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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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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The rel=”canonical” link duplicate content panacea

As many readers probably know, Google and other search engines recently announced support for a rel=”canonical” link attribute value. The new attribute value canonical (not a tag mind you, link is the html tag) can be used by website developers to specify which of essentially similar web pages is the definitive version.

A SEO problem known as duplicate content arises when websites use different URLs, generally through parameters, to provide slightly different versions of a page, such as a printer friendly version, or to support web analytics campaign tracking. In order to give search users unique choices, search engines tend to choose the “best” URL for a page, filtering out similar versions.

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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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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 such as Google’s AdSense, the specific content of a web page has become much more telling in this regard. Let’s see why.

In this article we will restrict ourselves to advertising as the monetization tool.

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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 Media Metrics and Measurement.

Yet it isn’t sufficient that we measure conversation on the web, we must also consider potential traps hidden in the data – we need to interpret it.

Consider the case of a blog post. The extent that a post has been read and has involved a blog’s readers might be deduced from the number of comments the post has generated. Two potential problems arise using this metric.

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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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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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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 plethora of services offering web statistics. Website owners often cite their Alexa rank to demonstrate how much more important their site is compared to a competitor’s. Other website owners will pay for Nielsen//Netratings panel research, a sampling technique born in the 1930s which surveys about 0% of Italy’s adult population – no wonder then the IAB has called this technique outdated.

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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 other players in a given market. Indeed, most of us have often heard web statistics from Nielsen//NetRatings, Alexa or comScore cited in the press and elsewhere. Practitioners of Search Engine Optimization and web marketing know that web analytics is not just silo analysis of a company’s website: it also entails looking at how a website and its business performance metrics measure up in the overall web ecosystem.

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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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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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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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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 exception.

Update: Google has announced improved crawling support for Flash sites. Our related article Why Flash is still bad for SEO and the Web explains that nothing has changed – the best websites should still avoid Flash. (2 July 2008)

Italy has a strong history of excellence in visual communication, including graphic design. Indeed, the very successful New York City subway signage was designed by an Italian. Many Italian graphic designers have worked on web sites, adopting Flash as their preferred technology when moving from the printed media to the web. Flash allows “pixel perfect” control over web design, including font specification.

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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 activities, such as search engine optimization, will want to track all search engine activity, including cached page views.

Referrers from the search engine’s cached copy will show up in the site’s web server log files, including the keywords and keyword phrases used to find the cached copy. In some cases, the user will click through to the original website, viewing a real page with cache referring information in the web server log file.

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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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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 testing, verification and potential adoption.

ExtraSection Samples

AWStats has an excellent custom report syntax called ExtraSection which enables an organization to both extend standard AWStats and add organization specific reports. Below we offer ExtraSection samples useful for sites involved in search engine optimization web marketing and / or monitoring of traffic from external sites.

Web server log analysis can be memory and CPU resource intensive. AWStats documentation notes that each ExtraSection reduces AWStats speed by about 8%. Proceed with caution.

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