Thursday, April 28, 2005

monitor adsense

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

Just been using the tool from http://www.asrep.com for quite a while now, and it is really a good tool.

You get all sort of stats about who has clicked on which ad, where they come from, etc ...

If you cross analyse the data provided, you can then identify how much you make out of each page! All you need to do then is to adjust your landing page in adwords or overture (or other PPC provider) to lead your propects to the right page.

I have been doing that on 1 testing site. the $50 were paid back in 3 days (monetisation has been multiplied by a factor 4!). Worth the investment.

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

List of "pick of the day"

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

You may want to get your hand on a nice list of "pick of the day" websites, to keep your viral campaigns rolling. Found a nice one on URLwire (Eric wards, the linking "guru").

Yahoo Picks of the Day/Week -
Forbes Best of The Web -
Exploratorium's Web Picks -
USA Today Web Guide/Hot Sites -
The Scout Report -
Education World -
NetGuide -
Guardian Web Watch -
Berit's Best Sites for Kids -
ZEAL -
BackWash -
Busy Educator's Guide to the Web -
Netsurfer Digest -
Surfing the Net With Kids -
Parents Best Web Sites -
Kids Web -
Lockergnome -
MyLook -
BestHistorySites -
Best of PhysicsWeb -
Suite101 -
About.com -
NY Public Library Best of the Web -
FamilyTree Best of the Web -
Classroom Earth Best of the Web

Enjoy!

Saturday, April 23, 2005

check for nofollow tag

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

You want to get good depp links to your site, and use your signature as a natural pointer ... you have to make sure that the blog, forum, etc ... doesn't add the attribute rel="nofollow" to the links you have got in your signature.

One solution is to check the code out. Not a big deal if you have got to do it just a few times. But really becomes a pain when you come across this thing daily.

Here is a more clever way to automate the task (with Internet Explorer):

1) Create a bookmark (anything, why not www.jazar.co.uk for instance) :-)
2) select the favorite, and right click on it - change the property to:

javascript:var
a=document.getElementsByTagName('a');function nfc
(){for(var
i=0;i<a.length;i++){if(a[i].rel.toLowerCase()
=='nofollow') {a[i].style.backgroundColor='#f00';a
[i].style.border='2px
solid #000';a[i].style.color='#fff';}}}nfc
();



3)rename the bookmark to something you can remember - nofollow for example.
4) Before posting on a new site, click onthis favourite, and all the links using nofollow will be highlighted.

Friday, April 22, 2005

New PageRank update

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

All sites have been updated.

But as I keep saying to our clients (but I still get comments such as: oh, that's a shame we have released the site a bit too late, the update doesn't show anything for our site), don't focus on it!

It is just a "marketing" tool, to convince people that your site "knows" what it "talks about". It shows that other site are pointing their visitors to your site. It basically means that your site gets good references from other sites.

Pagerank is used in the google algorithm, but th value displayed is not a real time one. So...having a pagerank null doesn't mean that your site will have to wait until the next update before taking off. It only means that you will have to wait until the next update to get a snapshot of what the PageRank was.

Pagerank is a bit like a star you are watching in the sky. because of light speed limitation (google have got their own limitations ...), you only see a snapshot of what the star WAS, not what the star actually IS. But it still makes people dream, or even speculate on the future...a bit like pageRank really! But at the end of the day, a star is only a star, and a pageRank is only a pageRank.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

drinks are on me

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

http://www.google.com/googlegulp/

Friday, April 15, 2005

what is a good conversion rate

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

Some interesting figures here (different according vertical market).They're aggregated from Fireclick's actual Web analytics retail customers, spanning December 1, 2003, to March 1, 2004:

Vertical ¦ Conversion Rate (%)
Catalog ¦ 6.1
Specialty stores ¦ 3.9
Fashion/apparel ¦ 2.2
Travel ¦ 2.1
Home and furnishing ¦ 2.0
Sport/outdoors ¦ 1.4
Electronics ¦ 1.1
All verticals ¦ 2.3
Source: Fireclick Index

These figures are very useful to help you building your business plan. but they cannot be used as stand alone for your analytics.

I prefer to have 1000 visitor/day and 2% conversion rate, rather than 100 visitors/day and 10% conversion rate.

but then, you have to take into account average value of your basket, etc ...

Conclusion: conversion cannot be used alone, and must be combined with other indicators prior initiating any "marketing" action. It is a strong indicator though, and can be used alone to convince people that your site or project is on the right track. A 2% conversion rate means that your site has got the potential to sell - this is a very strong argument to convince people investing in your project.

Monday, April 11, 2005

Jeremy Jaynes

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

Jeremy Jaynes is a spammer with very bad luck ... sentenced to 9 years for unsolicited emails!

Probably a coincidence, but it happened in Virginia, where AOL has got its headquarters.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

feedster down

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

Feedster has now been down for more than 24 hours ... what is going on there?

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Zoom Info

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

Want to find info about someone? Sounds like this site is for you. Mmmh, I looked for my name and could not find it! How useless!

So...well..added my profile: Emmanuel idé

I don't really see the point of such a website - unless you have got this in your favorite, and too lazy to spend 5 minutes browsing results in your search engine, this is probably a good tool to use to look up names.

Let's see if this profile get ranked #1 for my name then. If so, there is a reason to register to keep control of the type of info.

In february, I attended a show as a speaker, and I wanted to check out who was the guy who moderated the debate - first result in google led me to a porn website where a guy (found out later that he was not the actual moderator) with the same name put in display his best physical assets. During the show, could not manage to take him seriously!

conclusion. very important to keep control of your own image on internet, and if a site provides you with a way to control result#1 for your name, jump on the opportunity!

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

"sorcier glouton"

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

SEO is becoming more and more popular in france. I was listening to Olivier Andrieu (Abondance website, who has written a few books about SEO, specifically for Google) and heard about these SEO challenges, last one being ranking as well as possible for "sorcier glouton in MSN.

I think that it is quite a waste of time to be honest. If I want to do some on SEO, I'll do that to promote a service, a product, not to promote my own capability of promoting myself .... which is not even the case, because at the end of the day the big winner is ... the organiser of the challenge.

Here is a new challenge: try to get the best ranking in google for "Jazar, the best online solutions in the world!".

I hope that a lot of SEOs will read this thread :-), specially the ones involved in the sorcier glouton challenge.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

new patent from Google

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

Everybody has now heard of the new patent from google. Google may want to use this patent to keep the competition out, but by doing so they take the risk of giving too much information away to SEOpimisers.

That's why it is pretty clear that some information contained in this patent reflects technology currently used by google in its algorithm, or technology google may use in the close futur. Others are just jokes to drive the SEO reader into the wrongs direction.

Below is a short summary of the patent (from graywolf):

Domain Factors
Length of domain registration (section 0099)
Domains are monitored for changes in expiration (section 38,39)
Nameserver, and Whois data is monitored for changes and valid physical addresses (same technology used in google maps)
Name servers and possibly class C networks should have a mix of whois data, registrars, and keyword and non-keyword domains (section 0101)
Documents/websites are given a discovery date when they are discovered through any of the following means
external link
user gathered data(sections 1,2,3,4, 38)
Websites must have more than one document (section 5)
Change in the weighting of key terms for a domain are monitored for changes (section 50)
Changes in a domain to topics that don't match prior content are an indicator of change of focus, existing prior links will be discounted (section 0084)

Documents and Pages
Documents are compared for changes in the following
frequency (time frame)
amount of change
(section 6,7,8, 9, 11, 12)
Number of new documents (internal ?) linked to document is recorded (sections 9,13)
Change in the weighting of key terms for the document is recorded (section 10, 14)
Documents are given a staleness (lack of change?) rating (section 19)
The rate at which content of a document changes and it's anchor text changes are recorded (section 31, 33)
Outbound links to low trust or affiliate websites may be an indicator of low quality (section 0089)
Don't change the focus of many documents at once ( section 0128)

Links
A links anchor text and discovery date are recorded (sections 54, 55, 56, 57, 58)
Links are given a discovery date and monitored for appearance and disappearance over time(section 22,26, 58)
Links and anchor text are monitored for growth rates (section 48)
Links are monitored for changes in anchor text over a given period of time (sections 27, 30, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58)
Links are weighted on trust or authoritativeness of the linking document, as is the newness or longevity of the link (section 28, 58, 0074)
Link growth of independent peer documents (different class C networks?) are monitored.
The rate at which new links to a document appear or disappear is monitored (sections 23, 24)
A freshness rating of new links is recorded (section 32)
It is determined whether a document has trend of appearing or disappearing links (section 25)
A distribution rating for the age of all links is recorded (section 29)
Links that have a long lifespan are more valuable over links that have a shorter lifespan (section 59)
Links from stale pages are devalued where links from fresh pages are given a boost (section 60)
Link churn is monitored and recorded (section 61, 62)
New websites are not expected to have a large number of links (section 0038)
Link growth should remain constant and slow (section 0069, 0077)
Burst link growth may be a strong indicator of search engine spam ( section 0077)
If a document is stale (not changed) but is still acquiring new links it will be considered fresh ( section 0075)
If a document is stale and has no link growth or has a decrease of inbound links it's outbound links will be discounted (section 0080)
A spike in links would be acceptable if document has one or more links from authority documents (section 0110)
Anchor text should be varied as much as possible (sections 0120, 121)
The growth of variation in anchor text should remain consistent (section 0120, 0121)

Search Results
Volume of searches over time are recorded and monitored for increases (sections 17, 18)
Information regarding a documents rankings are recorded and monitored for changes (sections 41, 42, 43)
Click through rates are monitored for changes in seasonality, or burst increases, or other spike traffic (section 43, 44)
Click through rates are monitored for increase or decrease trends (section 51, 52, 53)
Click through rates are monitored to see if stale or fresh documents are preferred for a search query (sections 20, 21)
Click through rates for documents for a search term is recorded (sections 15, 16, 37, 43)

User Data
traffic to a document is recorded and monitored for changes (possibly through toolbar, or desktop searches of cache and history files) (section 34, 35)
User behavior is websites are monitored and recorded for changes (click through back button etc)(section 36, 37)
User behavior is monitored through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temp files (possibly through google toolbar or desktop search) (section 46)
Bookmarks and favorites are monitored for both additions and deletions (section 0114, 0115)
User behavior for documents are monitored for trends changes (section 47)
The time a user spends on website may be used to indicate a documents quality of freshness (section 0094)

miscellaneous
Documents that change frequently in ranking may be be considered untrustworthiness (0104)
Keywords with little or no change in results should match domains with stable rankings (section 0105, 106, 107)
Keywords with high volatility of change should have domains with more volatility (section 0105, 106, 107)

Monday, April 04, 2005

Linking Linking Linking

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

A List of different linking tactics. A must read if you are still confused about how to do your linking properly.

http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/leglinkpop.html

Friday, April 01, 2005

awards in cafe de paris

Add to Delicious Digg this links to this post -

http://www.netimperative.com/awards/2005

Net Imperatives results are there. Make sure to check the rising stars out. Was a great party, I love the club, stylish & full of vibe, and Hamilton is a funny piece of guy.