and how your content appears in search engines · 17 Feb 2007
  While it may seem paradoxical, there are many occasions where you may want to exclude a website or portion of a site from search engine crawling and indexing. One typical need is to keep duplicate content, such as printer friendly versions, out of a search engine’s index. The same is true for pages available both [...]
• Google Sitemap Standard Adopted by Three of the Leading International Search Engines · 16 Nov 2006
  Each of the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Live Search) have announced joint support of Google’s sitemaps protocol. 2007-04-11: Ask announces support of the sitemap standard. It is not yet clear if they actually use sitemaps. While Google and Yahoo do process sitemaps, Microsoft does not yet use them. A new site, www.sitemaps.org, [...]
• Accented Characters, Symbols and Special Characters in HTML Documents: Considerations for Search Engine Optimization, Usability and XML Feeds. · 6 Sep 2006
  One issue many international Webmasters face is how to properly manage documents written in languages containing accented and other special, non-English, characters. Does it matter how the special characters are written? Do HTML documents need to contain both accented and non-accented words to be found in search engines? Continuing our series on website internationalization for search [...]
• How to Specify an HTML Web Document Language for good SEO · 17 Aug 2006
  So you just wrote a stunning essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses – in Irish Gaelic. Will Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Ask recognize it as Gaelic, hosted as it is on your co.uk domain? Maybe. But you can given them a hint! The trick is to use all of the HTTP and HTML language code settings available [...]

• Unofficial documentation of Ask’s Web Search API · 26 Jul 2006
  In part one of this article, we set out to document the little known Ask web search API by providing background information. In this continuation, we’ll look at the actual API details. Update: Ask disabled access to their API on 6 March 2007. We are working on obtaining additional information. Write us if you would [...]
• Decrypting Ask’s Web Search API · 26 Jul 2006
  In this article, we set out to document the little known Ask web search API available at xml.teoma.com. One of the many aspects of successful search engine optimization (SEO) is the periodic measurement of how well a site is performing in a particular search engine. Dimensions to measure include the number of pages in the [...]
• Tracking Search Engine Cache Page Views with Web Analytics · 24 Jun 2006
  A small percentage of search engine users may view a web site using a search engine’s saved copy of site pages, their cached version. The cached copy the search engine serves to the user usually contains links to embedded objects present in the original site: images, CSS stylesheets, javascript, etc. Organizations focusing on web marketing [...]
• Search Engine Crawlers: Who’s visiting my site and why? · 17 Jun 2006
  Organizations implementing search engine optimization (SEO) strategies will sooner or later consider monitoring search engine crawling activity. Before a web page can appear in search results, the content has to be discovered through a crawling or spidering process. This is done through software which automatically navigates the web, finding and downloading web content for the [...]
• Google Zeitgeist has a Sibling, Google Trends · 17 May 2006
  Google Labs has launched a new search tool, Google Trends. It displays relative search volumes over time (from 2004 onward) for a set of user defined keywords and keyword phrases. Google Trends joins Google Zeitgeist, a static snapshot of top search trends. In some cases, news events are presented with the search volume, providing insight into [...]
• Top Keyword Search Trends in Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask · 12 May 2006
  An Introduction to Real World Search Engine User Behavior You were just assigned the task to update your website’s keywords. Not yet in the mood to pull out a thesaurus or check out the competition’s keyword meta tags? Then start with a bit of educational fun, reviewing how users really query search engines. Each of the [...]
• Google Maps, formerly Google Local, preparing for Italian Launch? · 25 Apr 2006
  It appears that Google will be rolling out Google Maps coverage for major European countries, including Italy, shortly. A preview with Italian data is available by using the Google Maps UK URL i.e. http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=it. Google Maps is three applications in one: Local business search (primarily yellow pages based data) integrated with a display map Navigation directions (From - [...]
• The Google Webmaster Dashboard, a.k.a. Google Sitemaps · 15 Mar 2006
  In order to index and display web content in their search results, search engines need to be able to find the content. The first generation of Internet search engines relied on webmasters to submit a site’s primary URL, the site’s “home page”, to the search engine’s crawler database. The crawler would then follow each link [...]
• Web Analytics: Embedded JavaScript Page Tracking Code vs. Web Server Log Files · 11 Mar 2006
  Web Analytics tracking choices with advantages and disadvantages Basic Web Analytics tools usually fall into one of two categories: Web server log file based JavaScript embedded page tags Both have advantages and disadvantages. By default, server logs contain much richer data than that usually tracked by JavaScript page tracking. For organizations focused on search engine visibility, web server logs show [...]
• Creating Search Engine Friendly Drop-down menus using CSS · 6 Mar 2006
  JavaScript drop-down menus are employed by many medium to large size web sites as primary navigation tool for site visitors. Drop-down menus offer many advantages. They are already familiar to computer uses who encounter them in almost all mainstream software. By collapsing when not needed, the menus take up little screen space - yet offer [...]
• Web Analytics Embedded JavaScript Page Tracking Code: Place at the top or bottom of the page? · 26 Jan 2006
  Hosted web analytics reporting systems commonly use JavaScript code embedded in site pages to track user viewings of each website page (alternatively the systems download and report on data contained in web server log files). Web Analytics system vendors provide instructions specifying where to place the JavaScript code in a site’s html pages. Usually the tracking [...]
• UK and US English Dialect Considerations for Site Internationalization · 16 Jan 2006
  Search Engines and Site Localization While there are few differences between the UK and US English dialects which might lead to miscomprehension, Noah Webster’s spelling reform does lead to interesting issues which need to be considered when designing sites for international audiences. Update: This document was written in 2006 and no longer represents the current state [...]
• Google Labs has re-released the much-maligned Google Web Accelerator · 24 Nov 2005
  The Google Web Accelerator made a brief appearance in May 2005 before downloads were cut off due to a „maximum capacity of users” being reached. The Accelerator was criticized by many, with privacy and security concerns frequently expressed. Google Labs has made a reworked Accelerator available for download. Aimed at broadband Internet users in Europe and [...]
• Google launches Google Base, a searchable on line database repository. And classified ad server? · 23 Nov 2005
  Already master in the acquisition and management of mostly unstructured data¹, whether it be web pages or word processing documents, Google is now taking on structured data as well. Google Base, currently only available in English, allows users to insert data items which become searchable through a form at base.google.com. 16 types of data to insert [...]
• Former Urchin Web Analytics Reporting Service now free as Google Analytics · 13 Nov 2005
  Google has made its on line web analytics reporting service, Google Analytics, available free of charge to website owners. The service, bought several months ago from Urchin, previously cost a minimum of $2400 / year. The service uses small snippets of code embedded in each page of a website. When the page is requested by an [...]
• Howto - AWStats Enhancements and Extensions · 23 Oct 2005
  This area focuses on resources to enhance the functionality of the web analytics tool AWStats. These resources have been developed based on our client needs. As a contribution, we offer them here. Some may even make it into a future version AWStats! The information here is provided on a „worked for us” as-is basis for your [...]

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