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 worked to keep the ball rolling by organizing Web Analytics Association / WAW events in Bologna. Yet therein lies the problem: with the apparently small Italian web analytics community spread across the peninsula, significant meet-ups can only occur when there is a critical mass due to an Internet industry event happening at the same time.

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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, with differing degrees of success, offer the possibility to upload contacts from an email system and/or a file of contacts.

Who should insert a profile?

Professionals seeking career opportunities, consulting offers and business deals have everything to gain from the visibility a profile in a business oriented social networking site offers. Most services offer a basic profile and set of features free of charge. The real cost is the time it takes to fill out and maintain a profile.

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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 search types, known as a vertical search, using links (tabs in the past) above the Google search box. Unfortunately, most people don’t realize the power of “advanced search“, leaving the specialized Google search engines underutilized.

Google has decided to default a user’s search across multiple data categories, mixing data source types in order of relevance. In addition to Google’s new Universal search, the specialized, or vertical, search tools are still available via links which have been moved to the top left of the search screen.

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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, making it difficult for even an experienced web analytics practitioner to navigate through a sea of somewhat repeating, redundant reports.

Google Analytics Reloaded

In version two, the Google Analytics user interface has been completely overhauled. Big bold fonts, similar to those used in feedburner’s statistics, and vibrant colors make key data points and trends much more intelligible. Report and date range selection has been simplified.

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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 have long advocated that site developers keep site coding simple, avoid hiding navigation systems in JavaScript menus and the like.

Today the situation is more complex. Google and the other search engines will try to extract links from anything they can – from PDF files to JavaScript embedded in a web page. This process is not foolproof, however – a site should still avoid relying solely on a JavaScript based navigation system, especially when CSS is a better choice.

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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 efficient way to get the answer is to tap the knowledge of the masses available in Google or a similar search engine.

In the process of cataloging multiple billions of pages, the major search engines have amassed a fairly good sized data sample of how often an expression is used and usually provide the context of the search phrase in the search engine results snippet or abstract.

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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. Yawn, you say.

What about the reverse side of the coin, keeping content out of search engines? Should be easy, no? Maybe not. In February, we looked at 5 ways to stop Google and the other search engines from downloading and indexing a website’s pages.

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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 public broadcaster RAI, just can’t compete for my attention.

It doesn’t get much easier on the web marketing front. The primary search engines in Italy are the US based Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask, sometimes found in their rebranded skins: Arianna (enhanced by Google) and Virgilio (listed by Google as a customer). Inevitably, most of my web marketing reading is English language centric.

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