When Yahoo announced their effective exit from the search engine business last July, the main points seemed clear:

• Microsoft will provide the development and management of search engine results technology
• Microsoft will provide the search and content network ad platform
• Microsoft will manage the relationship with all but an elite group of advertisers
• Yahoo will provide their own user interface on top of Microsoft’s Bing data

The Bing-Yahoo agreement, should it receive the necessary anti-trust approvals, may have a wider impact on web marketers (as a side note, I believe the agreement is a bad thing as it reduces competition in this strategic market). Consider the uncertainty surrounding just two of the web marketing tools currently provided by Yahoo:

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In a recent article on Microsoft’s bing, I felt it necessary to temper my enthusiasm for Microsoft’s commitment to web search by noting Microsoft’s decidedly checkered record as a good net citizen. What about Google?

It is almost too easy to write a glowing review of whatever new service Google unleashes. For example,

• Google Maps Street View enables us to preview a new client’s street and building prior to a first visit – a boon in city environments
• Google Translate has improved so significantly of late that it really is useful in providing rough draft translations of search marketing articles
• Google Squared provides an innovative take on structuring search results for items with multiple attributes.

However while enthusing over Google’s services one might ask,

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As many may know by now, Google has been experimenting for a few months with Ajax (JavaScript) based search results. One problem with the initial trial was that no referrer information was passed when a user clicked on a search result, “breaking” the historic ability of Web Analytics systems to track search traffic from Google. Google has more than one service on each of it’s domains which may send traffic to a website, such as the Google Reader, so just knowing traffic is from Google isn’t so informative.

Keyword information from search referrers is in particular very important as we want to know not only where our visitors came from, but what was their intent, intent indicated though the keywords they use to express their need or desire while searching.

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To judge by an e-mail I received, and this post Microsoft is abandoning the Live Metrics solution it relaunched as adCenter Analytics.

On a personal level, this reminds me lot of another web area (book search) where Microsoft competed with Google but later got cold feet and pulled out. I hope Yahoo remains steady in its commitment to Web Analytics [and hope they open it to SEO folks like me ]

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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 best present it. The line-up is an all star cast – two in house SEO practitioners at companies, that among other things, own search engines. As if that wasn’t enough, we also have John Marshall, founder and former CEO of Clicktracks. Rounding up the line-up is Jessica Bowman, a SEO consultant specializing in setting up and guiding in-house SEO programs.

Moderator: Jessica Bowman, Founder, SEOinhouse.com

Speakers:

• Duane Forrester, Senior Program Manager SEO, Microsoft

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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 2^nd. 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 a SEO quiz

The idea of the quiz came from reflections on the state of SEO knowledge and usage in Italy, observed from the perspective of a SEO practitioner.

Search engines, with Google in particular (question 1), are the gate keepers between us and the net. We use search engines not only to search for information that we imagine is out there somewhere, but also to navigate to a specific site, such as Fiat, or to perform a task, such as buy a ticket for a Tiziano Ferro concert (question 15).

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Note to the reader: this article was originally posted on our Italian blog on October 28^th. 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 check, just for fun, your SEO knowledge! We’ve prepared 15 multiple choice questions on topics which appear frequently in SEO projects.

Only for a limited time

The quiz will be available for just 5 weeks, from 28 October to 1 December 2008. Once the quiz is over, the correct answers and the overall results will be published here. Participants will receive an e-mail with their results and a certificate of participation.

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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 beat.

One particular report, the Search Engine report, is of particular interest to companies looking to optimize their organic search engine marketing activity. This report identifies sources of search traffic that brought visitors to the website.

For each search engine source, a drill-down feature shows the keywords people used – the very keywords which express a visitor’s intent as they came to your website.

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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 for other SEO activities.

The last two table columns indicate if a search engine is recognized by Google Analytics and Microsoft adCenter Analytics. See these related articles for more information about search engine and keyword detection in these two Web Analytics systems:

• Improve search engine and keyword reporting in Google Analytics, a SEO best practice
• Microsoft adCenter Analytics search engine recognition & keyword reporting

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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 its Web Analytics tool says a lot: with adCenter Analytics you know the priority is on advertising. Google has taken a softer approach with Google Analytics; sure there is and will be strong integration with AdWords, yet everyone is welcome to take advantage of Google Analytics even if they aren’t (yet) an AdWords client. The official line is that having experienced the power of measuring business results derived from a company’s web presence, marketing professionals will be more inclined to become AdWords clients. One presumes as well that the data collected by Google Analytics is used inside Google to measure the overall state of traffic on the web (including Google’s competitor’s market share – the benchmarking with other sites feature gives an idea of the possibilities). I hope that Microsoft will adopt a more enlightened Internet strategy and aggressively promote adCenter Analytics usage among non-adCenter clients. Google is a great company but could use some competition.

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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 Massa Marittima… but didn’t you forget something? Internal Site Search perhaps?

By Internal Site Search we mean a search feature on your website to allow site visitors to find what they’re looking for, using their own words.

Don’t fret, there are good reasons to deploy site search functionality and it’s relatively easy to do.

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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 and complexity of available reports in commercial systems, sufficiently intimidating many business professionals away from Web Analytics.

Google’s Google Analytics

Google, with their release of Google Analytics in November 2005, removed the first obstacle, cost, by releasing the first free “full featured” Web Analytics system. Previous free tools, such as AWStats, lack robust visitor recognition and click stream analysis, among other things. Yet a significant obstacle still remained to general Web Analytics usage: how to find the “important” data, without getting lost in a sea of confusing and often redundant reports? In May 2007 Google released an updated Google Analytics with a significant focus on the user interface, specifically as a response to this need.

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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 business decisions.

It is thus with much interest that I note the announcement of a new web marketing benchmarking comparison service from Google.

Integrated into Google Analytics, this functionality will be limited in scope:

• Sites must use Google Analytics and enable their participation in the program.
  • Competitors such as Fireclick’s web analytics benchmark index make some data publicly available without having to use the tracking tool. I can already think of the work-arounds some companies will find to this issue.

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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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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 which pages have been crawled by each search engine crawler – and how recently.

• JavaScript page tracking code does not trigger when a page is downloaded by automated robots. Proponents of JavaScript systems tout this as beneficial – their systems only track human activity. This is really just putting a brave face on a limitation. Better web log file analysis systems are able to separate human from non-human traffic.

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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 code is placed in the page heading section (<head>), or at the page bottom, right before the body closing tag, </body>.

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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 Internet navigator, a call is made to Google’s servers which track basic information such as the page, the time, the browser, the user’s host IP address and referring URL if any.

There are some strings attached. Sites will be limited to tracking 5 million pages a month unless they also participate in Google’s AdWords. Thus, the free, no-strings attached offer is effectively limited to smaller sites filling niche markets and needs.

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