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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? · 09 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? · 03 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 · 02 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? · 08 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. · 02 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 [...]
Google Analytics’ Web Statistics Benchmarking Service · 06 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 · 09 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? · 02 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 [...]
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 · 08 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 · 06 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 · 01 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 [...]

April 2008

Do you have an international business? This month, as part of our continuing series on international SEO issues, we look at SEO domain strategies for website localization.

July 2007

Top Web Statistics for Internet Market Research. Part 1 in a 2 part series.
Web Statistics: Understanding Alexa, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Quantcast and the others. Part 2 in a 2 part series.

May 2007

Yahoo!'s new class="robots-nocontent" html tag keeps sections of a page out of search results.

April 2007

This month we turn our attention to Video SEO, optimizing video and other rich media for search engines and video sharing sites.

An introductory guide to video search engine optimization (SEO)
Top 8 video search engine optimization tips

Many of you asked: when would we offer web marketing courses to the general public? We're pleased to announce we heard you. We're starting with the three fundamentals of web marketing:

March 2007

Is your web agency proposing a Flash based website? Antezeta considers top 7 problems with Flash websites.

February 2007

How can you keep a site's pages out of a search engine? We look at 5 ways to prevent search engines from spidering your site.

November 2006

Three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's Live) announce joint collaboration and support of sitemaps standard.

September 2006

This month we're launching a new site section devoted to website internationalization issues for search engine optimization. In addition to previous articles, we take on the use of HTML special characters:

Accented Characters, Symbols and Special Characters in HTML Documents: Considerations for Search Engine Optimization, Usability and XML Feeds.

August 2006

This month we give long overdue attention to recent developments in the world of Yahoo! Search. We also continue a series on search engine optimization internationalization issues, this time looking at how search engines determine the predominant human language in a html document.

In Yahoo! Sitemap Feed Submission... worth the Effort? Antezeta considers the current state of Yahoo! Sitemaps.
Yahoo! enhances their Yahoo! Site Explorer with additional Search Engine Optimization information in battle to keep up with Google's Webmaster Tools console.
Free Yahoo! Site Map Feed Generator for Search Engine Optimization
How search engines detect html document language. We continue our series on search engine optimization internationalization issues which we began in January.

July 2006

Decrypting Ask's Web Search API. Part I in a series.
Unofficial Ask Web Search API Documentation. Part II in a series.

June 2006

Is your web analytics application tracking all of your search engine page views?
Search Engine Crawlers: Who's visiting my site and why? Considerations of an often overlooked component of site search engine optimization.

May 2006

Google Labs presents Google Trends, a tool to compare search volume over time. Excellent for keyword review.
Top keyword search trends in Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask. An irreverent start to search engine optimization keyword research.

April 2006

Google Maps, formerly Google Local, preparing for Italian Launch?. Preview of Google Maps Italy.

March 2006

The Google Webmaster Dashboard, a.k.a. Google Sitemaps. An excellent search engine optimization tool, not to miss.
Site Architecture best practices: Creating Search Engine Friendly Drop-down menus using CSS
Web Analytics Solutions: Embedded JavaScript Page Tracking Code vs. Web Server Log Files

February 2006

Common Myths and Fallacies about Search Engine Optimization debunked. If a potential SEM firm tells you any of these tall tales, run!

January 2006

Second in a two part step-by-step guide to Analyzing Web Logs with AWStats, published by O'Reilly Media. See also Part 1.
Search Engines and Site Localization: UK and US English Dialect Considerations for Site Internationalization
Web Analytics Embedded JavaScript Page Tracking Code: Place at the top or bottom of the page?

December 2005

First in a two part step-by-step guide to Analyzing Web Logs with AWStats, published by O'Reilly Media.
The Guardian has published The sparring and spin of the Google dance, a rather simplistic look at Search Engine Optimization. For the curious, we captured a snapshot of their sample, Eco Friendly Flip Flops.

November 2005

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