K'necht-It

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K'necht-It

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This blog concentrates on search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and web analytics. Despite this desire, if I come across something that I find interesting, you can be sure I'll post something about it.

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alan@knechtology.com

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Upcoming Events

2010-03-16T11:50:00.008-04:00

I'll be speaking and moderating a few sessions at various up-coming conferences. Here is the most current list of events where you can here me speak. Yes I'm bragging but all these events are great events and worth attending.

March 31, 2010 I'm in Toronto at Marketing Magazine's - Search Engine Tune Up on a panel discussing the future of search.

http://www.marketingmag.ca/search/

April 8 & 9, 2010 I'm speaking on 2 panels and moderating another at SMX Toronto. I've on this conference's advisory board so I can ensure you that this conference is going to be great. As well I can offer you a 15% discount to the event. Simply use the code knecht15 when you register to receive the discount for SMX Toronto.

http://search marketingexpo.com/toronto

April 13 & 14, 2010 I'm heading down to Dallas Texas for PubCon Spring. I'll be on a panel on the second day discussing web analytics and how to leverage all this great info to improve on-line marketing campaigns

http://pubcon.com

So I hope to see you at one of these events and if you are attending any of these events be sure to track me down and say hi.

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Twitter Training for Business

2010-01-31T13:50:00.002-05:00

My company K'nechtology Inc. has just released two more dates in February for our live interactive twitter for business training program. The reviews from the January sessions were fantastic and several people who couldn't attend the sessions in January ask for some more dates.

We hope these sessions will be just as popular as the January ones, so check the website for the new dates and I encourage you to reserve your spot as soon as possible. If these dates don't meet your requirements please let me know.

Here is just one of the many comments we received about hour Twitter sessions:

I was impressed by a thorough and complete introduction to Twitter and it's applications for business. I feel ready to apply the knowledge I gained through his succinct and practical explanations of Twitter and related topics - all in just one hour! If you think you'd like to Tweet, take this course, you will be glad you did.

Dr. Kyra Gerber
Courtyard Chiropractic Clinic
Toronto, Ontario

WebTrends Engage

2010-01-31T13:43:00.002-05:00

This week I'm off to New Orleans to participate in Webtrends Engage. I'll be giving a talk/workshop on Tuesday about the importance of tracking phones calls generated by web traffic and tracking it back to their original marketing source.

This address is in partner ship with Mongoose Metrics. I've been working with them since October and have previously address the importance of integrating the data captured by call tracking software into corporate web analytic reports.

I'm really looking forward to this address as the people at Webtrends have also really stepped up to support this talk and have recognized the importance of this type of integration.

As a user of Webtrends since their original version 1, I can't wait for this conference and the opportunity to gather more information and innovation to continue to support my companies Webtrends clients and update our Webtrends training material with the latest product innovations.

Up Coming Conferences

2010-01-10T15:55:00.002-05:00

While the list isn't finalized my list of speaking engagements over the next few months promises to keep me busy. While I've spoken at some of these events in the past it will be the first time for me at the Webtrends engage event and the Fanshawe College's "Turning Clicks Into Customers".

Here's the detailed list with dates. I hope to see you at one of these events and if you're there be sure to introduce yourself.

Webtrends Engage - New Orleans - Feb 1 - 4
Executing Social Media - Toronto - Feb 10
Fanshawe Colledge - London, Ontario - March 1
SMX Toronto - April 8-9

I'm also on the conference board for SMX Toronto. So while the topic of my conference address isn't finalized, I can assure that I'll also be moderating a few sessions as well.

Twitter Training Program

2010-01-10T15:33:00.003-05:00

I'm happy to announce here in my blog that my company K'nechtology Inc. has just launched a 1 hour on-line twitter training seminar.

What separates out our training session from most on-line Twitter training programs is that is live and full interactive. Most others are either recorded video podcasts or a PowerPoint presentation. While these are fine for most people, from our experience not all people can take this form of training and apply it immediately without some trial and error.

By having a live sessions, users can ask specific questions relating to their needs and have them answered in real time.

K'nechtology is offering these courses at the inaugural price of $25 per person with a maximum number of 10 people participating per session. No date has been set when the price will be increased, but you can be sure at this price demand will be high.

While you may feel comfortable using Twitter on a personal level or even for your business, think about recommending this program to others. I know I'm constantly being asked "Why should I being using Twitter" or "How do I use Twitter" or anyone of hundred different questions.

Here is a list of just some of the topics covered:
Basics of Twitter;
Choosing the right Twitter Account ID;
Monitoring your Twitter account
Twitter terminology;
How to develop a following of both existing clients, potential clients; and
More effective Tweats through article linking and the use of "hash tags"

Best of all, I will be personally conducting first few of these session. So I know they'll be information packed and those attending will be able to hit the ground running (tweating). If you have any questions of this training seminar, drop me a line.

Cookie consent law is breathtakingly stupid

2009-11-10T12:30:00.002-05:00

For years I've written about why the public shouldn't be afraid of cookies except for the calories in the ones people eat. Despite my efforts, fear has continued to grow in part spurred on my anti-virus software companies that look for tracking cookies.

What most people don't get is that effective ecommerce web sites need cookies to operate. Web analytics software need cookies to create more accurate statistics of user behavior to conintually improve the sites usability and improve marketing campaigns to better convey message to their target audience.

So I'm shocked, but not surprised that the EU is passing a law that will effectively ban the use of cookies on EU based web sites without specific user permissions.

For all the details on this new law and all the stupid impacts please read http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/cookie-consent-law-is-breathtakingly-stupid-648740 from TechRadar.com

Tracking Phone Calls in WebTrends

2009-11-06T14:59:00.003-05:00

About 8 weeks ago I was contacted by Mongoose Metrics.

The purpose of this contact was two fold. First they wanted to demonstrate their product. Mongoose Metrics is an web/marketing analytics tool for tracking and attributing on-line phone calls back to the referring on-line marketing campaign.

The product works simply: by adding some java script to you page and a bit tagging. The result is that everyone who comes to your site sees a different toll-free number. This number is recorded in a cookie along with information about the referrer. If they came directly to your site, the visitor sees the default number.

The cool thing happens when a web site visitor decides to call because they need more information or to place the order over the telephone. The software then very cleanly capatures all the referrer information and displays it to you in a easy to read report format. With a bit of advance set-up you can even break it down by different marketing programs.

Now the exciting part and the second reason Mongoose contacted me. They wanted to see if it was possible to integrate their data automatically into WebTrends. After a bit of trial and error, I developed the framework for the integration and Mongoose quickly developed the code on their end to make it possible.

So what does it mean to the average WebTrends web analytics team. With a bit of effort and creation of some WebTrends Custom Reports, you can now know which campaigns (and any variable within your campaigns translation file) drove people to call in. This conversion point is no longer a mystery.

During our tests we were able to successfully monitor calls generated by a Twitter post (tweat), a link in a Facebook status, traffic from organic and paid search including which keyword phrases generated the calls.

The method was successfully tested with both WebTrends OnDemand and an locally installed version of WebTrends (must be using the SDC feature). Beyond passing a conversion point, the configuration also allows for you to set a dollar value to be assigned to each call. While this value is fix in your configuration right now, plans are being made to develop a way to make the value of call arbitrary and in control of the person who took the call. This feature is still under development and no time line has been provided. However, even with assigning an average call value, better quality ROI calculations can be made to better optimize your campaigns.

Below are some sample reports from WebTrends

Paths to and from the call

Orders By Campaign ID (in this case the order is a phone call)

We are still conducting tests, but I expect this feature to be available to the general public before the end of year. If you'd like more information please let me know and I'll be glad to make the appropriate introductions.

Getting Ready for Pubcon

2009-10-27T13:29:00.005-04:00

It's hard to believe it's been a year since the last PubCon marketing conference in Las Vegas. To me this is one of the best organized and informative conferences of the year and I start looking forward to it as soon as the last one is finished.

What makes this conference so great, is it the location or the quality of the speakers or something else? As to location, unlike many others, I'm not a fan of Las Vegas for a conference. Yes this year hotel deals are plentiful, but all those neon lights give me a headache.

So it must be the great quality of speakers at the event. Yes over 3 days of presentations the shear number of speakers can be overwhelming. I personally will be speaking during two sessions and the quality of the speakers is a good as anywhere. While you might find all of us at one conference most of the speakers speak at other quality events throughout the years. So what is the big deal?

What I see going between the sessions in the halls at the conference is something you don't usually see. People talking to other people and exchanging ideas, making friends and network connections. It through these new friends and connection that the benefit of the conference continues to grow throughout the year. I attribute this lose/casual/friendly environment to the conference organizers and their ability to get everyone in the right mood.

So with just two weeks before the opening keynote, if you haven't booked your ticket and registered time is running out. To those of you who know you'll be there be sure to tap me on the shoulder in Vegas and say hi.

Best Search Engine for Canada

2009-08-20T11:30:00.004-04:00

According to Hitwise and reported by Search Engine Watch today, the best quality search engine in Canada is Bing despite being ranked 6th in popularity.

http://www.searchengineland.com/best-search-engine-in-canada-hitwise-says-bing-24208

The primary reason given is that Bing is doing the best job of localizing search results. Through our own tests at K'nechtology, we've seen very little difference in search quality from Toronto office. So is Hitwise's data wrong, are our test wrong or has Hitwise simply assumed something about the results based on user behavior.

If you read the article you'll see its based on how many searches a person does before stopping. This assumes that the person found what they wanted when they stopped. Here is where I believe they've made some wrong assumptions.

1. Bing is new and lots of people are checking them out. This means "let me do a search on Bing for something I search on a lot and lets see what the results are." After their initial search or two when they don't see a significant difference between Bing and Google they return to Google as their primary search engine. Hence Bing is ranked number 6 in terms of popularity

2. While Bing may have a slight advantage in localized search, from this article it still doesn't appear that Canadians are doing long query strings and are still sticking to 1-2 word search queries. So if that query includes a geo-location then perhaps Bing is giving better results, but they did not analyze how many people include a city or province in their search. From the various clients data that we've analyzed even when they rank extremely well for an organic search phrase that includes a geo-locations, the vast majority of organic search traffic comes from phrases that don't include a geo-locations. So in my opinion this localization benefit of Bing is marginal at best.

3. Are people simply giving Bing the once over and doing a single or a secondary search and saying "so what, I'll stick to what I've been using".

Ultimately, it is going to be up to users to try Bing, see if they like the results and then to switch their default search engine. For that to happen Bing has to start promoting themselves here in Canada. In the US, I've seen TV commercials, heard radio ads and seen print ad. In Canada, next to nothing except at some industry trade shows. Unfortunately, this holds true for all the major search engines.

Canada's population is comparable to that of California, yet from my observations the amount of money spent by the major search engines here in Canada to promote themselves is a minor fraction of the California spend. Attention all search engines, if you want to take a bite out of Google's market share here in Canada, then start promoting yourselves by something more than word of mouth.

WebTrends 9

2009-08-17T08:47:00.002-04:00

Two weeks back, WebTrends announced version 9.0. As with all recent upgrades this version is only be released to users of WebTrends on Demand. The good news is they expect by late this quarter or early October to release version 9 for the installed version.

This approach is both good and bad for users of the software version. The bad part is obvious, we don't get our hands on this latest version which holds so much promised and should make all of our reporting that much more completed.

On the other hand, when it is released, we can be assured that it will be relatively bug free and stable.

My clients really do appreciate that reduced frequency of the minor updates, as they can concentrate on the numbers and not a parade of upgrades and batches (unlike other products). I on the other hand feel that in many instances users of the software version are being punished as they do not always get some of the improved reporting. It is one thing not to release the a, b, c of the same version, but not to release intra version releases (i.e. 8.6) makes me wonder. My best guess is that WebTrends is really trying to get all users to migrate to the on-demand version. While I don't have any issues with it and have several clients using it, for many it is simply not an option based on corporate policies and the legal stance of where data is stored.

Either way, I'm looking forward to WebTrends 9 full release.

PubCon and more

2009-08-17T08:35:00.002-04:00

If you've been following my near daily tweats (http://twitter.com/aknecht), you'll know that I'm speaking again this year at PubCon. PubCon which will run from November 10 - 13 in Las Vegas is by far the best networking industry conference I've ever attended. The combination of numerous sessions and what seems an endless number of nightly events make it ideal for making industry friends.

PubCon is first and foremost a search marketing conference put on by the people who bring us WebMaster world. This year the response to the conference from what I've heard has been fantastic despite the economy. By the end of July (then end of the first tier of early bird registration) they were well ahead of previous years. Also the number of people submitting proposals to speak at the conference has increased and made the work of conference organizers that much harder. Only over the past few days have some sessions been announced. I'm still waiting to hear what I'll be speaking on. I'm hoping to be on one of the Web Analytics sessions, but might just end up in a SEO and Design session like have been for the past two years. With some luck perhaps all the sessions will be announced by the end of the month.

If you've thought about this conference in the past this may be your best opportunity. Hotel costs in Las Vegas are the lowest they've been in years. This year I'm staying at the same hotel as last year and the room rate is 40% lower.

Beyond PubCon, I've also been book to speak at a Social Network/Web Marketing workshop series in my home city of Toronto called "Executing Social Media". This event is schedule to take place on October 28th and 29th. The details are still being finalized and I expect the their web site and registration system to be ready within the next week or two. More on this event as the details (location, registration, price) are announced.

Either way, if your at either of these events please tab me on the shoulder and say hi.

AT Internet Training & Certification

2009-07-20T21:29:00.003-04:00

Last month my company K'nechtology Inc. became the first Canadian partner for AT Internet. AT Internet provides a high-end web analytics tool which competes in the market space currently occupied by such giants as Omniture Site Catalyst and WebTrends.

For the past 4-5 weeks I've been giving it a trial run and loving it. Today I started a 4 day training course which dives deep into the product as part of becoming certified as an expert on the product itself. The course will run until Thursday after which myself and my firm will be able to provide product support for AT Internet's web analytics product as well as becoming an authorized reseller.

I'll be posting some screen shots of some of the cooler things it does in a day or two. For right now, consider that this product can provide information on how far down a screen your visitors are viewing (especially useful for analyzing longer pages to see if people read to the bottom) as well as provide a 5 point images called a "radar graph" which easily displays 5 KPI on one image for easy segmentation analysis.

More on this product over the next couple of days.

Search Engine Strategies - Toronto

2009-06-10T13:41:00.002-04:00

For the past two days, I was totally engrossed in Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto show. My hat goes off to this years conference organizers at Incisive truly came through and took all the negative criticism from the past couple of year and turned it around.

Change from the Toronto conference centre to the Sheraton Centre was by far the biggest improvement. No longer were attendees and speaker subjected to the dungeon like bottom floor of the convention centre, but instead were treated to a much warmer environment even if it was all virtually on the bottom floor as well. Perhaps it was just the lighting and the cushy carpeted floors, but it just worked better and there were not (or at least I couldn't find them) black holes where you cellphone wouldn't work.

As usual, the quality of speakers was fantastic as usual and Andrew Goodman who chaired this event did an excellent job developing the session topics. Grant many of the session were very basic, but there were a few sessions and frequently at least one panelist who took it to the next level.

One change I did notice this year was the background of the attendees. In past year there were many do it yourself business types at the event trying to figure out how to do SEO and PPC on their own. This time around there was the usual independent SEO consultants and some agency types, but many more people who were from medium to larger business who are the ones being tasked with implement SEO or paid search campaigns.

But no conference takes place with out a few criticisms. The biggest one I heard and agreed with was the location of one of the 3 session rooms. It was far way (about a 5 minute walk) from the may area. Attendees and/or speakers not paying attention to which room they needed to go to were frequently seen rushing to these rooms or getting there late. The distance from the main conference area to the speakers room had the same problem. While this was a inconvenience for most speakers, on the positive side this forced many of the speakers who usually disappear to the speakers room to remain in the conference area and opened up the lines of communication with all the attendees.

There are numerous blog posts and tweets on the session specifics so I would take up any more of your time, just simply search on SES Toronto for the blog post or #sesto in Twitter for more information

An Interesting Project

2009-05-21T13:25:00.002-04:00

Since late February I've been involved in an interesting SEO project with a branch of the British Government. In essences, I've been mentoring teams at 3 different institutions on the there SEO efforts as part of a pilot project.

The project has the following steps

1. Basic SEO Training
2. A technical review of their web sites along with recommendations (conducted by me)
3. Implementation of any technical changes (implement by their developers)
4. Identifications and recommendation of specific keyword phrases (joint effort)
5. Either the modification of existing pages or the creation of new content in support of the keyword phrases.
6. Monitoring of page ranking with on-going recommendations
7. Monitoring of impact on web traffic until the end of June

A couple of interesting things came out so far from this project. First off, at the time of the keyword research when the amount of time involvement became clear one of the two institutions dropped out of the pilot project. Leaving behind 2 participants CETLD and Archive Hub.

Fortunately, the remaining two organizations have given it their all and results have started to appear within 1 or 2 weeks of making the various adjustments.

In one case, CETLD chose low volume keyword phrases, but ones that were high quality. This included the phrases "Learning Spaces" and "student centred learning". In both cases, CETLD started rank in the top 100 within days of launching new content and has slowly been climbing of the SERPS.

In the case of Archive Hub it was decided to go after some very high volume and very competitive phrases. These include: "history of railways", "history of fairgrounds" and "history of textiles". Once again, a wide variety of changes were required, but as CETLD they are slowly climbing the SERPs.

The biggest issues we've faced on this project so far has been time. With different civic holidays on both sides of the Atlantic ocean, plus the usual paper work in getting anything done in a large organization has taken its toll and made getting the optimized pages published a little more difficult then expected.

What is interesting with both projects, is measuring the impact on web site traffic. Both sites have very seasonal traffic trends plus specific topics are being marketed externally which might be having an impact of the total amount of search they are targeting. The finds will be a interesting write-up next month.

SES Toronto

2009-05-21T13:21:00.003-04:00

In just over two weeks it will be time again for this year's Search Engine Strategy (SES) conference here in Toronto (June 8-10). Despite the economy, I expect a good turnout for this event.

If you're contemplating going but are a bit unsure keep this in mind. Based on this year's agenda, the majority of the talks will be focused at people just getting involved in search engine marketing to those at the intermediate level.

There are a lot of great speakers lined up for this event, so I do hope to see you there.

My Appologies

2009-05-21T13:18:00.002-04:00

I'm using Blogger as my blogging software and while I haven't posted anything for about 6 weeks, I just noticed that several of last posts starting in late February until early April are all missing.

If really isn't appropriate for me to dig through my files and resubmit them, but I'll be keeping a closer eye on these posts to ensure what ever happened doesn't happen again.

WebTrends Release New Tag Builder

2009-02-24T15:23:00.004-05:00

WebTrends announced today the release of a second generation tag builder. The tag builder is used for generating customized SDC (Smart Data Collector) java scripts to be added to web pages for java script based web analytics for both WebTrends OnDemand and installed version of WebTrends.

Details of the changes can be found at http://blog.webtrends.com/2009/02/24/new-verison-of-tag-builder-available/

Of note, you no longer have to tag Google Adword ads as paid search as WebTrends can now use the Google generated campaign ID assume you've enable "Autotagging" enabled for your Google Adwords campaign.

I'll be testing the new tag builder within the next few days and will post any problems if I find them.

Shorten URL's - TinyURL

2009-02-17T09:50:00.003-05:00

With the growing acceptance of Twitter into main stream use, the use of services to shorten lengthy URLs is growing. There are many of these free services out there on the web. Popular ones include:

The question becomes how do these services affect your web analytic reports? So let's start with the basics.

First off, if someone is using a twitter application (for example Tweetdeck) any one clicking on a full and proper link it would appear as direct traffic. The only way to properly identify this users is to use your web analytics campaign tracking feature.

If someone were to click on a shorten URL on a web page, how the referrer is handled would vary by the both the shortening service (most service do however work the same way) and your web analytics software.

For example using tinyurl and generating a link to my company web site www.knechtology.com the shorten URL would appear as: http://tinyurl.com/dfjood and would generate the following sequence of hits.

GET 301 Redirect to http://www.knechtology.com/ http://tinyurl.com/dfjood
GET 200 text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 http://www.knechtology.com/

The first hit might appear in tinyurl's web log files or possibly not depending on how they handle the 301 redirect. Regardless, there is nothing recorded in my web site's log files until the second hit.

Now the big question is: will this hit appear with the referrer of tinyurl.com or not. For that you need to check your log files. In my experience at best this will appear as a referrer from the shortening service. That's why if I'm posting a link in Twitter back to my web site, I alway like to add a campaign id to the URL.

I personally don't care which Tweet generated the traffic so here at K'nechtology have set up a standard one. If you want to distinguish your Tweets, you'll need to generate unique campaign IDs for each post.

WebTrends Update

2009-02-12T14:14:00.002-05:00

WebTrends has released an update for those of us who have the software version. This update includes an update of the latest search engine list including Twitter and an update of the browser list.

It is simple to download and fast to upgrade.

To download or for more information go to:

http://www.webtrends.com/support/browser-and-keywords-updater.aspx

SMX Analytics

2009-02-03T14:00:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned before starting on March 31, 2009 SMX will be holding its first SMX Analytics conference in Toronto Canada. At this time, I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be speaking at this event on March 31 during the "Analyzing & Converting Organic Search Traffic" session.

This promises to be a great event and remember that eMetrics will be on at the same time in Toronto as well. Great chance to take in two different web analytic conferences.

Twitter Imposters - Watch Out

2009-01-21T09:32:00.002-05:00

Over the past few days I've received about 10 follows from various people in Twitter. I found it strange when reviewing their past Tweets all had the same single tweet. I was getting suspicious and then today I got a follow from someone I knew (and followed), but the Twitter ID looked different.

Upon checking out the Twitter account I knew it wasn't him. So I decided I was going to investigate and write a detailed post about it. During my investigation I came across this blog post which details the problem in great detail http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10146731-26.html.

So be aware that like all good technology Twitter is being exploited by those who want to trick us to make a buck.

K'nechtology or Connectology or Konnectology

2009-01-07T15:35:00.006-05:00

How do people spell your company name when they have only heard the name and have to idea how to spell it? Believe it or not, this is a very common problem relating to search. For example, my company's name is K'nechtology which is pronounced Connectology.

On Tuesday, during a series of 10 radio interviews the name of my company was given out and only once was the spelling of the company name given out. This means that anyone who wanted to check out the company's web site for more information on the company or on myself had to guess at the spelling as they used Google or any other search engine and would most likely first spell it "connectology". While you might think this won't happen to you or your firm, try asking a stranger to spell your company name or product. I've seen this problem on many occasions.

Here are some solutions that we've come up with over the years:

Register multiple domains and set-up micro web sites that explain the situation and forward the user to the proper web site (hard to do for us when connectology.com is already taken by a legitimate company in the UK);
Write a humours web page that pokes fun at the various spellings or company or product name;
Leverage your corporate or personal blog (just like this post) and write a post about the situation;

So if you heard me on the CBC radio on Tuesday, and are looking for "connectology" or "Konnectology" or "alan connect" or "allan connect" or "allen connect" or "alen connect" or even possibly "alan Konnect" take comfort that you are in the right place and you can find my company's web site at www.knechtology.com

My Twitter Experiment

2008-11-17T16:19:00.005-05:00

All those who know me, know that I don't jump quickly to the latest and greatest Internet gadgets. This is not to say I am slow to adopt good ideas, I just need someone to show me the practical side of it for business. And this has brought me to my Twitter experiment.

If you have never heard of Twitter (www.twitter.com), you are not alone. Yet this simple tool is quickly gaining a foothold among teenagers, socially active technos and most top-end bloggers. For those who don't know what it is here is the simplest definition. It is a micro blogging tool which limits your posts to a mere 140 Characters. As with any social networking tool, people follow your Twitter posts (Tweets) and you can reciprocate by following their posts. My reluctance to Twitter was more of what did I have to Tweet about and who would want to follow my Tweets.

Two weeks ago I was in the UK at a conference and several people asked me what my Twitter ID was to which I had to answer "I don't tweet". I was greeted with a look of disappointment. So upon my return to Toronto, I quickly set-up my Twitter account (@aknecht - http://twitter.com/aknecht/) and started my experiment. Here's how the experiment went.

Step 1 - I linked my Twitter updates to my Facebook profile status (Friday)

Step 2 - I added Twitterberry to my BlackBerry for easy updates (Sunday)

Step 3 - I started to follow a couple of people related to the PubCon Conference I was about to attend

Step 4 - I started to Tweet (Sunday)

These simple actions soon proved to be very valuable. Before I knew several people (Facebook Friends) were following my Tweets. From this several people attending PubCon found me and started following my Tweets. For the experiment, I committed myself to Tweeting as often as possible.

Twitter Experiment Results

By the time I landed in Las Vegas (Monday afternoon) I quickly discovered that all PubCon related announcements were no longer going to out by email, but by Tweets (at least I had that covered). Next I started to see people Tweeting about dinner and where to go and where to meet. Before I knew it I had dinner plans with someone I had never met or even had contact with before Twitter. We met up (Tweetup) at a restaurant at my hotel and found each other. Of course there was some confusion as someone else who was going to join us who had simply described himself as bald with glasses (gee that could be me). Once we got that settled the three of us had dinner and a great conversation.

PubCon started the next day and the conference almost crashed Twitter. Everyone was Tweeting (at least 90% of all attendees -including myself) what sessions they were attending, issue during the session etc. By the end of the first day of PubCon, I must have Tweeted at least 10-15 times. It seemed as with each Tweet I got more followers. What a strange occurrence as just a year earlier at PubCon 2007 almost no-one Tweeted.

By day two, several people came up to me and said they enjoyed following my Tweets in Facebook. That night at the hotel bar, I ran into someone who I wasn't sure would recognize me, but of course he did and said, "Hi Alan, I opened up Facebook today and there you were all over my home page with your tweets." It was a positive response. The only person to voice negative feedback came from my wife, who just thought I was abusing Facebook for business and bragging purposes. I took to the old adage that most negative comments go unsaid so I took my wife's words to heart.

So after a week of Tweeting to my hearts galore, my experiment came to an end. Through this experience I learned a few things.

1. If you're going to Tweet a lot don't hook it up to your Facebook account, but encourage your friends to follow you on Twitter if they want
2. Get a variety of apps loaded up on your computer to help optimize your Twitter experience (my personal favourite right now is TweetDeck)
3. Link your cellphone to Twitter (SMS messaging or through a phone application)
4. Tweek responsibly and they will follow
5. Talk to other Tweeters about Tweet etiquette or read the book "Twitter Revolution" by Deborah Micek & Warren Whitlock (I devoured this book on the flight home from Las Vegas) which contains lots of excellent tips
6. Start Tweeting

The reality is there is no real business model for Twitter right now and who knows if they'll survive long term. For now, I equate the Twitter phenomena at the same state as the web was in the mid 1990's people knew it had potential, but they didn't yet know how to take advantage of it for business. Yes it was in the hands of a few geeks and look what we turned the web into.

For the socially active party goers this is a must have tool. Start following all your friends and have your friends start following you and there will never be the need for a phone call again or at least while you're out party hoping.

Happy Tweeting

Google Virus - Good Luck For Me

2009-01-06T15:40:00.004-05:00

For the best couple of days a virus that I'll call the "google virus" has been slowly spreading. The impact of this virus is that it hijacks your Google search results and redirects you to a spam site.

Fortunately, I didn't get hit by this virus but a call from CBC radio here in Toronto alerted me to the virus. For a brief moment it looked like CBC Toronto was being infected. The good news was they weren't either they had just trip a red flag at Google by having a large number of employees conduct lots of searches in a very short time period. Google then just wanted to verify that the searches were indeed coming from humans and not machines. So they got prompt with a CAPTCHA screen. You know these screen where you have to read a bunch of garbled letter and type them.

So what's the good news about this virus, well I did my research and as a result of helping CBC radio out, I'm being interviewed today across Canada on different local CBC radio stations about Google and viruses. I do need to tip my hat to Twitter, as it allowed me to isolate the virus and the details of what was going on.

Serious security flaw found in IE

2008-12-16T10:26:00.002-05:00

In case you're not following me on Twitter, this is a must read new story reported by the BBC today (December 16, 2008).

Security experts around the world are recommending that everyone (at least until Microsoft issues and emergency patch) stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer broswer (IE) and switch browsers due to a major security flaw in the browser.

Read the full news article at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7784908.stm

While security problems are nothing new to IE and other browsers, it is extremely rare if not unheard of for security experts to issue this type of warning. I strongly suggest that you read the full article for more detailed information.

Tracking Clicks on Off-site Links - Made Easy with WebTrends SDC

2008-11-26T14:47:00.003-05:00

One of the biggest questions many of us in web analytics have faced over the years was tracking visitors ow who click on which links that take users to 3rd party websites (external links). This is critical if you run banner ads, sell links, have partner sites etc.

Over the years a number of solutions have been developed. Some of these worked reasonably well and have included using third part tracking tools or creating redirection page or script. In any option it always required a middle layer that user would be directed to first and then redirect them to the external site. This solution, while it work, created a point of failure and potentially a bad user experience.

With the introduction java script tracking web analytics (WebTrends SDC, Google Analytics, Omiture etc.) it became possible tag the HTML code (specifically the "a href" tag) with an on-click or on-mouse down function that execute the tracking java script file and pass a series of variables to the data collection server. While this method works, it requires additional web site programming which generally required IT resources and testing.

WebTrends has come up with a way with their new SDC java script (relased earlier this year) to simplify this whole process. When building your SDC java script using the WebTrends Tag Builder simply select "Off-Site Links" as an option under the "Event Tracking" tab and generate your SDC script.

Once the script is uploaded, all works perfectly and clicks to off-site sites will appear in the top pages report with the title extension of "Offsite:URL".

At last something made simple. And please remember, if you need help with your WebTrends configuration please feel free to contact my company as that is one of our specialty.

The First Live WebCast Wedding - Celebrates 10 Years

2008-08-12T16:45:00.009-04:00

It's hard to believe that it was 10 years today that the first live broadcasted (webcasted) wedding on the web took place. This wedding was truly original not just by being the first wedding to use Internet technology (others relied on e-mail or the once might IRC), but it was the first to stream a live video and audio stream to a world-wide audience. The wedding was streamed live, but it also integrated gesture based virtual reality into the stream (think Wii 10 years ago, but even better). Back on August 13^th 1998, the concept of streaming anything across a dial-up connection was unheard of. It was a few months later that Victoria Secret rocked the world by streaming their fashion show using a high speed connection.

How do I remember it so well? Easy, I was groom and my wife of 10 years was the lovely bride. At that time in history this was real big news. Several local TV stations were on hand and the wedding was featured on several local (Toronto) 11:00 news shows. On top of that, the netcasted (as it was referred to then instead of webcasted) wedding was featured on several national TV shows and was written up in numerous national publications including Macleans magazine and several international publications as well.

The buzz around this wedding and the wedding's web site, existed long before sites like YouTube or MySpace existed and allowed family and friends to really share in the whole experience even if they couldn't attend. Why am I writing about this now and how does this relate to theme of this blog that's easy to answer. The wedding generated 100's of links to the wedding web site (now archived at www.knecht.ca/algo) and the web site was one of the top search results on any search engine when searching on "wedding" or "netcast" or any other related phrases. Yet over the years, all those links and all but one web reference (http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/1998/122498/august.html) have vanished from the web as if the wedding didn't occur or was never document. So is the life of the Internet and the web. The lesson to learn from this from an SEO perspective is simple – never stop building links to your site. Those great links that exist today might gone tomorrow.

Fortunately, for my wife and me, we have the video clips of the t.v. shows, and copies of the printed articles safely stored away. Recently upload the collection of video clips to the web.

Self Referrer

2008-11-25T14:37:00.002-05:00

Just got asked an interesting web analytics question. The client was reviewing the "Referring Domain" report in WebTrends and noticed a lot of direct traffic and that the site itself is listed as a referrer. They wanted to know why.

This is a question that I'm frequently asked by users of various web analytic products, and so I thought I'd post my response for others.

Direct traffic (as reported by WebTrends) comes from the following sources

1. People entering the web site URL directly
2. People having added the web site directly to their bookmarks and then clicking on the bookmarked site
3. People clicking on a link in an email
4. Other possible sources for links that are not part of a web site
5. People who choose to hide the referring web site information (a setting now available in some browsers)

In the report where the website is listed as its own referrer is a bit harder to explain, but here is my explanation:

Every page has a referrer, so when someone browses from one page to another page within the site, the site is in itself a referrer.

Normally, these should not appear in a referrer report (many analytics products strip this data out), but WebTrends does show this data under certain circumstances. What a site self referring traffic generally means is that someone was on the site who's visit session had time out (stayed on a page more than 30 minutes) and then clicked on a new page. So that a new visits was initiated and the visits referrer is now the site itself. There are a couple of other possible causes of this, but this is the easiest one to explain and understand.

The New Google Interface

2008-11-24T12:11:00.003-05:00

In case you haven't noticed the change yet in Google you will. Starting last week Google started to rolling out the ability for individuals (who are logged into their Google account) to start customizing their search results and even commenting on them.

This is all handled through what is called the "Google Search Wikki". So now you have the ability to move specific results up or down and even delete them. On top of it, you can leave comments for the whole world to see next to the listing forever.

Now this might seem like a good idea and is part of what I mention in a previous post on why Search Ranking is going to become meaningless. So is that day here now? Is Google on the right track? Will it last?

Let's tackle these questions one at a time.
1. No the day of search ranking being meaningless isn't here yet. Despite the ability of users to customize their results, how many will. How many know they can even do it and why would they want to. Sure you might want to delete your competitor from your results, but then how would you know what they are up to?

2. Is Google on the right track? That's hard to say, the feature most certainly has a cool factor to it, but what happens if I accidentally delete a listing, how do I get back? How many users have to delete a listing or move it down in their results before Google adjusts the natural listing? Are listing now not susceptible to attack by larger competitors who can have all their staff delete specific listing? Of course for us SEO, we could use it to fake search results to show how good a job we did. Just kidding of course.

3. Will this last? I don't think this will be going away to soon, but I can't really see people jumping on board. How many of us search on the same topics time and time again that we would really want to customize are listings. There are a few subjects that I do conduct regular searches on when looking for new content. I personally would have preferred it, if Google would have simply allowed me to sort the results by publishing date.

The last option of adding comments, does seem like a good idea. Let's see I like what I found on the other end of the listing so I go back to the search again and write a favorable comment. Who has time for that. The site on the other end doesn't match what I want so I hit the back button immediately and add a nasty comment (somewhat likely). Now there are going to be hundreds if not thousands of comments next something I want click on, do I have the time to read all the nasty stuff people have left. Hmmmmm

So let's give it some time and lets see if it will last.

PubCon Day 2

2008-11-13T02:34:00.007-05:00

Day 2 at PubCon turned out to be another inspiring day. It all started around 9:00 am with an truly inspiring keynote by George Wright from Blendtec. His keynote focused on how he took a $50 branding budget to purchase a few items video tape the owner of the company testing the company's blenders.

While it the story may sound simple, the video went viral and before they knew it this small blender company for Omaha was being featured on national news shows, and late night television. The resulting impact on sales were almost through the roof. A the legend of "Will it Blend" was born. Before long who knows, perhaps "blendtec-it" will become a verb of the likes of "google it".

As for the rest of day, there was a great session on web analytics despite the rep from Google pushing Google Analytics a bit too much. However between the pitches there was some good info.

My session on Organic design went well and we had nearly standing room only in our vast room. I didn't like the microphone they were using, but it was clear that the attendees were impressed with what all the panelist had to say.

Getting SEO Right the First Time

2008-11-13T09:18:00.006-05:00

After thinking about my session at PubCon yesterday and if we as a group of panelist (Mark Jackson, Lyndsay Walker Blahut, Aaron Wall, myself and our moderator Todd Friesen) had one thing we were trying to stress I cam up with the following. "Get in the project plan!"

Once you strip away the advice on how to and why you should use h1 tags, why writing good description meta tags and why using clean & valid XHTML is important, it really boiled down to you need to make the whole SEO process part of the project plan and part of everyone's deliverables.

You can't let the graphic designer get approval on a design that can't be marked-up in an SEO friendly way. Just the same as you can't let the html developer, the server management team or the back-end database programmers get away with it either.

So how do you do this, the answer is simple, but it is the execution that is hard. Step 1, get everyone educated on search engine optimization, how it works, the impact of different components on SEO and why it is important to your organization. Next make it part of each persons project deliverables. If their deliverable is not SEO compliant, then they haven't finished their job and need to go back and get it right. Of course, this means allowing enough time (budget if you are outsourcing it) for them to get it right. Just because it looks good or works from a technical point, doesn't mean it is. None SEO compliant feature must be treated as a web site bug and fixed on a high priority basis.

2 Minutes with Matt Cutts

2008-11-13T03:04:00.002-05:00

At a evening networking event at PubCon I had the chance to chat with Matt Cutts about some rumors I was hearing about things under development at Google. He was able to proved a clear and precise answer. So here are my questions Matt's answers:

1. What's with the indexing of Flash, what works and doesn't work? Matt was able to confirm what I had hear from Adobe last month, but that Adobe wasn't 100% sure. Google is only capable of finding links within the Flash file and unraserized text.

2. Is Google working on OCR for graphics and imaged pdfs? Matt - Google is now successful (at least to the limits of OCR) processing PDFs that were converted to images (you can't select text in these), but they are not yet working on trying to apply OCR (optical character recognition) to page images. Matt mentioned, that he has asked out this and even suggested it to the team, but so far no traction with the Google development team.

We went on to discuss how even if they got this working, the issue of OCR and different typeface would pose a huge issue and be very open to major mistakes.

So for now as I always state in my presentation we are still left with the 3 things that search engines value for our SEO projects - "words, words and words"

Why SERP Rank is meaningless

2008-11-12T11:33:00.003-05:00

Why Page Rank is meaningless

While at PubCon, I attended a session where Bruce Clay was speaking. As part of his address he stated something that I've been saying for years, "A page's rank in the search results is meaningless".

He went on to point out that the search engines are changing how they decided which page to rank. Most of us already know about how they adjust the results based on the users search location (someone in Las Vegas will get different results than someone in New York), many may not be aware they have started monitoring user behavior. This means they adjust the results based on what you as a searcher tend to search one. If you click on more product reviews than commerce site when searching for products, review pages will trend upward in your search query resutls.

Bruce feels that these types of changes are going to be even more wide spread come some time in the 1st quarter of 2009. While time will tell, Bruce pointed out as a community SEO and SEM specialists need to stop focusing on the rankings in the SERPS and start embracing web analytics. This latter point what I've been saying, preaching and teaching for years.

As with all conferences, the best things happen between sessions and that's when Bruce and I got to speak for about 3 minutes on this subject. During our brief conversation, our thoughts and opinions were identical that we as a community need to use web analytics to measure the quanity and quality of the traffic generated by search engines. We both agreed that being number 1 is important for corporate ego, but the truth that needs to be conveyed is what traffic do you get for which terms and how do they convert on your site.

Chance conversations like this is why I love conferences like PubCon. It gives everyone the chance to discuss ideas and concepts with peers and industry leaders ensuring that we as a community can than transfer this knowledge with confidence to co-workers and clients.

PubCon Day 1

2008-11-11T08:05:00.002-05:00

It's still the early hours here in Las Vegas and just a few hours before the start of PubCon, but I've already learned something. While in London last week for SMX, many people kept asking me if I'm twitting. To which I had to say no.

Given that numbers I realized that Twitter was starting to come to age and I better start Twitting. So I set-up my Twitter account and loaded my Blackberry with Titterberry. Didn't do much with it except link it to my Facebook account and thought so what. Who really wants to follow what I'm up to and how will I take advantage of it. Well then I headed to PubCon in Las Vegas.

I quickly started following the PubCon Twit and from there as they say the rest is history. All major social activities having anything to do with PubCon are being delivered via Twitter. Quickly several people started following my Twit and before I knew it, I had dinner plans with people I had never met before.

It got so crazy I was getting upset that my Twitterberry utility wasn't giving me live feeds like others around me that I realized the importance of the need for live feeds at least from a social aspect. So will I keep it up once I'm back at home, only time will tell - but my gut feel says yes and just another utility grabing more of limited time.

SMX Wrap-UP

2008-11-10T09:38:00.003-05:00

Well it's been a few days since I got home from SMX London and had a chance to reflect on the whole event. I must say that I was completely impressed with the sessions and the speakers.

Two sessions (beyond my own) really standout and both occurred on the second day. The first was SEO and Web 2.0. While the session didn't provide me with much new information, it was the way the information was presented especially the presentation by Mikkel DeMib Svendsen. I'm a big fan of Mikkel since he has officially gone white had and I had to love it when he said "I'm not that technical".

My other favourite session was the session on Local Search. Unfortunately it was the last session on the last day and I could only stay for about 1/2 of it as I had to get to the airport. There was a ton of great information once again presented in a way even the most non-technical person could understand. For anyone who attended this session, I hope they took good notes so they can apply this way of presenting their data to their clients and/or bosses.

Overall, I found it well worth my while to attend SMX London.

Next stop, is PubCon in Las Vegas starting tomorrow. Look for regular updates.

SMX London - Day 1

2008-11-05T03:33:00.002-05:00

We are just about to start day 2 here in London of SMX. Yesterday's turnout was about what I expected, but perhaps a bit smaller. However, organizers were pleased with the turnout.

From the people I chatted most were very familar with the concepts of SEO and PPC and appeared to be more focused on the advanced tracks.

My session with Offir Cohen, Richard Gregory and Kelly Gillease went very well with a small but attentive audience. Chris Sherman monerated this panel and did his excellent job.

Only complaint that I can have against this conference is the lack of free wireless Internet access. While the conference venue did offer it, it was at the steap cost of 5 pounds per hour or 20 pounds per day. As such, I was unaware of anyone who opted for the wireless.

I'll provide a more detailed summary once I'm back home in Toronto and before I head off to Las Vegas for PubCon next week.

Final Thoughts on Web Builder

2008-10-14T15:57:00.003-04:00

It's the next day and I've had some time to reflect on my brief stay at Web Builder 2.0.

In my previous post I mentioned that I was disappointed with the turnout and had hoped for maybe 20 people to attend my session. As it turned out, a mere 5 people turned out. Fortunately these people were well focused and receptive to the ideas and concepts I was presenting.

With a turnout like this, its hard to believe that there will be a Web Builder 2.0 in 2009. I was thrilled 3 years ago when this conference was brought back. Unfortunately after 3 years, it hasn't gained any traction and in reality has been losing ground.

I guess that the concept of a well round and broadly focus conference to the whole web team sounds good on paper, it just doesn't work. One of the attendees mentioned to me at lunch that we wishes he could get his boss to one of these events. As it would open his eyes to what really needs to be done.

The best part of this conference, like all conferences was the opportunity to reconnect with peers and make a few new friends.

I'm now back home and focusing on my session this coming Thursday here in Toronto to the Canadian Marketing Association. I'm positive there will a lot more there on Thursday then the 5 I faced on Monday.

Web Builder 2.0 - Day 1

2008-10-13T11:48:00.005-04:00

Well it's day 1 for Web Builder 2.0 and I'm a bit dissapointed but also pleased.

Turns out that there were a mere 100 or so attendees registered for this unique web conference, this is the only conference that bring the entire web team (developers, managers, programmers etc.) to a single conference. The number of attendees is disappointing but the fact that the conference was allowed to proceed is what I find pleasing. These days many companies are taking any opportunity save money and killing this conference, most likely would have saved lots of money.

For those who put aside the current economical turmoil and are attending this event they now have a great opportunity for more personal attention from the speakers and a great opportunity to meet and network with everyone.

David Verba is currently about 1/2 way through his kick-off keynote "Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain world". So far, its interesting with some great examples and lots interesting tibits.

My session will follow the keynote. With 5 different tracks happening at the same time, it is going to be interesting to see if I even get 20 people into my session given I'm up against Steve Mulder (Reich Interface Design) and Sandra Niehaus (Web Design for ROI) and DL Byron (Blog -Oriented Architecture). All are equally great speakers covering equally important subjects.

I'll be keeping my fingers crossed hoping for 20 attendees.

Canadian Marketing Association Roundtable

2008-10-08T14:33:00.002-04:00

Next week (Thursday October 16) I'll be one of 3 speakers at this months CMA's Roundtable here in Toronto. The topic is Demystifying Web Analytics. I'll be giving the first talk and will be covering the fundamentals of web analytics.

This should be a great event and price is right for those of you in the Toronto area. It's $80 for member and $100 for non-members.

For more information see the RoundTables web page at:
http://www.the-cma.org/?WCE=C=47%7CK=228645

WebBuilder 2.0 Las Vegas

2008-10-08T14:31:00.003-04:00

This is a reminder for anyone attending next weeks WebBuilder 2.0 in Las Vegas that I'll be presenting on Monday morning. My topic is Web Site Design and Web Analytics. Basically how to work in the concepts and needs of web analytics into your design strategy before a single line of code is generated.

Unfortunately, this year I won't be sticking around for the entire conference as I have to be back in Toronto the next day. However, I should be at the conference to a little after lunch and then I need to head back to the airport.

So if you're attending the conference, be sure to look me up and say hello.

Google Chrome Reporting in WebTrends

2008-09-16T14:43:00.005-04:00

In case you missed the big news a couple of weeks back Google released its browser called "Chrome". New browsers are nothing new, but because its from Google the speed at which users are trying it is higher than if it came from some unknown company. Now if you're using WebTrends On-Demand or Google Analytics, you don't have to worry about it showing up in your web analytics report of user clients.

However, if you are using a locally installed web analytics product (like WebTrends) then you need to tweak your software to start reporting on it. For WebTrends users, I've found some great instructions on just how to do this from WebTrends. These instructions can be found at: http://www.webtrendsoutsider.com/2008/adding-the-chrome-browser-to-your-reports/
For other web analytic products check with your manufacture and please post links to any guides as comments to this post.

It's Web Conference Season

2008-09-15T14:48:00.002-04:00

Several things happen in September. First the unofficial end of summer with the return of kids schools. Secondly all the fall conference start their marketing efforts.

This year is no exception and I'm happy to be speaking at 3 different events during the next few months plus my usual private corporate training and speaking sessions.

Here is a list of my up-coming talks, I'll post more on the individual events shortly.

October 12 - Web Builder 2.0 (Las Vegas,) Nevada)
October 16 - Canadian Marketing Association (Toronto, Ontario)
November 11 - Pub Con (Las Vegas, Nevada)

Topics range for discussion on web analytics (CMA & Web Builder) to SEO friendly design (PubCon). You can view the various conference web sites for details of my talks and other speakers. If you're thinking of attending any event remember they all offer early bird specials so register early. If you are attending let me know and look out for me and be sure to say hello.

More on each event shortly.

Google Twins & How to be Number 1

2008-08-24T12:41:00.006-04:00

Ever do some "Echo Surfing" (search your own name in Google or another search engine) only to find another person with the exact name. While finding a Google Twin may more common for some than others, what happens if that other you represents something you're not and has the potential to damage your reputation. What if a potential employer or client Googles your name and finds them instead and thinks you are them and there are some not nice things out there about them.

This is something that all of us and not just those of us who choose to be in the public eye (like myself) have to start addressing. Think your name is so unique, try Googling yourself with both the correct spelling and common misspellings of your name. I might be the only "Alan K'necht", but there is at least one other "Alan Knecht" out there.

Perhaps, these are some of the reasons that the Canada's National Post reporter Brianna Goldberg, decided to see what happened when she Googled herself and her subsequent drive to dominate the top 10 results for her name on Google.

Her journey to Google domination including quotes and advice from myself and another expert are contained in her article entitled "Google Twins: I want to be number 1" (http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=743136).

This article makes a great read and provides lots of useful information. Let's help show the world the power of links by adding the article to your Stumble Upon, Digg, etc. account or better yet, blog about it and link to it with the words "Google Twins"” in the link text.

A New Search Engine (A new kid on the Block)

2008-07-30T11:30:00.004-04:00

Earlier this week a new search engine was announced to a certain degree of fanfare and pride. The new search engine Cuil (pronouced "cool") is an interesting search engine at best.

Enough articles and reviews have already been published discussing the developers backgrounds and their former relationship with the likes of Google, so I won't go there. What I will focus on is the quality and usability of the search results.

Ad of today, Cuil claims to have index 121,617,892,992 web pages. This is far more than Google ever claimed and to my knowledge one of the highest amount amongst all search engines. My opinion on this is "So What?". Have the biggest collection of pages means nothing if you don't produce high quality results and have a highly usable search engine.

Back when Google was starting out, I was a reluctant convert. Many kept showing me this new search engine and telling me how much they liked. What they liked was it was clean and simple (unlike the best search engine of the time Alta Vista), but it didn't support complicated searches and as a result the quality of results was some what limited. Of course, Google addressed these weaknesses early on to become the powerhouse it is today.

So let's take Cuil through its paces.

Starting interface is simple and clean and with that lovely black background (reminds me of 1996 or was that 1997 when all web sites had to have a black background just because.
Cuil doesn't support even a basic boolean search - I tried using a plus sign "+" between two phrases and it returned unrelated results - remove the + sign and you get better results, but not what I was looking for
There is no advanced search option (i.e. if you want to exclude a specific domain from your search)
The search results - now this is different.

I'm going to focus on the search results and what I do and don't like about them.

Likes

There are no ads (Great for now, but for how long)
A clearly visible filter for safe searching (great for keeping out questionable material from you surfers)
The choice of displaying results in either 2 or 3 columns
Interesting images appear next to each search results

Dislikes:

You get to choose between a 2 or 3 column results page - the columns are very narrow making it very difficult to read the result summary. It would have been better if Cuil would have embraced liquid design and allowed the columns to fill the browser window instead of a restricted width. The current design only looks good if you're using a monitor set at a resolution of 800x600 (how year 2000).
There are interesting pictures next to each search results - sometimes these images are related and other times they are not. From what I could tell is Cuil has some stock images it uses if the page doesn't provide one that it wants to use based on the theme of the page. A search on my name "k'necht" yield a few results with my picture next to it and other times I have no idea of what the picture is of or how it is related to the result.
Quality of the results - I found this the weakest part of Cuil. Several sites that I can easily find using Google, Yahoo or Live (always show up in the top 10 if not the top 5) and are import sites for the search term, don't show up on page 1 and in some case don't appear until page 1.

So what is clear is that Cuil has a unique approach and a completely different algorithm than 3 major search engines. Time will tell if they will be able to tweak this to start producing better quality results instead of just more pages. And lastly I appreciate their different approach to displaying the search results, but it does require a tiny bit of tweaking.

Web Builder 2.0 Here I Come Again

2008-07-29T11:00:00.002-04:00

Once again I'm happy to announce that the best all round web development conference I've ever attended is happening again. This years Web Builder 2.0 conference will take place October 13-15 in Las Vegas Nevada at the Mirage Resort and Casino.

As with all previous Web Builder conference (except the inaugural on back 1997) I will be a presenter. I will also keep my streak alive of attending every single one (yes I was there back in 1997 when CNet kicked off this conference known then as Builder.com conference).

I've asked this year to simply reprise my address from last year. The subject matter is "Building Web Sites with Web Analytics in Mind". As so called "Web 2.0" development techniques continue to be adopted this is becoming very critical. As well Marketing Departs and senior management are now demanding even more detail of web site performance than ever before. So talks like mine where explain how both management and web development must work together to build not only a functional and effective web site, but one that can easily be measured and be flexible enough to adapt to the ever changing demands of management for measurements.

As I posted last year, this is the only conference I know of that brings together the spectrum of staff involved in web development to a single conference. In past years, I seen web project managers, hardcore java an dotnet programmers, graphic artists, usability specialists, SEO experts, marketing managers and others in attendance at this conference. This is the one conference to bring the entire team to.

So be sure to look into attending. There is an Early Bird registration special and more information at http://webbuilderconference.com/2008/default.aspx.

SEM Canada Postponed

2008-07-29T10:49:00.002-04:00

Said news from last week is that SEM Canada scheduled for September 4th and 5th had to be canceled. I really was looking forward to this conference as the slate of speakers was outstanding.

Granted having a conference the day after Labour Day when many heads turn back to work or getting the kids off on their first day back at school may have not been the wisest, but to the idea was sound.

So the good news is that SEM Canada is still scheduled to happen, but his time it is being scheduled tentatively for October 2009. This will give the organizers much more time to secure event sponsorship and build registrant momentum. I know that I have already agreed to speak at this event and I can only hope that the slate of speakers will remain mostly intact.

Don't Forget About Dial-Up Users

2008-07-03T12:47:00.006-04:00

To many of us who been in the Internet business since the mid 90's we remember all the issues about dial-up connections and slow speed. We knew how to design nice looking sites with small page size.

Over the past few years with the expansion of broadband access many have forgotten about the dial-up user. Well here is an interesting article about how many current dial-up users are sticking with their slower internet connections.

So with this thought in mind, here's link to the article:
Study says many dial-up users don't want broadband

WebTrends 8.5 Upgrade Success

2008-07-01T11:48:00.005-04:00

Following the issues in my previous post, the upgrade completed successfully.

The only minor complaint were the status screens. While there has been a major improvement in terms of providing accurate time estimates, one has to remember that these are estimates and not to put too much faith in them. At least this time round, WebTrends provides a screen per module so can monitor the progress.

One one of the first screens the count got down to 5 minutes remaining and after about 3 minutes it jumped back up to 6 minutes which was about right. On the last of these screens it sat at 14 seconds for what seemed like a eternity. Fortunately it was about 6.5 minutes.

The whole upgrade on my test server (4 profiles) took approximately 45 minutes once I shut down the WebTrends Scheduler (see previous post).

I did run into one minor problem after the install. When I tried to run a profile update the update failed. I also tried to run a new profile and it also failed. After some investigation, it turned out that despite entering a new license key during the install (as early posted), WebTrends didn't retain the new 8.5 key, but instead retained the original 8.1 key. A quick delete of the old key and I activated the new key and all is good. WebTrends is now up and running and generating report data. (this issue has been reported to the WebTrends technical support team)

I'll now be putting WebTrends through its paces and should be able to report back on the quality and stability of the new GeoTrends module in a day or so.

WebTrends 8.5 Upgrade Issue

2008-07-01T10:54:00.003-04:00

Still in the process of upgrading and ran into another minor issue.

In this instance, the upgrade had problems stopping the WebTrends Scheduler service. After 40 minutes I called tech support to report the problem. Here is the solution in case you run into the same problem.

Step
1. Open your Task Manager
2. Click on the Process Tab and sort the list by Image Name
3. Stop the process WTxd.exd

Once this is done, the upgrade proceeded as expected. Word of caution you should wait at least 10 minutes before performing the above steps.

According WebTrends technical support a way to avoid this problem in the future is to stop all the WebTrends services manually before the upgrade with the exception of the MySQL service. The Upgrade need to talk to this database during the upgrade.

One of the major changes in this version is a new backend database. Say good-bye to MySQL and say hello to MS Express (MS SQL Express). So a major part of this upgrade is converting the old data base over. So be sure to make a full and proper back-up of everything before starting the upgrade.

WebTrends 8.5 Upgrade GeoTrends & Other Issues

2008-07-01T10:02:00.006-04:00

I'm in the midst of upgrading my WebTrends test server from verison 8.1a to 8.5 and came across two issues. So I thought I would post these on the fly just in case anyone is planning on installing the upgrade today.

1. License Key - version 8.5 would not accept my current 8.1 license key. The reason for this is unclear as I was the first person to call into WebTrends tech support on any 8.5 issues. The problem may have just been with my key (I have a unique key for test and evaluation purposes only) or an issue with 8.5. The matter was quickly resolved by the phone call when a new 8.5 license key was issued.

2. GeoTrends - On the install screen where you point WebTrends to where your GeoTrends dat file is located, there is a warning message telling you that you must uses Geotrends version 8.200801 or later (presently this is the most current version).

I hadn't download this file before so off I went to download it. By going straight to it through the WebTrends FTP interface (FTP.webtrends.com/geotrends) it was going to take over 3 hours to download as it is over 800 megs and the site throttles download speeds (max I was getting was 76 kb/second). However on the install screen, they provide a download now button. It took just over 30 minutes for downloading from this alternative site. So if you have the time go the usual road and download it overnight, otherwise plan on 30 -45 minutes to download the dat file as part of your upgrade process.

I thought the downloading the latest dat file was a bit funny as WebTrends has been upgrading my GeoTrends database (at least according to my log files), but according to tech support, the newer GeoTrends is structured differently and version 8.5 takes advantage of this new structure.

That's it for now. The upgrade is in the process of shutting down all the WebTrends services. It's been trying to shut down the scheduler now for at least 5 minutes, but that seems normal given past experiences with WebTrends.

WebTrends 8.5

2008-06-30T21:23:00.002-04:00

WebTrends 8.5 was just released today (June 30th).

I'm in the process of downloading it and will report back my findings and recommendations about upgrading shortly.

Here's hoping issues with Geotrends have been resolved and that the new database for the backend is more stable and flexible than the previous MySQL.

If you're feeling adventurous you can download and try it for yourself at
ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/85/

Here are some of the new features as reported by WebTrends:
Analytics Reports and report Administration
New calculated measures provide support for user-configured formulas. Configure calculated measures in custom reports during configuration, or create them at report time to provide new insights in real time. Report users can rearrange existing columns or add new ones on the fly.

Analytics Reports
New Web 2.0-focused reports provide enhanced out-of-the-box tracking for Rich Internet Applications (RIA), RSS feeds, streaming media, and customer-generated media.

WebTrends Administration and WebTrends Accounts
New user roles provide consistent, streamlined user rights assignments and custom groupings when creating or modifying users in WebTrends On Demand or Software. Use preconfigured roles included with your implementation, or create roles fine-tuned to your organizational needs in WebTrends Administration.
WebTrends Analytics On Demand administrators now assign user roles, not rights, in WebTrends On Demand Accounts.

Other points to note:
The user interface no longer requires Java
Analytics Reports - Analytics Reports Calendar now defaults to monthly rather than daily.

Stay tuned for my review. I should be finished putting through its paces by the end of the week.

SES Toronto 2008 Review

2008-06-22T17:08:00.009-04:00

Well another SES Toronto has come and gone. This annual Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Toronto is the one annual conference here in Toronto that I look forward to each year. As mentioned previously, I spoke at this year's conference (4th year in a row) on the topic of Keyword Research along with Christine Churchill and Michelle Pruitt (from Microsoft) and Louis-Dominic Parizeau. Our session was moderated by Anne Kenndey. While I was impressed with the quality of speakers on the panel as well as virtually every session attended, I can't help but feel a bit disappointed with year's conference

The networking opportunities and chances for everyone (speakers and attendees) to mix and mingle with most speakers were on par with previous years. I personally got a chance to get together with the usual suspects of with Jim Hedger, Richard Zwicky, Ken Jurnia, Andrew Goodman, Greg Jarboe, and Lyndsay Walker. In addition, I also got to reconnect with Bryan Eisenberg who I hadn't seen or chatted with in about 7 years and finally meet in person Laura Callow (organizer of SEM Canada scheduled for September of this year).

I was especially impressed with Incisive's decision to include an Orion panel session purely dedicated to measuring success in Web 2.0 world and another session focused on the analytics aspect of search engine marketing. While the Orion session my not have been as technical as I wished, it more or less met the demands of most attendees. What I found most disappointing was the lack of vendors at the show. My best guess would be at most there were 12 booths with the biggest sponsor being the Yellow Pages. The small size of the Google and Microsoft booths reflects poorly on them and the respect they have for the Canadian market. SES Toronto until now was not only the premier search engine conference in Canada it was basically the only one (this year there will be SEM Canada in Calgary), so why didn't they have a bigger and more technical presence at the show?

Another disappointment over previous years was the attendees. I'm used to a mix of beginners and experienced SEO people. This year excluding the speakers, I ran into only a handful of people had any SEO or PPC experience from the attendees. During my session I asked how many of the audience had keyword research experience and only about 10% raised their hands. This compares to over 50% who raised their hands last year during the same session.
Several of us have an uneasy feeling that this may be the last SES Toronto for a while. Nothing can be confirmed, and while Incisive was selling booth space for next June's SES Toronto, there was no attempt to presell it to the attendees (no banners, no announcement unlike when Danny Sulivan ran the conference). Here's hoping I'm wrong.

I am next scheduled to speak at SEM Canada right after Labour Day in Calgary (more on this line up shortly), with any luck I'm hoping to speak at SES San Jose in August and perhaps at Danny Sulivan's SMX East in October.

SEM Canada - Early Bird Discount

2008-06-23T11:08:00.004-04:00

Here is the heads up on the next conference I'm scheduled to speak at. I really got excited about this conference after meeting the organizer Laura Callow last week at SES Toronto. She is a warm and friendly person, who is giving this conference a truly personal touch. As well several many of the speakers at SEM Canada were in attendance here in Toronto. We share the excitement of another search engine conference here in Canada. During various discussions, we acknowledge that this will be a different type of conference and how we are all being challenged to deliver something new and exciting during our sessions. Conference organizers are now offering a early bird discount of $695 for the two day event valid until July 7th.

I must admit, that most of the following post was so well put by Jim Hedger, that with permission I have reposted with only a few minor adjustments and some trimming. Now the essences of Jim's post:

The organizers of the SEM Canada conference scheduled for the 4th and 5th of September in Calgary have secured an "A" list of speakers including myself (Alan K'necht), Jane Copland, Todd Friesen, Ken Jurina, Cindy Krum, Bill Slawski, and Richard Zwicky, SEM Canada is now working on filling the most important seats in the conference, the audience.

According to conference organizer Laura Callow, local interest from Calgary and Edmonton is booming with several large companies in two of Canada's most prosperous cities booking space for their staff. International attendance numbers, which are vital for the conference's success, remain a hurdle as ID requirements for international travel are confusing for some US residents and high fuel surcharges have increased the costs of traveling. To bolster local support and turn that support into hard cash, SEM Canada is organizing a Test-My-Site taster conference.

In order to promote sales, SEM Canada is offering readers an enormous discount on the early bird rate. Until July 7, registrants can purchase a full, all-inclusive 2-day pass for only $695, down from the original early bird rate of $895, similar to the discount already offered to SEOmoz Premier members.

From the standpoint of a business developer, attending SEM Canada makes financial sense. Those who participate in the SEM Canada conference are likely to find a larger pool of potential customers than those attending similar SES or SMX events. There are few search marketing conferences held in Canada and the event in Calgary is the only multi-day conference on search marketing in western Canada. With a stable resource based economy, western Canada is the only part of North America seeing sustained economic growth at this time. The business market in western Canada, while served by amazing local talent, is still wide-open for search marketers to enter. There simply aren't enough of us up here to satiate the growing need for effective search marketing.

SEM Canada will be a far more intimate show than SES San Jose or the SMX East conference scheduled for one month later in NYC, giving attendees a chance to meet and really get to know some of the most influential names in the industry. It will also be a successful show, at least from a biz-dev standpoint, for those who attend.

Organizer Laura Callow recently emailed all speakers with a personal message for anyone interested in attending SEM Canada. "Please also ask your subscribers to contact me personally via email to put their names down on our hotel discount list I will call them back after they email me, or they can call me on 403-714-6170. We like the personal touch. Well I do…" Let's hope the personal touch works. The SEM Canada conference could be highly beneficial to the entire search marketing industry.

So I hope to see you there.

Web Analytics & Mobile Devices

2008-05-21T15:22:00.003-04:00

Here is a link to an interesting article about the issues of measuring traffic from mobile devices and the short comings of the traditional web analytics products http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629590

Of course, this article can't capture everything, but it missed one big point and the one I've been standing up for years on. While the article talks about the short comings of using java script based tracking (like Google Analtyics, Web Trends SDC etc.), it didn't talk about my standard recommended approach.

This approach means setting the user cookie at the server and not on the web page and recording this in the log file. Most mobile devises (to my limited knowledge) do accept first party cookies even if they won't execute most java scripts. So with the cookie controlled by the server and not the web page, you can track unique visits.

What I found most interesting from this article was the percentage of people who do some web browsing from their mobile devices in the use (19%). Here in Canada I don't know of many who except in an emergency would do any browsing (unless their phone supports WiFi). Of course the cost of data plans here is ridiculous hight when compared to the USA.

Regardless if this percentage is high or low, the reality is people are starting to surf from their mobile phones and we better be prepared to measure and analyze this traffic. Anyone who's attended one of my web analytics or WebTrends training classes lately knows I do reference this issue with mobile browsing and its growing impact on the world of web analytics.

SES Toronto 2008

2008-05-09T10:44:00.003-04:00

Search Engines Strategies Toronto is back for its 5th year here in Toronto. This year's event will take place June 16 -18th.

For the fourth year in a row, I'll be speaking at this year's event (June 18th at 12:45). My topic for this year's conference address is "Keyword Research". This is the same topic as last year's address, but I promise to update my slides and give out some new information.

Joining me again on this year's panel is Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance. I've gotten to know Christine not only at SES, but at other search conferences throughout North America. She not only brings a big smile and sunny disposition to each presentation, but a wealth of knowledge and insight developed through years of hands on experiences.

SES Toronto, to my great delight is also increasing its focus on web analytics. Anyone who has ever attended one of my talks knows that I firmly believe that you can't do and SEO or SEM without sound analytics in place. That's why I'm thrilled to see June Li (Clickinsight) (June and I have teamed up before in Toronto to speak on the topic of Web Analytics) and Bryan Eisenberg (Future Now Inc.) two of the leading authorities on web analytics speaking at this year's conference.

So if you're only going to attend one search engine conference in Canada this year, make SES Toronto. As reminder to people in the US north east, Toronto isn't that far to travel and it is a very cosmopolitan place (the most multicultural city on the planet) with lots of fun activities and despite the recent increase in value of the Canadian dollar, it still is a relatively affordable place to travel to.

WebTrends 8.1a - Reissued

2008-03-30T14:15:00.002-04:00

During a routine call to WebTrends technical support a couple of weeks ago, I was asked an interesting questions by them. The question was "Which download of WebTrends 8.1a was I using?".

This question took me a second to digest. I dug a little deeper to only discover that some time in the middle of January of this year, they posted a revised version of WebTrends 8.1 on their FTP site. This posting had no fanfare and no announcement. I guess they just assumed that anyone installing 8.1a would simply download the newer version automatically. They didn't think about people like myself and my firm to help companies install their product. We keep the latest version of WebTrends on our USB keys so our clients don't have to download them.

Not being told there was a revision is a little disheartening.

However that being said, I've personally did one complete install of WebTrends 8.1a from stratch and was by far the smoothest install of 8.1a I had to date. In fact, there were any problems what so ever. Of course, this client had a properly sized server with ample RAM and hard drive space.

I just completed a reinstall of 8.1a on my company's test WebTrends sever and all went smooth. We're going to be doing a bit more testing, but it is starting to look like the upgrade to WebTrends 8.1 might finally be good enough to recommended it clients. Let me test it a bit further before you take that big jump.

However, if you're planning on simply installing it from scratch on a new server without porting all your existing data, I'm very happy to now recommended it. As always, read the installation guide first and make sure you have a minimum of 3 gigs of RAM or 4 gigs of RAM per processor if you're planning on using the WebTrends GeoTrends module.

As always, if you can afford it, I recommend having a firm like my company (K'nechtology) or WebTrends itself come out and help you install and configure the product plus get your WebTrends Administrators some training. WebTrends is not a simple product to manage and a lot more difficult to install correctly than an out of the box product like MS Office or Adobe Photoshop.

European Link Building

2008-03-21T17:13:00.003-04:00

I'm happy to announce that my firm K'nechtology Inc. has just been engaged to by Shred-it UK a firm specializing in secure mobile paper shredding and confidential waste destruction to help develop and implement a UK focused link building strategy.

K'nechtology has worked for years with the Shred-it UK's parent company Securit (www.securit.com) implementing various SEO and SEM strategies throughout its world-wide operations plus managing its web analytics software and measuring the success of all on-line marketing activities.

PubCon 2008

2008-03-21T17:05:00.003-04:00

The dates for PubCon (http://www.pubcon.com) 2008 have just been announced. This years PubCon is happening November 11-14 and once again will be held in Las Vegas.

While the speakers list and agenda haven't been finalized, it looks highly likely that I'll be speaking during at least one session at the conference. If this year's conference is anything like last years conference it promises to be highly informative, a great networking opportunity and one great time.

So block off these dates and get ready to say hello to Vegas. One word of advice, don't plan on leaving early on the 14th. This has traditionally been the day of the big networking event and something you really don't want to miss.

As always as I know more, I'll post more on this event.

New SEM Conference

2008-03-21T15:53:00.003-04:00

I know its been a while since I posted, and now I have a backlog of news items. So here is the first one.

A new Search Engine Marketing conference has been announced. The conference entitled SEM Canada (http://www.semcanada.org/) will take place in Calgary Alberta on September 4 and 5. At a cost of $895 Canadian for a two day event, this conference has a very attractive price tag.

The conference features some great speakers including Andy Beal, Christine Churchill, Todd Friesen, Ken Jurina, Richard Zwicky and of course myself. As it stands now (agenda hasn't been completely finalized), I'll be speaking at two sessions and moderating a 3rd.

For those who've never been to Western Canada this is a great excuse. The conference is on the Tuesday and Wednesday right after labour day, so I'd suggest flying out early and spending the weekend in mountains (i.e. Banff or Lake Louise) or head out to one of my favourite spots in Canada the Alberta Bad Lands especially Drumheller and Dinosaur Provincial Park.

More on this conference as I find out, but for now check out SEM Canada web site and think about registering.

Search Engine Market Share and Web Site Traffic

2008-01-28T09:02:00.000-05:00

An interesting article in today's issue of USA Today Money section (unfortunately not on-line article to link to). It's a story about the rise, fall and future of Yahoo.

I won't go into details of the article, but the article itself contained the following information:

Search Engine Market Share for December in the USA
1. Google 4 Billion searches Market Share 56%
2. Yahoo 1.27 Billion searches Market Share 18%
3. MSN 995 Million searches Market Share 14%
4. AOL 340 Million searches Market Share 4.7%
5. ASK.com 160 Million searches Market Share 2.2%

Source Nielsen Online

So is it any surprise when working on an SEO project that in virtually all cases we only concentrate on Google?

Blue Man - Las Vegas - SEO

2007-12-31T17:43:00.000-05:00

So what do the Blue Man, Las Vegas and Search Engine Optimization have in common? Yes, the Blue Man is a fun pack 2 hours entertainment event at the Blue Man Theatre at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. Yes, Las Vegas recently was home to PubCon's Search Engine Marketing conference. But the fact that both have Las Vegas in common doesn't make Blue Man = SEO.

What they have in common is the marketing team behind the Blue Man show; understand search engine optimization and the importance of building links. During the Pub Con, the Blue Man invited several of us to attend their show. The cost of admittance was to ensure we wrote a review of the show and ensured that it would be published on-line with a link to the show. They clearly understand the importance of viral/word of mouth marketing and of link building. With each link to their show web site, they increase the importance of the site in the eyes of all leading search engines. So the distribution of a couple of handful of tickets to leading bloggers and SEO people can easily lead to the selling of hundreds of more tickets.

Yes, I saw the show free of charge, but does that mean you shouldn't pay for it. As a reviewer, I was entertained even before the show started right through to the closing routine. Simply waiting for the show to start and reading the stages electronic marquee (ticker tape) with humours messages about turning off cell phones was entertaining. Even as the show was just about to start, they singled out several individuals in the crowd including yours truly. As I gazed upon the ticker tape I noticed my name flashing across it, with the message "Let's welcome Alan K'necht an all round good guy who knows everything!". My simple waving of hand wasn't good enough; the marquee then got the entire audience to chat in unison "Stand Up Alan and take a Bow".

After I took my bow and they directed their attention to others in the crowd, the show began. The show a combination of amazing drumming, visual effects, humour all from the emotionless Blue Men is something to be experienced. The only complaint was at times the band with their use of neon and blinking lights was a bit distracting from the action of the Blue Men.

So if you're heading to Vegas, I highly recommend this show.

Spock the Next FaceBook?

2007-12-23T12:30:00.000-05:00

People are always looking for what the next big thing on the web is going to be. Almost a year ago I wrote about Facebook. Back then it was still redistricted to people at educational institutions. Well it opened up to the rest of us and as the say "the rest is history".

So what is the next big thing? While I won't put any money it, give Spock a look (www.spock.com). This site is the ultimate web site for ego surfing. It is a search engine of just people. So type in your name, type in my name and see what comes up. You might be surprised.

Want to update your personal information or start a network of trusted individuals then go for it by registering. Spock has a rating system of the importance of individuals called "Spock Power". Simply add more people you your network and your power grows. As well, you immediately get Spock's recommendations of others who you might want to invite to your network because they are connected to you through someone in your network. Think of Spock as a blending of Facebook (the personal social network site) and LinkedIn (the business social network site)

You can also increase your power by establishing trust with others. Get people you know to confirm who you are and anything (tags) that you've used to identify yourself.

So why do I think Spock could be the next big thing, after all we already have Facebook and LinkedIn. I registered with Spock about 1 year ago and I didn't hear anything more about it or from it. Yet over the past 2 weeks I've started getting lots of "Trust Requests" from it. This means others are now starting to flock to it. Perhaps it's a fad perhaps not. Either way, people are starting to use it and if you want to be up on the latest social networking sites, you better take a look. And while you're there, why not add yourself to my network as a K'necht-It reader.

Las Vegas Web Conferences Wrap-Up

2007-12-23T12:19:00.000-05:00

It's hard to believe that it's been 2 weeks since the wrap-up party from PubCon. I know I promised to keep you posted on events and news from both Web Builder 2.0 and PubCon, but work and life sometimes gets in the way of the best plans.

To summaries both events, both were great in different ways. Web Builder 2.0 as predicated brought to together developers, web project managers, usability specialist and so much more. The sessions were top notch and giving the speakers a full hour each gave them a chance to go more than just surface level on their given topics.

PubCon on the other hand was an SEO and SEM focused event. It was much larger and the sessions were composed of panels of experts (including yours truly). While this format gives the opportunity to hear lots of different views, by limiting the panellists to 9-12 minutes each, you don't get into much depth.

I always say you can tell a great conference from a good conference by what happens between sessions. Using this measure both conferences were great! PubCon gets an extra star for organizing a wrap-up networking session on the last day. Perhaps it was the free beer and soft drinks, perhaps it was squeezing almost a thousand people into the Brew Pub at the Monte Carlo or perhaps it was just the desire of people to get to know people at a deeper level.Whatever the reason, this was the highlight of PubCon. I met more new people that afternoon and swapped more business cards in 4 hours then I did over the first few days combined. Many of the speakers stuck around for this event and it gave the opportunity for the attendees to get to know us and to ask us those final questions they didn't get to ask during the sessions.

My personal highlight was watching Matt Cutts (of Google fame) and Danny Sullivan (from Search Engine Land) race their cellphones. It was IPhone (Matt Cutts) vs. The HTC 6800 (Canny Sullivan). I had to cheer for Danny as he has the same cellphone as I do (IPhones are not available in Canada). So with cellphones in hand and browsers open, the race began. Would the sleek design of the IPhone win over the large QWERTY keyboard of the HTC 6800. It was Mac vs. Windows Mobile and the winner is...

Well Matt Cutts did hold up a Search Engine Land sticker on his head.

Here's hoping that both events will take place again next year. If so, I can almost guarantee I'll be there.

Summary of Web Builder 2.0 2007

2007-12-05T19:13:00.001-05:00

This years Web Builder 2.0 was well organized and had a great speakers. Unfortunately attendance was down a bit from last year and the rooms could have easily help 3 times the number of attendees.

One thing that became clear while attending several of keynotes and sessions is that world of Web 2.0 is maturing. There wasn't much new to say, just a few adjustments and adjusted forecast.

One presentation that stood out to no surprise was the Usability session with Jared Spool of UIE. While Jared didn't address Web 2.0, he did take us back to the early days of the Wang word processor and showed the "Evolution of Intuitive Design".

The one quote that stood out from his presenation besides pointing out that everyone uses the word "intuitive" incorrectly was "Who ever set the standard that an "*" means required? I want to find that person and kill him. Just kidding!".

Despite the small turn out, I still enjoyed Web Builder 2007 and the people I talked to loved the fact that this is only conference for the whole web team. Here's hoping there is going to be a Web Builder 2008.

2 Conference 1 Week

2007-12-05T19:07:00.002-05:00

It's Wednesday and I'm half way through my 1 week in Las Vegas with 2 conference addresses at two different conferences.

This morning I wrapped up my second address with Presentation at Pub Con.

It was a great presentation on "A Top Down Approach to SEO". I was part of a 4 person panel which included : Mark Jackson, Lyndsay Walker and Paul Bruemmer.

The presentation contained lots of great tips and my slide on comparing poorly coded web pages (from an SEO perspective) as noose vs. a straight rope (the linear approach) was well received.

If you'd like to read more on the presentation, Mark has a great summary of the presentation on his blog

The Night Before Web Builder

2007-12-03T01:01:00.000-05:00

Another year has gone by and its time for Web Builder. As usual there are lots of speakers and lots of interesting topics being covered. While nothing has made me jump with excitement and highlight a specific session, I'm sure there is going to be lots of great information being exchanged.

My presentation on Web Analytics is now all ready to go and is rock solid with just a touch of humour and lots good information. The sad news is it is the last session of the day. And with a conference starting at 8:30 am and going until 6:00 pm I don't know how many people will still be there come the 5:00 pm start time.

I'll be sure to post any interesting tips and gossip I hear during the conference.

It's hard to believe that it is 10 years since I attended my first Web Builder conference in New Orleans. Back then all this was so new and the excitement of just being with others in love with this emgerging technology called the web as a communication tool gave the conference a buzz that I have never seen or felt before or since.

So keep your eyes on this blog for some great info. Remember that I'll be speaking and attending PubCon from WebMaster's World starting Wednesday.

The best news so far is that I've been comped a ticket to Blue Men for tomorrow night and there is going to be one big blow out party sponsored by Microsoft this week. I'm sure there will stories to tell from that party.

SEO from Scratch

2007-11-27T09:23:00.000-05:00

For a change I'm getting to work on a search engine optimization project the proper way. My firm has been hired to do SEO for a start-up company. What's nice to see is this start-up is making search engine optimization part of the project plan right up front.

Before they even engaged a design firm, they had identified their SEO needs and started working with us to help define the requirements that the design firm must meet. Now SEO is part of the entire project plan.

I'm looking forward to not trying to retro fit SEO into poorly designed page templates, or trying to fix a site just after it was launched.

I'll be posting more about this project as various steps have been completed. On of the challenges faced my start-ups in the SEO world, is that of longevity. The search engines give some wait to how long a domain has been around. So instead of keeping everything under wraps until the site is launches in 2008, or just leaving a standard "Under Construction" page of a hosting company's parking page as a place holder, we launched a subject matter place holder page, which has a few keyword phrase in it. What will this do? First, it helps establish the site in the search engines eyes and secondly it starts telling the search engines what this page/site is about. So take a look at the place holder for 479 Popcorn to get an idea of what I'm talking.

More on 479 Popcorn as the next steps in SEO project are completed

WebTrends Releases 8.1a

2007-09-18T19:51:00.000-04:00

As previously posted, the new version of WebTrends 8.1 was a bit buggy. So 4 weeks later, WebTrends has now released the first round of patches with version 8.1a.

I'm in the process of upgrading my test server and the upgrade is slow. Just like during the original upgrade, it looks like the upgrade is hanging giving a message for more then 30 minutes "Time remaing: 13 seconds". I learned my lesson last time and did kill the process.

The result, after 30 minutes, I was notified that the upgrade was successful and to reboot the server.

I also did a brand new clean install today on a production server at a client. It went smooth until I went back to modify the configuration to change the UI port from the default of 7099 to port 80. After 30 minutes, WebTrends was still displaying the message "Shutting Down WTUI". It was a little after 5:00 pm, so I left it and am keeping my fingers crossed that it will be resolved by tomorrow morning.

So until I see the impact from tonights upgrade, I still can't recommend the WebTrends upgrade. However if your installing from scratch, go for it and download the latest version WebTrends 8.1a at ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/81a/wt-windows.exe

Google's Market Share US

2007-11-22T11:47:00.001-05:00

Overall the number of searches in the US in October increased 12 percent from September to 10.5 billion. Google's market share continued to increase to 58.5% or 6.1 billion searches during this period according to comScore.

Just remember that all searches are not created equal and these numbers include searches on such web properties as YouTube and other search engine web properties. What does this all mean? If the experts are right, then the US search market is destined to resemble the Canadian market where Google has well over 80% of all searches. In essence, Google is becoming a monopoly when it comes to search.

Here are the other major search engines' market shares for the US in October:

Yahoo - 22.9%
MSN - 9.7%
Ask - 4.7%
Time Warner (AOL) - 4.2%

To more information please see the Yahoo News article

WebTrends 8.1A Success at Last

2007-11-21T09:13:00.001-05:00

After numerous attempts to get the new WebTrends version 8.1a working on my test server I finally succeeded. That's the good news, what I had to do to get here is another story and the bad news.

First for those who've been following my blog posts on WebTrends can tell that I haven't been happy with the new version of WebTrends. I've been on the phone regularly with WebTrends technical support staff and just couldn't get it working the way I wanted. As someone who installs, configures and manages WebTrends for clients across North America this has been disappointing to say the least.

Since WebTrends 8.1 release back in August I've had a few opportunities to do clean installs on new servers. They went relatively OK as long as we got all the setting right the first time. If the client had first tried to install WebTrends and then I needed to reinstall to add missing components that's when another set of nightmares began. But these nightmares got me on the road to figuring out the good clean installation.

So now back to my test server. On several occasions, I had WebTrends 8.1 working, but speed was an issue and it kept crashing. In the end, I was one of the problems. This is a test server and I was using Windows XP Pro as the OS. Because of the version of IIS isn't a full version and only allows 1 web site to work at a time. I had previously used this instance of IIS to host my test SDC server. This was problem number 1. The SDC component even when it wasn't operation seemed to cause a conflict. And when I'd switch between them WebTrends would crash. So I deleted the SDC component and WebTrends ran, but it ran slow.

My WebTrends test server has been around for a while starting with version 7.0 and has always gone through upgrades. It was the 8.1 upgrade that ultimately was causing me problems. To get WebTrends to run properly, I latterly had to uninstall the previous version of WebTrends, delete all related files (OK simply rename the directory) including the instance of MySQL and start from scratch. WebTrends is now flying on my test server and I haven't had a single problem in days. That's good news for me, but if you have an existing WebTrends installation and need to upgrade you're not in the position to blow it all away and start over. So proceed carefully, do a complete server back up and be ready to revert if you run into problems.

I'm starting to like the new interface despite less than a handful of things that annoy me. I'm still waiting for at least one more round of patches/fixes with this version before recommend to clients to proceed with the upgrade. However, if you're starting from scratch there is now no reason to stay away from version 8.1a of WebTrends.

Log Scrubber Version 2.0 Released

2007-11-14T20:34:00.000-05:00

My company K'nechtology Inc. this past Monday released version 2.0 of it's popular log scrubber.

For those who may have not seen previous posts about the Log Scrubber here is a brief overview. The Log Scrubber allows for the optimization of both Apache and IIS access log files. What does optimization of log files mean?

Log file optimization simply means removing unnecessary hit (line entries) from the log file. This allows for the size of the log file to be significantly reduced and speeds up the processing time your favourite web analytics tool.

For example, do you really need to report on all the .js and .css file calls in your log file? What about those up-time utilities that are hitting a web page every 60 seconds that you are filtering out anyways from your reporting. By removing these entries uses have typically reduced their log file size by 25% and in some case even more.

This is a big deal especially if you process your log files multiple times. The time savings can really ad up. As well, if you're using a product like WebTrends that charge you based on page views, you can remove specific page views before WebTrends process your log file and now save money as well as time.

The Log Scrubber is still priced at $199 until the end of the year and there is a free 30 day trial version also available. For more information on the Log Scrubber please visit the Log Scrubber product page or read the Log Scrubber press release.

Verifying your PPC Efforts

2007-11-11T20:39:00.000-05:00

I'm currently giving the product PPC Assurance a trial run. PPC Assurance is a product from Enquisite that makes it easy to verify that all the clicks you're getting and paying for from your Google Adword campaign are legitimate.

According to their web site up to 10% of clicks you get charged for you shouldn't be charged for. Now if you're running a small campaign that may be just a couple of bucks a month, but what if you're spending thousands per month. In this case it can equate to 100's if not thousands of dollars each month and over the course of a year, we're talking big bucks.

So with a new client SEM campaign launching last week I decided to give PPC Assurance a trial run. The set-up looked simple and it should have been. However, my expectations and requirements didn't fit into the standard business model. So a few emails and phone calls later I was up and running with a clearer sense of how this product works. Knowing what I now know, it should taken less then 15 minutes.

PPC Assure basically sits on top of your existing Enquisite account (more on that great product another time) and measures every click you get from Google Adwords. With an API into Adwords itself, PPC Assurance verifies that every click you're being charged for match your campaign criteria. It then reports on inappropriate clicks and even has a mechanism for claiming refunds from Google.

Is PPC Assurance for you. The answer is no if you're running a Global campaign with no day parting settings and no audience targeting (language, country, etc.). However, if you like most of my clients running specific ads targeted at specific audiences (country, city, state/province, etc.) then PPC Assure is something to look into.

So far my trial test is going great. The campaign is set to only display ads to people searching within Canada in English. According to PPC Assure, about 8% of ad clicks are from outside that definition and that Google is charging for a little less then 1/2 of those (about 2.5%).

I'm going to run PPC Assurance for a whole month and then try the claim mechanism to see how it works. Keep looking here for more updates on this trial evaluation.

For more information on PPC Assure visit their web site at http://ppcassurance.enquisite.com/

SEM & Web Analytics

2007-11-11T20:36:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting article on the getting the big picture of Search Engine Marketing lined up correctly with web analytics. Basically it boils down to the problem of different camps and different responsibilities and objectives.

If you have a few minutes give it a read at http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2007/11/search-engine-m.html

Baidu SEO

2007-10-25T10:08:00.001-04:00

One of the benefits of running my SEO Tools and Resources Directory is people are always sending me in suggestions of new SEO tools or Search Engine Optimization resources.

I personally review all submissions and decide on which items to added to my ever growing list. Unfortunately, most submissions are not up to my standards. I was however pleasantly surprised by todays submission.

Today's submission was for an on-line article about Baidu (the most popular search engine in China) and how SEO for Baidu is different then SEO for Google or the other major search engines. While the English used in this article is not perfect, the message and methodology is clear.

Key points of the article include the use of simplified Chinese as the character set, use of specific meta tags (once again in simplified Chinese) and use of domain names an hosting locations. Over the SEO techniques described are nothing that don't apply to other search engines, but the specific combinations of elements are a bit different.

So if you're interested in marketing your web site to China and want to be optimized for Baidu give this article a read www.baidupro.com

The Description Meta Tag

2007-10-21T11:00:00.001-04:00

The description meta tag, is frequently overlooked by HTML coders and copy writers. Yet, the importance of this tag has never gone away.

Some of us in the SEO community feel it is an important element in the various search engine algorithms, while some others do not. According to Google "While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results." Yet, I've seen sites rankings improve in Google with a simple rewrite of the description meta tag. So who do you believe? That's up to you and regardless, the mere fact that in many instance it will be displayed in the search results to describe the page, make it an important sales message to improve click-through rates.

If the search engine is your new home page, you not only need effective page titles (the first line of a search result listing), but an effective description meta tag. This tag needs to be more then just loaded with keywords, it needs to be engaging, and convince the searcher (if they see this element) to click on your listing. After all, being number one in search results with an uninviting page title and description, won't get your site any traffic.

As a reminder, the format of the description meta tag is
<meta name="Description" content="informative description here">

This is why, my firm K'nechtology always stress the importance of this tag and has developed a specialty of writing effective description meta tags. Effective description meta tags must be part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy.

For more information on this subject, here is a link to a great article from Google on the subject matter (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/querystats?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.knechtology.com%2F&hl=en).

WebTrends 8.1a - Issues and Solutions

2007-09-21T00:29:00.001-04:00

An interesting thing occurred today, I received a call from one of WebTrends senior technical support staff. Turns out he was reading my blog posts about all recent issues with version 8.1. This is also one of the reason I like WebTrends. This was not a call to calm me down, but a proactive call and investigation into the cause of my problems and if I managed to get them resolved. I've always said that WebTrends has some of the best Techincal Support staff in the software business (both knowledgeable and high quality service)

We chatted for about 15 minutes and discussed issues and the reasons why. Here are a couple of things that came out of it.

1. My problem about the status message not updating for over 30 minutes is noted and should be addressed in a future release;
2. The reason why it takes so long upgrade compared to any previous version - turns out that WebTrends makes a temporary backup of the existing database, then deletes everything before performing a complete new install afterwards it restores the data.

This is a high risk move which is why WebTrends stresses the need to properly back up your WebTrends before any upgrade. I'll be posting a guide to the upgrade that I've developed based on some other conversations with tech support to ensure it goes smoothly.

3. Spent 3 days working with version 8.1a - while it is taking a while to get use to the new interface and there are still some technical issues, there are some new features that do make the upgrade worthwhile. Just make sure you plan for the upgrade properly (leave lots of time).

Here are a few of my favorites new features

Scheduled Reports - you can now specify a default SMTP server and from Address - no need to enter for each scheduled report.
Ability to FTP scheduled reports to a repository
Use of date macros in scheduled report naming convention (no more overwriting previously saved reports)
Ability to right click on a graphic a copy and pasted to other applications

Here are a few things I really don't like

Can't open profile reports in a new window or tag - so have keep closing report to view the admin module instead of toggling between them;
Export to Excel Smart Reports is no longer listed as an export type (solution - just choose "Export to Database");
Still no date macros available for scheduled custom compare reports

I'll expand on the above items in another post. The good news is the software is stable and performs as promised.

WebTrends 8.1 Update

2007-08-22T15:43:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend WebTrends released version 8.1 to all Ondemand customers. It appears to be working fine.

I've also installed the stand-alone version on my test server and despite some problems getting the upgrade to work, it appears to be working. However, I also have a test SDC installation on that server and that has created a conflict.

I think I know where the problem lies, but I just haven't had time to fix it. I hope to have that resolved shortly. Once I have that out of the way, I can better comment on version 8.1. I must admit, I do like the new interface.

A couple of complaints on the new version and the install. First it requires .net Framework version 2.0. I had to go out and look for it on microsoft.com and install it. It should have come bundled with the install.

Secondly, since the new version doesn't require Apache or Tomcat it should have prompted me to delete these two applications. Instead it simply leaves them on the server and deactivated the Apache Virtual host. Not a very clean upgrade.

Lastly, my test server has less then 10 profiles and all are very small. Yet it took several hours for the upgrade. This seems excessive and I'm not looking forward to upgrading my various clients who have a 100 plus profiles.

WebTrends Geotrends Database

2007-08-22T15:41:00.000-04:00

WebTrends has deleted the most recent geotrends update from its ftp site.

As of this morning they have replaced the dat file with the previous one from November 2006. My guess is that I'm not the only one who got stuck with the corrupted database.

I expect a fix by Friday or early next week.

Problems with WebTrends GeoTrend Update

2007-08-18T00:05:00.000-04:00

Don't bother downloading the latest Geotrends msi updater. It is corrupt and won't work. I tried two different downloads onto two different installations and both failed.

So I tried it the old fashion way and downloaded the Geotrends data file and ran the installation program to use the new GeoTrends dat file. While that worked, my geographical data is now corrupt. Many of the North American state names don't appear correct and are using some kind of different character set.

I just discovered this today and haven't had a chance to call WebTrends tech support. My guess is this GeoTrends update is only for WebTrends 8.1. I guess I'll find out when I do my upgrade in a day or two.

So the best advice for now is don't update your Geotrends database.

WebTrends 8.1

2007-08-13T10:53:00.001-04:00

Want to thank Wolf who gave me the heads-up that WebTrends 8.1 in now available for download.

I'm on the road this week and next week running WebTrends training classes, so I don't know when I'll get the chance to install and evaluate this download. Should be lots of fun

If you want to be the first on the block with WebTrends 8.1 go ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/81/

For the OnDemand users, WebTrends is promising the upgrade this coming weekened (Auguat 18 & 19th).

Should be a fun time for all.

Another Las Vegas Web Conference

2007-08-08T17:33:00.000-04:00

This year overlapping with WebBuilder in Las Vegas is Pubcon. Pubcon is an all encompassing web conference run by WebmasterWorld.

Pubcon will run Dec. 4 - 7, 2007 at the Las Vegas Convention Centre.

I've also just been confirmed as a speaker at this years Pubcon as well. The exact topic my address has not been finalized, but will most likely be focused on either Web Analytics or SEO. More on my address as the details are worked out.

For more information on Pubcon visit the conference web site at www.pubcon.com

WebBuilder 2007 Schedule Annouced

2007-08-08T17:25:00.000-04:00

As mentioned in an earlier post, I'll be speaking at this years WebBuilder 2.0 conference in Las Vegas (December 3-5, 2007). The good news is they've finally launched the conference web site at www.ftponline.com/conferences/webbuilder/2007.

The bad news is I've been given a tough time slot. I'll be speaking on Tuesday December 4 at 5:15 pm. Once again my session is entitled "Designing with Web Analytics In Mind".

For details on my session and the other sessions along with information about the conference workshops, be sure to visit their web site.

More on WebTrends 8.1

2007-07-31T16:27:00.001-04:00

I've gotten some of the dirt on the soon to be released new version of WebTrends (WebTrends 8.1). Here are the highlights of new features (remember this will first be released to On-demand customers and then as a download to software owners).

1. A new interface for both Admin and end-users
2. Graphics will no longer be generated using Java, but will be dynamically generated web graphics (i.e. jpg or gif)
3. Users will have the ability to e-mail and schedule reports from the profile interface (not sure if this will be a rights issue or not)
4. Admin logging - yes the feature we've been asking for. All profile changes will be dated and logged. Everything an Admin does (so they claim) will be logged. Open a profile for edit, it's logged etc.
5. No more icons on the right-hand side for Admins (analyze now and reanalyze icons that look the nearly the same) - instead they will be replaced with a drop down list to make it less likely that you'll click on the wrong icon and delete your profile.

You can view a sales demo of the new version at:
https://admin.acrobat.com/_a162502/whatsnewanalytics/

Now stuff from the rumor mill. There is going to be a big change in the pricing model. The cost of for the On-demand version and software version are going to be nearly the same and if you've chosen to buy the software, the annual costs will be much higher and perhaps close to the costs of the On-demand version. Final pricing hasn't been set (at least the person I talked to at WebTrends didn't know if had). The good news is that it looks like if you've already purchased the software, you'll be grandfathered in and won't face the new pricing model.

What does this all mean? It looks like WebTrends is trying to harder to move all new customers to the On-demand version of their product. While some businesses don't care, this means higher costs to for others, especially if they like to slice and dice their web site into numerous profiles and have ownership over their own log files.

Other news/rumors from WebTrends, version 9 is now off the drawing board. It has an internal name and development has started. Anticipated release date some time in 2008.

WebBuider 2007 Here I Come

2007-07-28T11:32:00.000-04:00

I've just been confirmed as a speaker at this years WebBuilder conference in Las Vegas. This years conference will run from December 3 to December 5. I'm thrilled to be speaking at this years conference as usual. This speaking engagement will ensure my attendance at one of the industries most interesting web conferences anywhere plus it keeps alive my continuous attendance at WebBuilder conferences since the inaugural event back in 97.

WebBuilder was originally organized by CNet and eventually sold to FTP Publications who just after last year's WebBuilder conference was purchased by 1105 Media.

What makes WebBuilder stand out as a conference for web builders is it is the only conference to target the entire web development team. This includes everyone from programmers to project managers to the entire marketing team. There are conference tracks there for everyone and some that try to bring the different teams together. My topic this year is exactly that. Entitled "Designing with Web Analytics in Mind", will address the needs of the marketing team for measuring success and build a bridge with the web developers to ensure that the web site is designed and code in such a way to support the web analytic needs of the marketing and management teams.

More on my conference address at a later date. Once the conference web site is up and running, I'll be sure to post a link to it. For now, if you want to check out last years conference you can view the 2006 WebBuilder 2.0 web site instead and start planning to attend this unique annual conference.

Canadian Mobile Data Rates

2007-07-28T11:26:00.000-04:00

Here is a very informative article about how appalling the mobile data rates are for Canadians. Turns out we are paying more then anyone else including some second and third world countries.

These high costs are no going to hold back the adoption of mobile web devices here in Canada and in turn, keep us backward when it comes to mobile e-commerce.

Article URL: news.stepforth.com/blog/2007/07/canadian-mobile-data-rates-are.php

Search Engines Tighten Privacy

2007-07-25T17:05:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting article from the Washington Post about Search engines and their privacy policies. In a nutshell, the major search engines are starting to reduce the the life of their cookie and the tracking of what terms you've been searching on.

This article is well worth the read for anyone concerned about Internet Privacy and search engines.

Read the article

WebTrends 8.1 Comming Soon

2007-07-13T08:36:00.000-04:00

I just got word that WebTrends 8.1 is coming within the next 4 weeks to WebTrends on demand. I expect that it will be also available around the same time as an upgrade for people who have a local installation.

From the noticed I've received they are promoting better integration with the Marketing Lab 2 and WebTrends Dynamic Search. There is no mention of what enhancements or new features will be included in the analytics software upgrade.

Stay tuned for more information on this WebTrends upgrade as I get it.

An Amazing Web Site

2007-07-12T11:10:00.002-04:00

This post is not about SEO, web analytics or WebTrends, but something truly amazing and still web related. Yesterday, I was introduced to an electronic hand held game an old kids and adult favourite - 20 Questions. While looking at the packaging, I noticed they had a web site www.20q.net.

Well today I checked out the web site and they have same game on-line. You can choose what language you want to think in including several different flavours of English (American, British and Canadian) then choose the version of the game. You can choose the classic version or one of several specialty versions like movies or Dr. Who, Harry Potter etc.

What is amazing about this web site is not only how often it guesses what you were thinking of, but that the site (OK the computer behind it) is learning at the same time. The goal if it guess in 20 questions or less it wins. If takes more than 20 questions, you win. Of course on the few times I stumped it, it shows me where my answers contradicted what was in its database as an excuse for losing. However, if enough people keep answering the same way it will learn and get even better.

So give it a try and try not to get addicted.

Monitoring Search Engine Traffic

2007-07-04T12:12:00.000-04:00

One of the advantages of speaking at conferences is the chance to meet and socialize with other conference speakers. Recently at SES Toronto, I had the opportunity to go out for dinner with some 40 plus of these people.

During the dinner I had the chance to chat with someone from Google who actually works on the algorithm and I was able to get some very detailed information o the algorithm that almost contradicted what he had he said during his conference address. To be more specific, I got him to clarify his statement about coding valid HTML and its impact on SEO efforts, more on that another day.

The score of the evening was a chat with Richard Zwicky of Enquisite (www.enquisite.com). During our chat, he mentioned a beta product that his company had launched that allows any web site to get extremely detailed search engine traffic information that typically exceeds anything from all the web analytic products on the marketing (including WebTrends, Site Catalyst, etc.).

So we swapped business cards, and the next day I was given a personal demo of the Enquisite tool. I was impressed and immediately following the conference I registered for the beta. Ever since my account was activated, I've been enjoying rich detailed information on how people are finding my web site.

Features include:

Splitting paid from organic traffic;
Exact search phrases;
Data drilldown by country, region, city, search engine, paid vs. organic, search term or any combination of these elements;
Frequency of searches;
Which page of search results they had clicked on;

This tool is a must have for anyone doing search engine optimization or search engine marketing. If you're using Google Analytics or any other analytics tool that doesn't easily split paid from organic traffic, the value is even higher. The best news it's free. All you need to do is go to the Enquisite site (www.enquisite.com), register and typically within 24 hours your account will be activated and you'll be given a java script to add to the bottom of all your web pages. It's that simple.

Once the script is activated, you just need to do a tiny bit of configuration to define how you identified paid traffic and away you go. You can now easily and accurately extract valuable information from all your search traffic. With this information on hand you can use it to further enhance you SEO efforts or paid search campaigns.

SES Presentation - Follow-up

2007-06-13T00:06:00.000-04:00

Just a quick note to all those who attended my presentation at the Search Engine Strategies conference here in Toronto on June 12.

I was thrilled with all the positive feedback you gave me after the presentation as I wandered the vendor area and hallways of the Toronto Convention Centre.

Many of you asked me for the name of the software that dynamically sets different phone numbers on your web site. The company is voicestar.com.

As I mentioned during the Q&A of the session, I've only seen the demo of this software and am not currently using it. From the demo it looks great. So if you give it a try let me know how it works out.

Which Analytic Tool Are They Using?

2007-05-27T06:22:00.001-04:00

Ever wonder which of the many web analytics tool a specific web site is using? Maybe not, but rest assured that if you start getting more and more into web analytics the question will come up from one of your clients or even yourself.

To help answer this question, the folks at webanalyticsdemystified.com have made a free tool available called "Simple Vendor Discovery Tool". This tool can help determine which java script based web analytics tool a specific site is using. Unfortunately, and for obvious reasons, if a site is analyzing traditional log files, it won't be able to help.

So have some fun and check it out at http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/vendor_discovery_tool.asp

Search Engine Strategies - Toronto

2007-05-26T14:13:00.000-04:00

For the third year in a row, I'll be speaking at Search Engine Strategies Toronto. While the search engine conference will run for two days (June 12-13), I will be speaking in the morning of June 12.

Look for me at the session entitled "Keyword Research: Purpose, Tools, and Tactics".

I'll be giving this topic a bit of twist by not talking usual SEO stuff, but about how to harvest data from your own log files. In essence using web analytics in support of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Unfortunately, I'll only have 15 minutes to speak and I could easily devote several hours to this topic.

So if you're going to be in the Toronto area in June, keep this conference in mind. It is the only one of its kind to take place in Canada. If past experience is anything, it is well worth the cost of admission.

For more information visit the SES conference web site.

Paid Search and Spend Breakdown

2007-05-15T13:27:00.000-04:00

Just read an interesting article based on a survey that was sponsored by WebTrends about paid search (SEM).

Some of the highlights from the article/survey include:

22 percent saying they run 1,000 to 10,000 keywords
31 percent stating they use 1-1,000 keywords
21 percent indicated they are running over 10,000 to more than 200,000 keywords

Most respondents indicated that they use multiple metrics for measuring success:

"traffic" being the top choice at 44 percent
"conversion" at 34 percent
"cost per action" at 22 percent

What I found disturbing is that only 14 percent of marketers who responded indicated that they use "profit" to evaluate the success of their paid search campaigns. While I understand that measuring profit may not always be easy especially, when identifying web site conversion points is already difficult on most no e-commerce web site, however, not paying attention to profit or ROI means, that marketing mistakes will be repeated.

From a practical stand-point, I just believe it is laziness in configuring web analytic tools to measure conversions and assigning a value (profit) to these conversions. Followed by applying this revenue to the cost of the campaign for a clear indicator of ROI/profitability.

Read the full article - it is well worth the read

SEO and Baby Naming

2007-05-15T08:24:00.000-04:00

Here is a great article from the Wall Street Journal on how important it is for you to rank high in Google for your name. The article goes on to talk about how people are even choosing baby names on how competitive their name (first name last name) is in Google.

What is interesting this is the same exercise that SEO professionals do before recommending specific keyword phrases to target for a business.

For more details see the article on the web site.

Keyword Spy - A new Tool in my SEM Toolbox

2007-04-15T22:28:00.000-04:00

A friend just forwarded a great new search engine marketing tool to my attention. After just a few minutes of evaluating it in the free mode, I've added to my arsenal of search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO tools. The tool is Internet Spy (http://www.keywordspy.com).

This tool allows you to easily see how different keyword terms you've purchased are performing plus look up the keyword terms your competition is bidding on a well.

So far I've only tried the free version of Internet Spy and perhaps I'll dig into the old wallet to give the paid version a try. My first thoughts on looking at the costs are that it is a bit steep. At $19 USD for a single day, they may be pricing themselves a bit too high and when you look at an annual subscription price of $99 per month ($1,188 per year) they are a lot more expensive then paid SEM and SEO tools that I'm currently using.

So I'll stick with the free version for now, but I'll keep in mind the competitor's information that you can't anywhere else. So let me know if you decided to give the paid version a try. I'd love hear from you.

WebTrends 8.0d Download Now Available

2007-03-19T22:27:00.000-04:00

WebTrends as of last Friday released 8.0d. This version contains the batch for daylight savings time plus a few other minor bug fixes.

I'm in the process of downloading it and as usual either WebTrends is swamped with downloads (which I doubt) or they are once again throttling the download speed. I'm on a high speed connection and barely getting dial-up download speeds.

Oh well,

Here is the link for all of you: ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/80d/wt-windows.exe

WebTrends & Day Light Savings Time

2007-03-08T08:05:00.000-05:00

Great article from WebTrends on what you need to do before this weekends change to Day Light Savings time here in North America.

Basically you don't need to do anything if you're running your profiles with the default settings. However, if you are using the custom time zone settings, you need to apply a patch.

The article references WebTrends 8.0d, but a check of their download site does not show a version 8.0d being available. My guess is that the patch is the equivalent, unfortunately the article is a bit vague on this.

What's interesting is that the patch became available on March 2, barely a week before needed. Yet given the formal policies in most organizations about applying patches to production servers, I expect many organizations won't have the patch in place on time.

I also find it surprising that WebTrends hasn't issued a notice of the patch and instead has relied on a message being displayed when you log into your WebTrends. Since many people ignore these WebTrends marketing messages I'm sure many organizations didn't even get the message that there is a patch available.

Search Engine Market Share Update

2007-03-07T14:35:00.000-05:00

I want to thank Patrick G. an avid reader of my blog for pushing me to research and report on the latest market share for the different search engines.

Like you, I use this knowledge when concentrating my SEO efforts for specific search engines or for my ppc (Pay Per Click) search engine marketing efforts.

The last statistics I reported on were received from Google Canada itself. I haven't received an update lately, but I've found a few web sites that are reporting these numbers on a global basis.

So are some different latest snapshots:

Comscore
Share of Online Searches by Engine
December 2006 - January 2007
Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users
Source: comScore qSearch

	Dec-06	Jan-07	Pt Chg vs. Previous Month
Total Internet Population	100%	100%	N/A
Google Sites	47.3	47.5	0.2
Yahoo! Sites	28.5	28.1	-0.4
Microsoft Sites	10.5	10.6	0.1
Ask Network	5.4	5.2	-0.2
Time Warner Network	4.9	5.0	0.1

If you're looking for global numer then take a look a these numbers from Netapplications.com (the numbers are based on traffic to the web sites they monitor).

Top 10 Search Engines and their market share for February 2007

Google 52.16%
Yahoo! Web Sites 10.43%
Google U.K. 10.20%
MSN 4.57%
Google Canada 3.39%
Google AdSense for Content 3.35%
AOL 1.59%
Google Germany 1.28%
Microsoft Live Search 0.99%
Yahoo! Web Sites U.K. 0.98%

Of course what we all really want to know is how this breaks down within the USA, Canada, UK, Germany etc. If I find this kind of details I'll post those numbers.

In the mean time, you can view the full details that are updated monthly at

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=1

Web Analytics & Daylight Savings Time

2007-03-05T15:10:00.000-05:00

Much is being made about computers and switch this year to day light savings time happening two weeks earlier. Yes if you didn't download and install the appropriate patch, your personal computer will show the wrong time (off by an hour). So, what about your web analytics product?

As the clocks spring forward by an hour will you show an hour gap in your log reporting? The answer can be a bit complicated, but here goes the long and short of it.

If you're using a hosted web analytics tool like WebTrends OnDemand or Google Analytics, everything should be fine as I would expect these firms to have patched all their servers and planned for this change. If you're processing log files on your own server there are a couple of things to look out for.

First, is your web server or log data collection server patched and set to adjust automatically for the time change? If not, the entries in the log file will be off by an hour. Next, is your web analytics server and is it patched and ready for the time change. If either of these are not synchronized, then you'll have problems.

Just remember, the clocks are moving forward by one hour. So no matter what you do you'll see a gap as the clocks jump from 1:59:59 am to 3:00:00 am. The problem is if you don't see this event.

So plan and don't panic you still have a few days to prepare for it.

Podcamp Toronto - Review

2007-02-26T08:01:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, I had the pleasure to attend the first day of Podcamp Toronto. Unfortunately, a scheduling conflict prevented me from attending day 2 of Podcamp Toronto. If I had known when I planned my schedule how exceptional Podcamp would be I would have made sure to have kept my Sunday open as well.

Attending Podcamp here in Toronto reminded me and many other attendees of the buzz that surround the web back in 1997 or 1998. I even took that feeling one level further and noted that the conference and speakers were truly throwbacks to the earliest days to the web, when like minded people would get together and share everything in order to spread the word and perhaps change the world.

Podcamp speakers were quick to share tips, code and techniques. All speakers made their slides publicly available via the conference Wiki. To my surprise, the whole event was broadcast live. I took advantage of this by tuning into a couple of the Podcamp presentations on Sunday when I couldn't attend in person. While I was able to get the info from the presentations, there is nothing like attending an event like this in person. As I always say about conference, you can separate a good conference from a great conference by what happens between sessions and in the hallways. On more then one occasion, I was late or missed an entire session because I was involved in great conversations in the hallways.

My how this technology has change over the years, while to me it seems like only yesterday that people were conceiving the idea of broadcasting events live over the Internet and when my wedding was the first wedding ever broadcast live 8.5 years ago, it seem just so radical. Now the cost and the technology to do live broadcasts is within virtually everyone's reach.

So I learnt a lot about podcasting. Sessions covered everything from hardware, to software, how to publish your podcast, how to market your podcast and much more. There were even a few sessions on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and your podcast. While these sessions covered the basics, for a seasoned SEO professional like me, I saw a lot more opportunity.

Absent from the conference however were speaker egos, copyright notices on slide presentations and costs. Yes Podcamp Toronto was free to attend. Thank you to all the volunteers, speakers and event sponsors for not only putting on an incrediable event, but for allowing everyone to attend regardless of their financial abilities. I can't say I got my money's worth, but I can say that Podcamp Toronto was worth investing my time in attending and I can't wait until the next Podcamp.

Google Loses Belgium Court Case

2007-02-13T08:32:00.000-05:00

Several months back I posted an article on how a group of Belgium newspapers were suing Google over listing headlines and snippets of stories in Google News. Well the court has ruled and Google has lost.

It turns out that the bigger issue besides the headlines and content snippets (which in itself contradicts the Belgium copyright laws) was the storing of copies of articles in Google's cache. Like most newspapers they offer recent stories for free, but then place them in an archive and charge for access to the archive. By allowing searchers to access the articles through a cached copy, Google was taking away potential revenue from the newspapers.

As with all big law suits, it is never over until someone gives up. On that note, Google is planning on appealing.

Read the full story.

Checking Backlinks in Google

2007-02-11T14:58:00.000-05:00

Checking Backlinks in Google

As all SEO professionals know, the back link checker offered by Google (link:yoururl), has been intentionally broken for some time now. While there have been many reasons discussed for why Google broke their own application, it has left SEO professional with a broken tool for checking backlinks on the most poplar search engine, until now.

As of last week, Google has added a new tool to its set of extremely helpful tools available as part of its Webmasters program. According to the Google post on its blog, "Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded".

The good news is that everything Google promised in its post is true. You can now check backlinks to every single page in your web site instead of just the domain. There is a treasure chest of information just waiting to be discovered with this new tool.

The tool does come with some limitations. First and most obvious, you need to sign-up for the Webmaster program (not a big deal and it is free) and secondly you need to verify yourself and the domain you want to check backlinks for. This second step isn’t a big deal either, but it does require that you publish some code to the web site that you are interested in.

So go on and register and check out all the free features of Google's Webmaster service at http://www.google.com/webmasters

Remember if you have questions about this or any other post you can contact me by simply clicking on the Bitwine Icon in the right-hand column.

Tracking Blogs & Bog Conversations

2007-01-31T10:29:00.000-05:00

Along the lines of del.icio.us has come a new bookmaking tool called co.mments.com.

co.mments.com allows you to create bookmarks of specific blog conversations that you want to track. This tool can be used to monitor blogs where you have posted a comment and want to see if anyone has responded, or perhaps you just want to monitor a particular blog entry to see if others have added comments (started a blog conversation).

Personally, I think this is an interesting idea. On several occasions I've posted comments blogs, only to forget to check back for a response. It was only days later that I remembered the posting and had to try hard to remember the specific blog.

This tool allows you the option of having blog comments e-mailed directly to you. This is a great alternative if you don’t want to subscribe to the blogs RSS feed. As another option, you can share to co.mnents links with friends or the public at large.

Because I think this idea has merit, I'll be giving it a try. It appears very easy to use and you can even arrange to be e-mailed when comments are added. Only time will tell if co.ments.com catches on like del.icio.us.

Video Blogs - BlogTV.ca

2007-02-01T08:31:00.000-05:00

For Canadians interested in taking blogs to the next level comes BlogTv.ca.

BlogTv is currently in beta and it allows anyone with a web cam to broadcast live and even record the broadcast for later streaming. This is a free service and for now restricted to user in Canada.

I've just registered with a test account and will give it a try. I can see the potential of this type of service and am currently trying to differentiate it from the already established world of Podcasts.

So far by poking around the site, I've yet been able to find how I can download these broadcasts to my personal computer or video iPod. I'd love to see a subscription service to specific individuals or channels, so I don't have to visit the site every day. Perhaps that is something that will be forth coming as BlogTV moves its way through the beta process, but for now they are relying on Shockwave for streaming the videos.

One nice feature is they allow you to link your video into your blog. So here is a link to my first very basic test.

If you've ever wanted your own TV show, but just couldn't break into the industry here is your chance.

More details about BlogTV can be found on CBC.ca at www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/01/31/tech-blogtv-20070131.html

New Marketing Guy at WebTrends

2007-01-28T10:43:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't heard, WebTrends has appointed Tim Kopp as its new CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). Kopp is responsible for all the company's marketing and branding.

Kopp joins WebTrends with over 10 years of marketing experience including his most recent efforts at Coke where he has served as VP-global interactive marketing for just under the past two years. According to one article Kopps is best known for convincing Coke to embrace the Mentos-Diet Coke geyser video phenomenon by sponsoring video contests at EepyBird.com.

Makes you think what he'll have up his sleeve to help promote WebTrends.

A Cranky Way to Search

2007-01-10T18:55:00.000-05:00

A new search engine launched this week called "cRANKy" (www.cranky.com). This new search engine is targeted at web users who are 50+ years old.

Beyond adjusting the search result to list pages that cRANKy thinks are more appropriate to this demographic, it also limits the total results significantly and places content search based ads (provided InterActiveCorp's Ask.com aka Google Adwords) at the bottom of the page as well creating a search experience that is less confusing.

The user interface uses a larger typeface then on most search engine. The use of the larger typeface is sure to please all of us who are 40+ years old.

So if you're over 50 or even if your not give a try. Who knows "Try it. You'll like it"

11th Annual Webby Awards

2007-01-04T08:36:00.000-05:00

I'm happy to announce that I've been selected as judge for this years Webby Awards.

For those who don't know, the Webby is the Oscar of the web industry. If you haven't heard of the Webby Awards before, check it out at http://www.webbyawards.com/.

If you're interested in submitting a site, you have until January 26th. Full details available at http://www.webbyawards.com/

BitWine Advisor

2007-01-04T08:55:00.000-05:00

Some of you may have noticed a new ad on the right side of my blog the past couple of weeks. This ad indicates that I'm a BitWine Advisor.
So the question I've been asked is what is BitWine and what does it mean to be a BitWine Advisor.

First off let me state that BitWine is a Beta product that I found intriguing and wanted to explore further. It you go their web site http://www.bitwine.com you'll see a web site that looks a bit hooky and even a bit untrustworthy. Yet dig a little deeper and you’ll discover an interesting concept.

The concept is perfectly in line with the new Web 2.0 concept of a Mash-up (coming up with a good idea using API (application interface integration) with established web businesses) to develop it. In this case, they created a middle layer between Skype and PayPal.

First the BitWine middle layer is a database of people who have registered and defined a list of topics they consider themselves experts on. To find an expert on a specific topic say "WebTrends", you simply search on WebTrends and a list of those who claim to be WebTrends experts will appear along with a bio, links to their web sites/blogs and a per minute billing rate. Next, what BitWine does through Skype is monitor my on-line connection. So if I'm logged into Skype and available, they show me as available. You then have ability to simply click on my name and be connected immediately to me via my Skype connection. If I'm not on-line and you want to talk to me you can make an appointment using the BitWine calendaring service.

Of course you need to pay, so once you and I agree during our call that the billing should commence, I start the clock (you'll need to agree electronically) and BitWine calculates the charge on a per minute basis and handles the payment automatically via PayPal.

Sounds simple enough does it? BitWine has also taken a page from eBay and asks users to rate their advisor after the fact. Hence one method of building up creditability and proving you are the expert you claim to be. Well so far, no calls but the Christmas period have just ended and as business start to ramp-up again who knows. Of course, this all depends on BitWine actively promoting their service or for me to direct potential business there. This brings us full circle back to the new ad on the side of my blog.

So here is an offer to my blog readers. Just to help me test out this service, I'll give the first person who calls via BitWine and mentions this blog 10 minutes of advise no charge.

WebTrends 8.0C Upgrade - Is it worth it?

2006-12-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

One of the questions I'm frequently asked is "Should we do the incremental upgrades of WebTrends?" This question is a difficult one to answer as many of these types of upgrades fix very little and the problems they address may not be impacting your particular use of WebTrends.

So now with 8.0c out I'm being asked this again. First off I always tell everyone you should do every upgrade and keep current. It just makes sense. However, since many clients' installations are managed by their IT departments and performing a WebTrends upgrade, needs to be scheduled well in advanced accompanied with copious amounts of paper work, the answer may not always be that easy.

So here is my answer to the WebTrends 8.0c question. Check the list of fixes and decided if you really need the patches and fixes contained in 8.0c. Here are my two reasons for the upgrade:

One, WebTrends 8.0c includes the upgrade to allow WebTrends to work with IE 7;

Two, from my perspective, WebTrends has addressed one of my concerns with the product and the "Report Designer" module. In the past when you granted user permissions to all report templates, the Designer Module would appear in the navigation and when clicked on it appeared that you could change some of the Options settings as the screen would open up with editable fields. Fortunately, the save button was grayed out. On several occasions I'd have users asking what this was and why they couldn't save changes.

Well in 8.0c, WebTrends has addressed this to a certain degree. While the Report Designer menu item still appears, the link to the "Options" screen is no longer present. Access to the list of report templates and dashboards is still there, but only a list of these items appears when the links are clicked on. I still wish that WebTrends would stop this entire module from appearing unless a user has edit privileges, but I'll take what I can get.

All in all, WebTrends 8.0c is worth the upgrade especially if you're planning on rolling out IE7 in the near future to your organization.

WebTrends 8.0c Upgrade Now Available

2006-12-20T11:13:00.000-05:00

WebTrends quietly released a version 8.0c upgrade on December 15th. Version 8.0c in now available for downloading from WebTrends' FTP server. It's been a few days since the upgrade was made available on the WebTrends FTP site (ftp.webtrends.com), but still no alert in my installation or others that I monitor. I'm sure one will eventually show up.

Don't remember a version 8.0b, don't worry about it. WebTrends only released version 8.0b for their on-demand service. Version 8.0c doesn't seem to fix much, even in their documentation there is no reference to IE7, I've yet to confirm if the IE 7 fix is included, but my preliminary test show all is OK. Still I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't done the IE7 WebTrends patches first.

I was hoping for more fixes and improvements, but for now all seems well. A list of the fixes is available at product.webtrends.com/wrc/8/issuesresolved/IssuesResolvedInWebTrends80.pdf
And the upgrade is available for downloading at
ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/80c/

A Good Web Conference in Canada?

2006-11-12T14:52:00.000-05:00

One of my biggest complaints is that rarely do good quality web conferences come to Canada. Not even when our dollar was valued at 65 cents US, did the big US conference come here.

There were a few exceptions most notably Search Engine Strategy which now has an annual event here in Toronto. I've been fortunate enough to attend all three and even speak at the last two.

Well I'm proud to say it looks like an excellent web conference is coming to Canada. This February 6-10 in Vancouver and new conference called "Web Directions North" is coming. From what I've learned, this or a similar version of this conference was run annually in Australia and they've decided to bring it to North America. Of course if you're going to have a conference in Canada in February Vancouver is an excellent choice.

I don't normally plug conferences that I'm not speaking at, but I'll make an exception for this one. First off, there list of speakers is excellent. As well two people who I'm very found of and have had met at other conferences are speaking there. So if you've never had the chance to hear either of these two world renowned speaker Molly Holzschlag (Molly.com) and Kelly Goto (Gotomobile), and you'll be in the Vancouver area in February, I strongly suggest taking in this conference. In my opinion, just listing to these two Divas of the web world, you'll get your moneys worth.

If you do go to Web Directions North, please let me know you what you thought of it. Unfortunately, my schedule these days most likely won't provide me the luxury of attending this conference.

Web Builder 2.0 Another Success

2006-12-06T01:07:00.001-05:00

Just as in the past attending a Web Builder conference has proven worth while. The mix of people representing all aspects of web development is a great opportunity that you just have to take advantage of.

As I said before, I'm glad Fawcette who brought back WebBuilder after 4 years. I just hope this conference once again becomes an annual event and that I can continue my streak of attending every WebBuilder conference.

To Jim Fawcette, thanks again for the great conference and the opportunity to speak to this amazing group of people.

Ethical Blogging at Web Builder 2.0

2006-12-05T19:38:00.001-05:00

I'll be doing a last minute presentation here at Web Builder 2.0 as slot opened up by a speaker no show. My chosen topic for today is "Ethical Blogging". There was a last minute request for a presentation and I was given the opportunity to choose my topic.

This is going to be an interesting presentation as I pulled together a mini slide presentation on what I think Ethical Blogging is in about 25 minutes. What will truly make this presentation interesting is I've recruited DL Byron author of Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business to join me for the presentation. The session will have very few slides and we'll be turning it into more of a live human to human conversation with all attendees participating.

Teaching the World about Web Analytics

2006-12-04T08:36:00.001-05:00

Last week I had the privilege to deliver a 20 minute presentation on how to improve the accuracy of web analytics reporting to AIMS (Association of Internet Marketing & Sales) in Toronto. The presentation went extremely well as I was flanked on both sides by cases studies.

One of the cases studies addressed improving Search Engine Marketing efforts with analytics and the other was improving overall web site efficiencies with it. The irony was both of these presentations dealt with the travel industry.

Today in a few hours I'll be addressing the international crowd at WebBuilder 2.0 in Las Vegas. The subject is Improving ROI with Web Analytics. A very similar presentation to last week's, but this time it's just me.

So far the best part to the trip is my hotel room. While my flight here was uneventful (just long with a 2 hour layover in Denver), getting out of the Las Vegas airport was another story. I had to wait 30 minutes for my suitcase. Now I'm not a person who normally checks a bag for short trips, but with the layover I thought it would be the wise thing to do. Well never again. Now the worst part, after checking into Caesars Palace at the airport checking, I decided to take their airport shuttle ($7 vs. a $20 cab ride). What a big mistake, after rushing the length of the terminal to catch the next shuttle, I was told it was full and I'd have to wait for the next one. Well the next one didn't arrive for another 30 minutes. So basically it took 2 hours from touch town of my flight to the hotel.

The bad news continues, the room they gave me, didn't have a view. OK not a big deal, but when I looked out the window, I was right next to a roof top heating and cooling system making lots of noise. Fortunately, I complained and I'm not one to complain, but with a big presentation to do the next morning I thought I better. Well my hats off to Caesars Palace. Despite being sold out, they found me a better room. They gave a much superior room (about 3 times in size) as a no charge upgrade and it even has a reasonable view (35 floor vs. 4 floor).

Why am I telling you this? Simple, it is all analytics. Telling people it took you 2 hours to get to a hotel from an airport doesn't tell anything. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Once I break down the steps into a scenario we get to see where problems are in the process. If I hadn't prepaid for the shuttle, and had known I'd have to wait 30 minutes, I would have abandoned this scenario and the ROI for Caesars selling shuttle passes would have gone down.

While Caesars Palace gave me a less then desirable room at the airport checkin, they demonstrated a desire to fix the problem at some cost to themselves, they improved my experience got a nice writeup in this blog, made me feel good about being here which in turn may mean I'll spend a little more at least tell people about it. Hence a soft conversion that is hard to put into dollar values, but still a positive factor in the ROI equation.

All these topics are being covered in today's presentation, the only difference I'll be talking it about from a web site perspective and there really isn't a difference. There is always a customer at the other end.

Measuring ROI with Web Analytics

2006-10-10T15:25:00.000-04:00

I'll speaking at WebBuilder 2.0 this coming December. Web Builder is a Fawcette Technical Publishing (FTP) conference. My topic is Measuring ROI with Web Analytics.

While many people many have never heard of the Web Builder conference, it origins go way back to 1997 and was originally put on by C|Net before being sold to Fawcette who ran it for several years before sending it to the beach in the fall of 2002.

While Web Builder may have been on vacation, it's nice to see FTP bringing it back. What has always separated Web Builder from other web and Internet conferences is it doesn't target just one of the many groups involved in web development instead it tries to make the conference all encompassing for entire web development team. This covers everyone from the hard-core program to web managers and even web marketers.

It's always fun to see how the crowds at these conferences gel. Sometimes, everyone blends and other times, you can really spot the separation. What usually contributes to the blending is a great kick-off party or event the night before the conference. It will be interesting to see if FTP brings this conference feature back as well.

By speaking at this conference, it will ensure that I've attended every Web Builder conference since its inception. I've gone as a regular attendee and on many occasions as a speaker. Back in December 1999, I was speaking on virtually the same topic. Back then, the web bubble was nearing the point of implosion, and not many people wanted to listen to my message. I suspect that 7 years later the audience will be a little more receptive.

If you attend this conference, be sure to track me down and say hello.

Ajax and Web Analytics Problem or Opportunity?

2006-12-04T21:10:00.000-05:00

This morning, I sat through the most imformative Keynote I think I've ever sat through. Scott Dietzen the President and CTO of Zimbra, kicked off Web Builder 2.0 with some great insight into the potential of using AJAX to build Web 2.0.

I'm not going to summarize his talk, but he really showed the potential in a way everyone from marketing people to hard core java developers could undertand.

I finally got to see some of the issues that the web analytics world is going to face when it comes analyzing this new generation of web sites. I know products like WebTrends claim to have a solution, and yes it should work. However, during the presentation, I may have discovered some other alternatives for more accurate reporting.

I talked breifly with Scott and hope to follow-up on it over the next few weeks. Perhaps between the two of us, we'll come up with a workable and easy to implement solution that will work across all web analytic tools.

More on Google & Belgium Court Case

2006-11-28T16:28:00.000-05:00

Great artilce from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061127-123545

Google Being Sued - It's not what you think!

2006-11-24T20:36:00.000-05:00

Google is quickly becoming the next punching bag on the street. When they were small and a private company most people just took them for granted.

Since they went public, Google has had their fair share of people suing them and with acquisition of Utube.com, you cam bet there will be more. However, I saw this article from "Yahoo News" http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061123/ap_on_hi_te/google_vs_newspapers_4 and thought that this must be a first. Google being sued for including someone’s content in their search engine (Copiepresse a French language newspaper in Belgium).

After all, it's the job of an SEO like myself is to get companies content in Google and not to exclude it. Of course, this court case specifically takes issue with Google News (news.google.com) and that they took content without permission.

Perhaps I've been in this came for too long, but search engines always assumed they had permission unless you told them otherwise. Isn't that what the robots.txt file is for?

In this instance, Google quickly responded and removed the offending content, but the lawsuit is still there. I'm sure Google is taking all this in stride.

It does beg the question; if legal challenges like this become successful does it mean the end of search engines as we know them? For now, I'll concentrate on getting my clients content up there and ranking well. After all, the more organizations that decided not have their content included, the better my chances are of ranking well.

WebTrends & IE 7 Fix Works!!!

2006-11-10T11:36:00.000-05:00

I followed the instructions from WebTrends and found only one item that didn't go as expected. Step 4, didn't completely stop every WebTrends service. So I did that task manually by accessing the Administration services list.

The whole process took about 5 minutes.

Take note, IE 7 hidd the SmartView Icon. I spent more time looking for it then doing this fix.

Let me know if you try that and it works. It was hidden on my installation to the right of the home button which was postion to the far right. I finally simply expanded this tool bar and lo and behold there was the SmartView icon.

All tests proved positive.

Helping Raise Money With Search

2006-10-19T15:25:00.000-04:00

I thought I had seen it all, but thanks to Blinkx.com, and my bookmark on "search engine optimization", I've discovered something wonderful in the world of search engines.

www.goodsearch.com has developed a new approach to entice users to come and use their search engine for searching the web. Goodsearch.com like many smaller search engines out there is powered by one of the bigger search engines and in this case it's yahoo.com. Like all players in this field, they make money by running pay per click advertising on their site, but here is the twist. Goodsearch.com donates 50% of its revenue to your favourite charity.

That's right your favourite charity and not a charity of its choice. You can choose from thousands of organizations already registered or add your favourite cause (charity, non-profit, school, etc.). This includes nominating your funds to go to your child's school for example. No you're not going to generate tens of thousands dollars a year for your charity or school, but think of the possibilities. According to Goodsearch.com, each search will generate approximately $0.01. So if a school has let's say 500 students and each parent does 2 searches a day that equates to a mere $10/day, but multiply that by say 365 days (1 year) and your cause has earned $3,650. If you're worried about the quality of the search results remember it's powered by yahoo.com and the quality will be the same.

Good search also has a utility that allows you to monitor and see how much money has been earned by the various charities.

This figure is of course an estimate and depends not only on the frequency that people search, but how likely they are to click on the generated ads. Remember only earning pennies at a time still adds up (just think of all those charity boxes on store counters) and if you're going to search anyways, might as well make some money for your favourite cause.

Xenu Link Sleuth Updated

2006-11-19T14:08:00.000-05:00

OK I missed this some how, but one of my favourite tools for web development and SEO work Xenu Link Checker was updated last month. A new version of Xenu Link Checker 1.2i was released October 16, 2006.

I love this tool first from a web development stand point as it allows me to quickly test a large site for broken links. I've yet to find a better tool.

From an SEO stand point, I use it much the same way, but this time as a bot/spider emulation. It allows me to view the sites linking architecture (site architecture) backwards. If there is a specific page that I'm trying to get ranked high in the search engines, then I run Xenu and make sure, first the page gets found. Secondly I can reference all pages that link to the page. I can then evaluate if the page needs more internal links or perhaps to be relocated within the sites architecture.

Either way this is an extremely useful tool for the SEO & Web Developer tool box.

A download of Xenu can be obtained at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

IE 7 Automatic Rollout Has Started

2006-11-13T13:35:00.000-05:00

Yes, Microsoft has started the automatic roll-out of IE7. While IE 7 has been available as download now for several weeks, they have started pushing the upgrade via the OS automatic update utility as of late last week. Their plan is to have the roll-out completed within 3 months. I personally think this is a bit ambitious, but the reality is that by the end of Q1 2007 the majority of IE users will have been upgraded to version 7.

What does this mean to you? If you haven't done so, start testing your web site(s) and any web based applications to ensure they work with IE 7. If not, time to start fixing them before the clients start calling.

For more information on the rollout, read the following article from Yahoo News http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20061113/tc_pcworld/127851

WebTrends & IE7 Fix Available

2006-11-08T20:20:00.000-05:00

WebTrends has just released a hot fix for the problems that Internet Explorer was causing. These WebTrends fixes mean IE7 is now a supported browser and also include a fix so you can use the WebTrends SmartView plug-in for IE 6 and with IE 7.

For those using WebTrends on Demand, WebTrends has already installed WebTrends version 8.0b which includes the support of IE7, but not the fix for SmartView. The good news about these hot fix is that WebTrends has decided not to wait until they make version 8.0b available to the general public and instead issued the hot fixes.

I just got these links directly from WebTrends and haven't had the chance to test them. However, WebTrends assures me they will work.

So here is the links to the fixes:
SmartView - ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/80a/IE7/SmartViewUpdater.exe
WebTends - ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/80a/IE7/8.0a_IE7_Solution.zip

Be sure to follow these instuctions
1) Log in to WebTrends as an administrator.
2) Select Service Health under Administration | Monitoring.
3) Click the Shut Down System button.

4) After the system is shut down, extract the 8.0a_IE7_Solution.zip into your installation directory (e.g. "C:\Program Files\WebTrends"), overwriting existing files.

4a) If WebTrends is installed in a Distributed Architecture you will need to overwrite the files on each system WebTrends is installed in.

5) After this completes, start the WebTrends system database, if stopped (for example, the "WebTrends - MySQL" service in a MySQL environment)

6) Next, launch SmartViewUpdater.exe. After the installation completes, your WebTrends server will have an updated version of the SmartView in the component repository.

7) After the files have been overwritten and the SmartViewUpdater install completes, start the WebTrends system. To start the system, run “SystemShutdown.exe mode=start” from the command line when in \modules\analysis under the installation directory.

The next time users run SmartView from an updated server, they will be informed that a newer version is available and asked to upgrade. Once they select "Upgrade" the new SmartView client will be downloaded and installed over their previous version. The new version includes support for both Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Good luck and please post a response if these WebTrends fixes for IE 7 work for you.

My Space so Yesterday

2006-10-30T21:51:00.000-05:00

Great article from the Washington post on the pending demise of Myspace.com

I don't think it will disappear over night, but the teen market appears to be a lot smarter then the general public and especially parents give them credit for. According to the article teens are leaving myspace.com for privacy reasons and because of the creeps that are hanging out there pretending to be someone else.

Where are they going instead? It turns out many of them our heading to facebook.com.

Read the article for more information

WebTrends Doesn't Work with Internet Explorer 7

2006-10-24T10:44:00.000-04:00

I was on the phone talking with WebTrends technical support about the problem I discovered with using WebTrends and the newly released version of IE 7 as mentioned in my previous post.

Their response is as follows:

Yes, we've seen that problem before
It doesn't occur with every instance of IE 7, sometimes people get lucky with IE 7
Development is aware of the problem and WebTrends is working on a fix
Expect the fix in the next release of WebTrends

As result, my personal recommendation is don't upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 if you don't have to and you need to use WebTrends. If you've upgraded already or if your organization forces the upgrade, or by mistake you let Microsoft upgrade your version with their automatic auto-update utility, then start using FireFox.

WebTrends & IE7

2006-10-20T09:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I installed the first production version of IE 7 from Microsoft. So far, I'm not overly impressed in anyway.

I find it even slower then IE 6 with just a slightly nicer user interface. I'm slowly going through all my application that use a web interface. While most perform correctly (if just a bit slower), I've run into many issues in using IE7 and WebTrends.

The problems seem to change between reboots and each test, but here are two of the big ones.

* when switching between reports IE hangs so you can't see additional reports
* java applets for graphics periodically fail to load properly in IE.

Of course, I'm having no issues with using WebTrends in Firefox. I'll be calling WebTrends later today to discuss fixes for these issues and to see if others are having them as well. I'll keep you posted.

IE 7 Released

2006-10-19T12:05:00.000-04:00

Microsoft has finally announced the production release of the new Internet Explorer version 7. IE 7 is now available.

Here is the press release. Take a minute to read and see what's up. Some interesting facts on the loss of market share to Firefox and Opera.

Now that it's out of beta, I might even download it for myself.

The connection between your marketing spend and the bottom line

2006-10-12T19:05:00.000-04:00

Make the connection between your marketing spend and the bottom line

I don't know what's in the water these days, but I've been asked to deliver another talk on using web analytics to measure ROI. This time I'll be speaking here in Toronto at AIMS (Association of Internet Marketing & Sales).

The primary focus of my talk will be "Clearing up the confusion about cookies, privacy, and why 'hits' and 'unique visits' are meaningless for the majority of websites".

I'll be one of two presenters and this should prove to be an interesting event for all those who are interested in learning how to leverage their investment in web analytics software to improve the performance of their web site.

For more information visit the AIMS web site.

VOIP Speed Tester

2006-09-22T13:51:00.000-04:00

Thinking about getting a VOIP phone or perhaps you're having problems with your current connection. Well I discovered this interesting tool that let's you test your Internet connection for both speed and quality of service. It then ranks the overall results. So now you can know if you're Inerent connection speed can support VOIP as well if you're having problems with your VOIP phone if the problem is your ISP or the VOIP provider.

It's a free tool and well worth checking out if you're think of VOIP.

My VOIP Speed

Below is a shot of the summary page of my Internet connection.

Web Analytics & Cookies

2006-09-22T09:15:00.000-04:00

Measuring how many visitors are coming to your web sites is one of several critical web analytic measurements. But how do you measure visitors? In the good old days 10-15 years ago, you simply needed to track a visitor by their IP address. But those easy days of measurement are long gone with the introduction of proxy servers and large scale ISPs.

Virtually all web analytic tools on the market today suggest the use of persistent cookies to identify unique visitors instead of relying on the old and inaccurate measurements of IP addresses. The by tracking cookies, you can more accurately track user behaviour through the web site, track returning visitors, number of visits between purchases, average number of purchases by visitors, campaign effectiveness etc.

The real question we need to ask is just how effective are persistent cookies. Unfortunately, the answer may not be what you want to hear. First off, they are only as effective as the percentage of web site visitors who accept cookies. From my observations at various clients, I've seen an acceptance rate range between 60%-95%. The biggest factor in defining the acceptance rate is the target audience for the web site. When targeting tech savvy individuals especially those in the open source movement, I've seen the lowest cookie acceptance rates. When targeting general consumers I've seen the highest cookie acceptance rates.

Another factor, based purely on my observations is location. It appears that people in some countries are more likely then others to accept or reject all cookies. The following table contains some my observations. These figures were taken from a single client who operates multiple b to b web sites across the world all with the same target audience and promoting the same product over the last 90 days (bot and internal traffic excluded).

Country/Region	Acceptance Rate
North America	80.3%
Germany	85.3%
UK	88.5%
Ireland	90.0%
France	85.0%
Belgium	87.0%

While the above information may not be statistically relevant across all industry, it does demonstrate that the use of cookies to improve accuracy is not 100% as some would lead us to believe and the greatest concentration of people and organization suffering form cookie paranoia are located in North America. The reality is that cookies are still the best alternative available to us and are far more accurate then the use of IP addresses.

Of course, if you want to be 100% accurate, you'd need to have users register and log into your site and then track them by their user id. Of course, if you followed this approach, most web sites wouldn't get any visitors and then they wouldn't have anything to measure. Remember, web analytics is about measuring trends and measuring effectiveness and even with a cookie acceptance rate in the low 80's, you can still provide statistically relevant data

Video Search Google & Singing Fish

2006-09-09T15:03:00.000-04:00

I've always been a fan of Sing Fish (www.singingfish.com) for searching for mp3, wav, other audio files and yes video clips. So if you’re on the look out for a search engine that very few people have heard give it a try.

If you're just searching for video clips, may I suggest the new Google Video Search (video.google.com). It's new and they also offer a space where you can up load and share your own videos.

I haven't tried the upload and share feature, but searches on some my hobbies did reveal some interesting home videos. I especially like somebody's windsurfing vacation video all 21 minutes of it. Makes me suspect that Google is offering lots of free space for your videos.

Press Releases, Blogs & Success

2006-09-04T11:40:00.000-04:00

It's been 7 days since my SEO friendly press release on this blog was released. So now I need to determine if the press release was an immediate success. I can unequivocally state " yes".

You may be surprised by how my measure its success so let me say first what didn't happen and that I don't care about. The press release didn't drive thousands of visitors to my blog or my web site. Did I expect it to do so? No, but I did expect some increase in traffic and yes that did happen. In fact traffic on the day of the press release was a 150% more then usual and up until today (Labour Day) has been about 25% more then usual with the number of return visitors also increasing.

This alone is not a sign of success. Here are some other factors do make the press release a success.

* Press release was picked-up by Google News and Yahoo News
* Of the people who saw the on-line press release summary, 1 in 113 opened it up and presumably read the press release.
* Of those who read the on-line press release:
- 10.6% saved it as a PDF (presumably for future reference)
- 10.1% click-through to my web site and several of those visited more then once
- those who visited my site averaged 2 page views per visit.

It is these statistics, gathered from both my press release company, and my web analytics tool that I use to measure success. Based on my experience getting an press release open rate below 1 in 125 is a good thing, getting a 10% conversion (people who read a press release and click to your web site to find out more), is fantastic.

Now the best part, I've just finished an on-line interview with a journalist who read the press release. Assuming I get quoted in his article and they include a link to my site (in both the print and on-liversionson), I've garnered a valuable inbound link and expanded the marketing efforts the press release.

Once again, a press release when well written and SEO'd is a valuable tool in the SEM and SEO tool chest and can form part of your SEO Best Practices foundation.

Google Analytics Now Open for Business

2006-08-31T06:57:00.000-04:00

If you've been itching to try Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics), but didn't because it trial was on an "by invitation only" status, you are in luck. Google has recently lifted that restriction and Google Analytics is now open to everyone.

It may have also been a worth while wait. Since its launch Google Analytics has added many new features that now allow it to complete with some of the major players. These include click map overlays similar to WebTrends SmartView and the one offered by Ominture's Site Catalyst.

So give it a try and I think you may like it. The level of reporting is still on the light side, but it's free. So don't complain.

Yahoo Click-Fraud Class Action

2006-08-29T15:51:00.000-04:00

Something interesting arrived in today's mail. Yes traditional mail dropped off by a mail carrier. It was a "Notice of a Settlement" for a class action against Yahoo for Click Fraud.

The period covered by this class action includes January 1, 2004 to July 31, 2006. Take note that includes the period before Yahoo purchased Overture (at least to the best of my memory).

This seven (7) page document covers a log of material, but basically the outcome is even less exciting then the Google Settlement. There is no mention of how much everyone will get, but simply that Yahoo has to put in place a mechanism for companies who believe they were victims of click fraud to make a claim and then have it investigated by Yahoo and for it to become part of the final settlement.

Sounds like a lot of work to get back a few clicks.

Of course the lawyers did well again. They get $4,950,000 plus expenses up to $25,000 (US dollars of course). Not the same legal payout as Google got hit with, but still somebody is making money with all these law suits and it sure isn't the people who paid for all those clicks.

The only good thing to truly come out the click fraud legal actions (at least one can hope} is better tracking and monitoring by the Pay Per Click programs for click fraud so perhaps in the near future what you pay for in a ppc campaign will be for real web site traffic.

Free Business Apps from Google

2006-08-29T07:43:00.000-04:00

In case you didn't hear it yet, Google yesterday formally announced that it is offering a free trial of the Beta of its new enterprise business application. This includes everything you see at www.google.com/a

So now you can have an enterprise version of:
* Google Mail
* Google Calendar
* Google Page Creator
* Google Talk

While I'm a user of Google Calendar for my personal calendar and have enjoyed using it with the ability of sharing my calendar with others (makes scheduling appointments much easier), I'm not sure of the others.

Do I really want to shift my business e-mail from its current provider to Google? Yes Google will be free, but who do I call when something goes wrong?

While free today and Google does promise that it will be free forever to all beta users, what happens when the new and improved version of everything becomes available and is sold as a premium service? Is this is just a fancy take on the bait and switch?

Just more offerings from Google, now add these to other offerings by Google: Writely (www.writely.com a free word processor) and Google Spreadsheet (spreadsheets.google.com) and you have a company which is ready to take on the entrenched Microsoft Office. Perhaps these products aren't ready for major corporations, but they do and will make sense to all the small and medium sized businesses out there.

It's strange that about 6 or 7 years ago or so, I had predicted at a conference that Internet and web would allow software companies to move their applications on-line. This had a few advantages, from the users perspective, they didn't have to keep buying upgrades and could always be on the latest version and it should cost less per user. From the software manufacture perspective, they can say good-bye to pirated versions of the software since there are no CDs out there to be burned and license keys to be hacked.

Well let's wait and see how all this plays out. It could become very interesting.

Blogs, SEO & Press Releases

2006-08-27T18:17:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday August 29, my firm is issuing a press release formally announcing this blog. The questions may be why now after a couple of months or why issue a press release at all.

So let start with why wait. First off, I wanted to see if I'd be posting blog entries on a regular basis. I never planned on the one day thing, but at least one a week or so. Well a review of past postings shows, I have didn't always meet the weekly posting boal, but I've managed close to an average of one a week. There is no point in issuing a press release without having anything to show. Secondly, I wanted to see what would really happen without any formal announcements.

From my log files I've been able to see that several of my posts have attracted many visitors via the search engines as I had hoped they would. What's nice is many of you do appear to be coming back to read more despite the not posting comments to my blog entries.

So, I've started with the soft roll-out. Now out comes a press release. So why a press release? There are a couple of factors; first a high quality on-line press release with links to a specific page does create high quality external links an important factor in ranking well in the search engine results. Secondly and the most obvious is to drive traffic to my blog and perhaps increase the number of regular readers and in turn increase the value of my brand. Third and the last reason, is a well written press release (I believe this one is), may get picked up by on-line news engines like Google news and Yahoo news. This increases the probability of someone searching for an SEO or web analytics blog from finding mine and perhaps a reported looking for a quote on a specific subject that I've covered will come and seek me out and once again improve my brand.

From an SEO perspective, a well crafted press release is always a good thing. From a business perspective, it always good to issue one when you have something positive to announce, so why hold back.

So as an SEO firm that tells clients to issue SEO'd press releases, it is always a good time to "start eating our own dog food".

Free Skype To Landline - Have You Tried It?

2006-08-24T11:06:00.000-04:00

As a regular user of a VOIP (voice over IP) telephone system and regular user of Skype (an Web based VOIP network), I was intrigued by Skype's offer earlier this summer of free Web to landline calls in North America.

I love using Skype to talk to friends and family all over the world for free. All they require is the free Skype software, speakers and a microphone. Now throw in a web cam and we have live video calling. Truly amazing to talk and see the person who you're talking with in real time. Of course depending on your bandwidth, the person on the other ends bandwidth and the overall available bandwidth on the network this can range from a great call with OK video to a poor quality call with very jerky video.

In my experience, when you turn off the video, Skype delivers an OK quality voice call. So now I could call for free friends and family throughout North America (assuming I'm in North America) for free who don't have Skype. Of course with my Primus TalkBroadband VOIP line I already had unlimited calling in North America, but for others who only had Skype this could be a real money saver and extremely convenient.

Let me explain, for Skype to Skype to work, both people have to be on-line. So if the person you want to speak to isn't at their computer you can't talk to them. With Skype to landline, you login in to your Skype account, dial their telephone number and your almost instantly connect.

The problem is the quality of the call. While on the web you might expect a poor quality call, but on a land line that is another story. I gave it a try a few times and was reminded on International calls I used to make 10-15 years ago. Where you talked wait a few seconds and hear yourself on the other end.

OK this is for free, but the person on the other end doesn't know it. I personally think if Skype is trying to promote this service in North America they need to improve their network routing within North America. I know of several Europeans who use this service regularly with Europe and are happy with the quality.

If you're using this free Skype to landline a try in hopes of evaluating VOIP overall don't. It simply isn't the same thing.

I gave a few VOIP providers here in Canada a try and all provided a good quality service (except AOL). For the most you can't tell I'm on a VOIP phone system regardless of where in the world I'm calling.

Dan MacLean over at ITworld Canada has a good editorial piece on why you shouldn't use Skype to evaluate VOIP. Well worth the read if you are thinking of going to a VOIP phone.

Access Log Scrubber Update

2006-08-22T13:56:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to announce that versions 0.8 of our log scrubber beta is now available.

The biggest enhancement is that the scrubber can now open and process files that were gzipped. So now you can scrubb (remove unwanted entries) from your IIS and Apache access log files in the following formats

.log
.zip
.gz

To register for the beta trial simply go to www.knechtology.com/log-scrubber/log-scubber-30day-trial.html and complete the registration form.

For more detailed information on the Log Scrubber visit http://www.knechtology.com/log-scrubber/.

I hope to have the production version ready within 2-3 weeks.

Canadian Web Surfing Facts

2006-08-22T09:12:00.000-04:00

I saw these interesting facts from Statistics Canada last week and thought I'd share them.

68% of adult Canadians used the Internet for personal non-business reason in 2005

In Toronto, that number rose to 75%

Almost two-thirds of adult Canadians who used the Internet from home used it every day during a typical month

About six in 10 Internet users used it to read news or sports, or to conduct their banking online.

More than 50% used the Internet to check weather conditions, make travel arrangements, to search for medial or government information and window shop.

I found the last point most interesting especially on the point about "to window shop". While it is always easy to see and measure the direct benefit ("ROI") of a web site sells something or has various on-line conversion points, it is difficult to measure the success of window shopping. Yet there is a benefit and we all know it. Think about how many restaurants have web sites. If they don't provide takeout and merely have a web site for promotion and letting people check out the menu then this site is purely for window shopping.

What about stores which operate both on-line and in the brick and mortar world. There must be some residual value of people merely window shopping on the electronics side to review product offerings and price. From the benefits side, this needs to be taken into account when assigning a true value to the company web site.

Microsoft AdCenter Beta - Review

2006-08-17T13:59:00.000-04:00

In case you haven't heard yet, Microsoft has entered the world of search engine marketing with its own Pay Per Click search engine ad system called AdCenter which has been around for about 9 months now and servers ads on the MSN search engine (perhaps you didn't even know Microsoft had its own search engine). While still in beta, I've been privilege to be a participant in the AdCenter beta program for the past 3 months.

What is interesting is that for once Microsoft seems to have done something right. While PPC has been around for a long time already, and the industry is supported by many tools to support search engine marketers, Microsoft has taken the lead of these 3rd party tools and taken the best form Google Adwords and Overture by integrated them into AdCenter PPC engine.

Some features of AdCenter include day parting tools (the ability to set specific days of the week and times to run your ads), a keyword research tool (which incorporates the best of Overtures keyword tool, WordTracker and others) and a demographics tool. All these tools fall under its research tab.

The most interesting tool is the demographic tool. With this you can enter a specific word or phrase and see the demographic of who is searching on the phrase. You can find out the split between male and female web users, age bracket and income. What is suspicious is how does Microsoft know all this? Well according to one Microsoft rep I had the privilege to talk to at a conference they gather all this info when users register for their products such as HotMail, Operating systems, MS Office, etc. So how much value should you put into these demographics? To me the answer is how truthful do you really think everyone is when registering on-line for products. Have you ever stretched the truth? Regardless it at least has some merit and may be useful in targeting specific ads to specific keywords to a specific category of user.

While AdCenter does offer some limited geotargeting, for Canadian you are out of luck. AdCenter does not allow its ads to be targeted at Canadians (msn.ca). The reason is that Micorsoft Canada still has a deal in place with Yahoo Canada (hence Overture) to continue to server ads on MSN Canada Search.

As mentioned earlier this product is in Beta, but I now know Microsoft is taking PPC and AdCenter to heart. I was invited to participate yesterday in a survey of SEM professionals here in Toronto. The focus of this survey was AdCenter. I can not comment more on the survey as most of it is confidential, but I can say get ready for a strong ad campaign for when it comes out of beta.

For now AdCenter is still in Beta and I'll keep my eye on it to see if when its ready for prime time.

Why Pre-process Access Logs (Log scrubbing)

2006-07-20T13:03:00.000-04:00

We'll I've finally released a public beta of my log scrubbing utility.

It's been 6 months in concept, several months of internal testing along with some limited user testing. So now I need some serious feedback before it can make the leap to a production version.

You might be asking yourself "Why Should I optimize my log files after all my web analytics program filters hits out of my log files?" The answer is really simple. Do you want to speed up the time it takes to process your access logs and generate more accurate results?

Think about it, each hit filter takes time to review each hit and decided if should include or exclude it from the reported results. Now repeat that additional time for each time you process your log files. The result can be everything from an extra few minutes to hours a day depending how much data is being filtered. For one tester, the simple removal of a single specific page (used as part of a 404 redirect) from its log files resulted in almost 9 million fewer pages a year that had to be filtered out of the analysis.

As to accuracy, it's so easy to miss setting a filter to capture variety possibilities. This may result is some pages being accidentally excluded or included in your results.

By pre-processing and reviewing the extracted data (log file dirt), you can be sure that only items you don't want are removed and significantly reduce the size of your web log files.

So give log scrubbing a try. For more information about optimizing (scrubbing) your access logs and to download the beta visit my website K'nechtology.

Stop Google From Using DMOZ Listing

2006-07-15T19:15:00.000-04:00

Here is a great article on the new meta tag recently embraced by Google that was originally created by MSN.

Why do want to stop Google from using your listing in the Open Directory Project (ODP) aka DMOZ? Simply ODP has always been slow to update listings to reflect changes within company offerings or they might simply have it wrong. Either way, this could effect your ranking in the SERPs or even what is display as a site description within the SERP.

It's all covered in the article from Stepforth.

FireFox 2.0 Now in Beta

2006-07-13T14:27:00.000-04:00

Mozilla has just released FireFox 2.0. It's a big jump from the current production version of 1.5.

Just take a look at the new or enhanced features
* Built in Phishing Protection
* Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
* Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
* Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
* Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
* Inline spell checking in text boxes
* Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
* New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
* Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
* New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
* New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
* Support for JavaScript 1.7
* Support for client-side session and persistent storage
* Extended search plugin format
* Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
* Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

Of course its still early in its beta, but keep an eye open for its release. To find out more go to http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/

Search Engine Market Share in China

2006-07-05T21:33:00.000-04:00

Seems a lot of people have been reading my previous post about search engine market share here in Canada and in the United States.

So I dug up some more numbers for you. Hope you find this useful.

Search Engine Market Share for China
TMCnet.com reports:
Baidu leads with 43.9%
Yahoo is in second place with 21.1%
Google is in third place in China, with 13.2%

China Internet search engine sector achieved a total income of CNY 303 million in the first quarter this year.

TMCnet sources this information from the Beijing Modern Business Daily from the Tuesday, June 27, 2006 edition

The full article can be access at www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/06/28/1699289.htm

$5 Router will you Byte

2006-06-25T21:07:00.000-04:00

An interesting article about one organizations attempt to establish a free global Wi-Fi network. The catch, buy a router from them for $5 and share it with who ever wants access and you get free Wi-Fi access where ever you go.

Sounds good, but what about security? By sharing your Internet connection you are sharing your home network. As time goes by and more network based appliances start becoming mainstream in the home this could create just another opportunity for identity theft, privacy breaches and viruses to spread.

So will you take the bait?

I for one will not, but it is tempting.

New Google Adwords Features The Good & The Bad

2006-06-18T22:44:00.000-04:00

If you didn't log into your Adwords account for the past week you may be in for a good shock. Yes Google has added some new and valuable features to their big money maker Adwords.

Here is the breakdown.

First, the most disappointing, you can now set the time zone for your reports and budgets. This means instead of having a campaign expired at midnight pacific time, you can change your default to your time zone. With a couple of mouse clicks your Google Adwords Campaigns now run and report on North American Eastern time, GMT, or what ever time zone you want. Sounds great doesn't it, but watch out. This is a one time setting, choose the wrong setting and your s*** out of luck.

Also, why can I only set it for my profile and not per campaign? I run campaigns for others and they can be in any time zone around the world. Why for a Vancouver company do I have to run their campaigns on Easter Time and for a company in England on Eastern Time and not GMT time? I think Google is on the right track, but this one should have stayed in the closet a little longer for all the kinks to be worked out.

Secondly, and this is a win win for everyone, is they now offer day parting. Day parting allows you to set what days of the week you want your Google Adwords to appear and the time of the day. This means if you want to only target business in Toronto, Ontario you can now not only set the geotarget to the New York City area, but you configure Adwords to display ads only from Monday to Friday from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, if that's what you want. This when done correctly, will allow you to increase the click through rate and improve your ad quality score. As we all know the all important quality score is becoming even more important then the PPC bid. High quality score ads can get listed higher in the paid section and be charged less per click then other ads. So start testing when your ads get the best click through rate and target your budget there.

For third party software companies like "BidRank" that offer tools for day parting, this may signal the start of their down fall. Well for now there are still those Yahoo/Overture campaigns to worry about.

Talking SEO to Chartered Accountants

2006-06-13T18:40:00.000-04:00

Today was an interesting day. I gave a conference address on Search Engine Optimization to a group of Chartered Accountants here in Toronto at the inaugural CICA National IT Conference.

The conference organizers thought it would be a good idea to have a track devoted to techie subjects. Hence, I gave a talk on the hot topic of SEO. Too bad most of the 200+ attendees didn't agree. While the room could seat approx. 150 people, I'd say that no more then 25 attended my session. The good news is that those 25 were very interested in learning what SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) were all about and how they/their firms could take advantage of both SEO and SEM.

For this crowd, I had to deemphasized the techie details in my regular presentation and concentrate on the business side of SEO and SEM. This is something that comes naturally to me and I could easily rely on my presentation topics from 1999 and 2000 where I exclusively talked about how to measure ROI and the success of web projects.

I did receive some excellent questions at the end of my address. And I think I managed to impart, on what I hope are the decision makers of companies, the importance of SEO and the need to embrace it as a long term strategy and how there are real financial pay-offs when done correctly and how SEM can be used to supplement SEO efforts.

All in all I'm pleased with the presentation and it was fun to run into some people who I had worked with in the past.

My hat is off to the conference organizers for a excellent and well run conference and good luck with next year's conference.

Google's Market Share US & Canada

2006-06-12T13:52:00.000-04:00

SearchEngineWatch reported on Netratings score of the on-line searches for Arpil 2006. Google has now reached 50% (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060526-090731). This compares to comScore reporting they represent 43% for the same period. No matter how you look at it, Google is the most popular search engine at least in the US. No wonder every SEO targets Google, but do the math, if you can rank well in the other search engines, you'll still reaching 40% or so of the potential market. So if it's easier to reach 40% then to reach 50% where do you put your effort?

It's just something to think about. The reality is you need to know where your target market is searching and not just be fixated with Google.

By the way, for those in Canada here are some stats that were given to me by Google Canada.

Reach December 2005
Google - 66%
MSN - 14%
Yahoo - 13%

Hmmmm, looks like Google has a strangle hold on Canada.

More Google & China

2006-06-09T08:24:00.000-04:00

There is a follow-up news article to the one I referenced in my previous post.

Google co-founder says company is staying in China.

This article is well worth the read and provides better details on how Google is going to walk both sides of the fence (at least fro now) between censoring its index and providing non-censored results.

As I said before, they're in business to make money and not change the world. So this way they can comply with China's requirements and provide a high quality (speedy search engine) and also continue to provide access to poor quality (slow speed search engine) that doesn't comply.

I guess China is hoping that users will go with google.cn because its fast and Google things people will go to google.com because its not censored. Let's see Google built its reputation on being a fast search engine with high quality results. For now, according to this article quality is winning (99% use Google.com). So just like going out to eat, if you want good quality food and service it may take longer then grabbing something at your favourite fast food establishment. Yes it may be 100% beef, but which part of the cow?

Google and Compromised Principals

2006-06-07T19:55:00.000-04:00

So Google has now admitted that it has compromised its principals when it comes to China (see: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060607/ap_on_hi_te/google_censorship_5) and the censorship of its search results.

So the first question one needs to ask is "SO?" While I personally don't like censorship, Google is already conducting censorship in North America just not as obviously as when an government asks them not to list specific sites.

Don't believe me! By their own admission, if they discover you've used some black hat SEO techniques on your site, they can blacklist you from their index. That is a form of censorship. Yes saying you "must not do XXX on your site or else we won't list you" is a form of censorship.

How about when you build a brand new site only to have Google put you in the Google sandbox. This may be a temporary form of censorship, but you are still penalized for being a new site.

Google makes no claims that their index contains every web site in the world. Nor is there ever a guarantee that they will index you despite your best SEO efforts.

As a private company they have the right to modify their product to best fit their customers and their market. Go to a pizza parlor in Jerusalem, because of the religious dietary laws, you won't get meat on your cheese pizza. In Muslim countries the government may require restaurants to only server Halla meats and no pork. Is this any different then telling Google they can not server up specific sites to people of that country? In the first instance they are trying to stop people from consuming specific foods that are forbidden by their religion and in the other they are trying to stop people from consuming specific knowledge that is forbidden by their government.

Yes, I agree what China is doing is bad and it is right up there with the people who keep trying to stop the teaching of evolution, but let's not blame Google or the other search engines for trying to make money and expand their markets. Set the blame where it belongs on the governments that set the rules we all live and work within.

FireFox Security Update

2006-06-05T09:46:00.000-04:00

For those of you who are using the FireFox browser beaware that a rare security warning has been issued for FireFox and the Thunderbird e-mail reader both from Mozilla.com. There is a security hole common to both application and the fix is available on-line simply by upgrading your current version at http://www.mozilla.com/.

The Cyper-Alter was issued on June 2, 2006 see below.

Cyber Security Alert SA06-153A

Mozilla Products Contain Multiple Vulnerabilities

Original release date: June 2, 2006
Last revised: --
Source: US-CERT

Systems Affected

* Firefox web browser
* Thunderbird email application

Overview

The Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email application contain
several vulnerabilities. By taking advantage of one or more of
these vulnerabilities, an attacker may be able to take control of
your computer.

Solution

Upgrade to the latest versions of Firefox and Thunberbird

Mozilla has released an updated version of Firefox to corrrect
these problems.

Mozilla has released an updated version of Thunderbird to correct
these problems.

Description

Mozilla products, including the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird
email application, contain a number of vulnerabilities. These
vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to access your computer, run
programs that could cause your computer to crash, or gain control
of your computer.

For more technical information, see US-CERT Technical Alert
TA06-153A.

Measuring Bandwidth Speed - What's Your Speed

2006-06-02T09:28:00.000-04:00

Over the last couple of days I've noticed a slow down on my main pc and generally with accessing the web. So was it my ISP or my PC.

Many people over the years have asked me this question and how do you know before you call and complain to your ISP or start looking at your PC.

The easiest way is to first eliminate the Internet connection. To do this you can access anyone of many bandwidth checkers. What these utilities generally do is conduct a small file transfer in both directions and measure the time it takes to for the file to transfer. In other cases they simply do a test called a Trace Route and measure the time it takes for servers to respond. In either case, they can give you a sense of your bandwidth speed (does it match what you’re paying for) and how many errors are encountered along the way (causes of slow downs). If all looks good then it's your PC, if you have lots of errors and your bandwidth is off, then it's your ISP.

My favourite tool for testing my connection is MySpeed Bandwidth Test.

In the past, I've caught one ISP who had reduced my bandwith speed to a lower level then what I was paying for. Unfortunately today it’s something with my PC and I now need to spend some time figuring out what. Until then, at least I know my connection is good.

1, 2 or 3 & SEM

2006-05-31T11:19:00.000-04:00

Search engine marketing is much more of a science while search engine optimization is more of an art. I was asked today by a client why their Google Adword ads were generally showing up in the number 2 and 3 position in Google search results and on occasion even in the 4th position.

I had to explain to the client that simply being in the number 1 position is no guarantee of anything and that by balancing a limited budget with the cost per click I was able to maximize the number of clicks per day to the daily budget cap in Adwords.

What it boiled down to is to be in number 1 cost more, leaving less budget room and to make things worse the click-through rate was lower. Since Google introduced their ad quality score, it has become even more important to ensure high click-throughs on ads to help keep the cost of ads down. The irony of this is, that Google will start to automatically move ads higher in the ranking if they have a good quality score. Yet in many cases the ideal position for maximum click-throughs may be position 2, 3 or 4.

Fortunately, Google does offer you the ability to set a position preference. Something that more of us should perhaps should consider using to maximize click-through rates. I wonder what will happen when everyone wants position 3 and no-one wants position 1?

Any one else experience similar results, where being number 1 wasn't the best position for maximum ROI?

The Power of One Good Word

2006-05-29T13:51:00.001-04:00

The world-wide web never ceases to amaze me. I mentioned that last week that PC World had referenced my site and specifically the e-mail encoder to help stop spam. Since that single reference, I've discovered several more site creating links to the same page on a virtually identical reference.

What is amazing isn't that this page was released several years ago, has been fully search engine optimized so it routinely ranks in the top 5 if not the to 10 in all major search engines for a variety of keyword phrases, but rather that until now I was only aware of 2 other links to it, despite it being access many time during a typical day. Since that article came out, I've picked-up at least 6 links that I know of, so what were these people waiting for? For someone else to link to it first or perhaps they were just waiting for someone to validate the utility? Either way, it proves that providing valuable content combined with good Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you'll drive traffic to your site and build quality links organically. The unfortunate part is, as I tell all my clients, it rarely happens over night.

The Press Release - The Day After

2006-05-26T10:16:00.000-04:00

Well initial results from my site stats looked amazing, traffic up 4 to 5 times, but then I started to dig.

First, I looked at the referrer report; I noticed a lot of traffic from PC World and very little from the various press release distribution sites. This was not enough of an increase to explain the overall increase in visits. Total referred traffic up approx. 25%. The majority of the increase was from direct traffic.

So, I investigated the referring page from PC World. It turns out; they had put a link (blogs.pcworld.com/tipsandtweaks) to the free e-mail encoder on my site along with a favorable review. Yet that link only delivered a handful of the visitors. So I kept digging and checked my most popular pages.

My most popular page of the day was a page that doesn't exist on my site and was generating a 404 error (page not found). Had I made a mistake in my press release and pointed to a non-existent page. No, that was not it. Remember, there were no referrers to this page, all the traffic was direct traffic. So where was it coming from? Perhaps a new bot/spider that I'm not scrubbing from my log files. Yes that was it.

My site was and still is getting pounded by the AvantGo spider. AvantGo is a proxy utility for the Palm and Windows CE that helps sync users handhelds with the latest news etc. So my guess, AvantGo had picked up the press release from one of the many distribution points and was following all the links. Now since, AvantGo only supports HTML 3.1 (at least from my investigations) and no java script, and my site is built in XHTML, the poor little spider is having problems and getting confused by my web analytics java script tracking utility.

So it's back to monitoring it, and trying how to get AvantGo to stop calling a page that doesn't exist. I'm well aware that the benefits of press release are not just traffic to a web site, but it is an indicator of people's interest in the subject matter etc. At a minimum, the inbound links from the press release across all the sites it appears on should give me a boast in link popularity and that should help increase my overall ranking in the SERPs.

K'necht to Address CICA National IT Conference

2006-05-25T11:08:00.000-04:00

Well my press release went out this morning. So far it has had no impact on web site traffic, zero e-mails etc.

Here's a link to press release (http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/060525/0131019.html)) - let me know your thoughts.

Are You Going Claim Your Share from Google?

2006-05-25T10:50:00.000-04:00

If you haven't been following the story, several months back, Google settled out of court a class action regarding click fraud. The basics of the settlement are as follows:

1. Google to pay $90 Million US
2. Lawyers to take $30 Million
3. Public to share remaining $60 Million
4. Payout on a prorated basis of your share of Google’s total revenue during that period.

To be eligible you must meet the following criteria:
"The settlement will provide advertising credits to class members who certify that they were the victims of "click fraud" or other invalid or improper clicks on online advertisements purchased from Google on or after 1 January, 2002."

So my questions are: a) How can you prove that you were a victim of Click-Fraud? and b) How are they going to check?

In the end all you are going to get are advertising credits (better then nothing), but think about it. Even if you spent $20,000 during the identified period on Adwords and 2% of the traffic was click fraud. That equates to $400 of click-fraud. Now what proportion of you're $20,000 spend is that of Google's total Adword revenue during that same period. My guess is maybe 1/10,000 if not less. So that means you'll be able reclaim an advertising credit of $6.

Hardly seems worth it. Remember you only have between June 19 and August 4, 2006 to make your claim.

For more detailed information on the is topic go http://www.clicksettlement.com/

The Shoemaker's Children

2006-05-24T10:13:00.000-04:00

First off, yesterday I managed to get several high priority tasks taken care of. As the old adage goes "the shoemaker's children go barefoot", I've take upon myself to address this short coming in my business. After years of encouraging clients to issue optimized press releases to not only help promote their busineses, but to also build valuable links to their sites as part of a search engine optimization strategy, I finally signed-off on my company's first press release in several years.

While I frequently help clients optimize their press releases, I out sourced this service for myslef. Why? Simply if I had to put it on my plate, it would have waited until paying clients got the attention they needed and then it would be too late to issue it.

Of course a press release for just the sake of a press release is a worthless thing. I'm finally promoting my speaking engagements. This time it's my address to CICA (Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants) at their annual National IT conference this coming June.

Once some stats are in, I'll post the effect of the press release on web site traffic, and any other direct benefits.

A Call At Last

2006-05-24T10:07:00.000-04:00

Well Yahoo/Overture called me back about the problems I was having over the weekend. The call came at almost 7:00 pm local time. Good thing, I have a home office. If I worked normal hours in an office; I'd have missed the call. Perhaps they should look up my address and check the time zone before calling?

On a positive note, they did leave me with their toll-free number incase I run into problems in the future. Perhaps good customer service isn't dead it just works a little slow.

Back to Business & Customer Service

2006-05-23T09:19:00.000-04:00

Well the Victoria long weekend here in Canada is now over and it is officially back to work. The joy's of my business is there is never truly a real day off. Yesterday I got a call from WebTrends to follow-up on a minor bug in Version 8a, which I had reported earlier last week and for which they sent me a fix. The call was to make sure the fix had worked. This call was unexpected and a welcomed surprise, as they had already sent me an e-mail notification that the case was closed. I'm not used to such good customer service from a software company. The weekend had some other surprises, I ran into to some login problems with my Overture account, managed to get that resolved on my own (good luck trying to find a contact e-mail address to resolve problems with on the Overture web site), and after several months of issues with my Google Analytics account (could not login), they finally fixed it. Of course did they send me an e-mail to notify me that they had fixed the problem? Nooooo, I did my weekly test and bang I could actually login.

That's my weekend experience with Customer Service groups, some good and some bad. Let me know about your experiences with different customer service groups.

WebTrends 8 Update

2006-05-21T13:01:00.000-04:00

Last week, WebTrends quietly released the first patch for their new WebTrends Analytics 8 (8a). I've been very impressed with version 8 and the patch fixes a couple of minor bugs. These bugs mostly affected people who had upgraded from the previous version 7.5

I've been an avid user of WebTrends since version 1.0 and love the easy of use for the users and the quality of the graphics. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't all that much more in version 8 then in version 7 for the users. I must admit, from an administrator's point of view, getting e-mail notification when things don't work as they should or a Geotrends database update is available is simply wonderful and a truly must have feature.

I'll be posting more thoughts on WebTrends 8 over the next few weeks.

Welcome

2006-05-21T11:35:00.000-04:00

After being encouraged to start a blog for many years by colleagues and contemporaries, I've finally broken down and started my first blog.

One of the reasons I've resisted was that I couldn't come up with a consistent theme for this blog. Well I've been giving it thought for more then a year as my regular newsletter went by the waste site as I never could put together enough time to write and publish it while still keeping it current and relevant.

So now I will attempt to use this blog to highlight events, latest news and product reviews of things that I think are important. I will concentrate on search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and web analytics. Despite this desire to target these areas if I come across something that I find interesting, you can be sure I'll post it here.

Now, only time will tell if I'll be able to keep it up and if I can develop a loyal following.

Hey Alan, It was great to see you at Pubcon. Let...

2010-01-05T16:35:57.971-05:00

Hey Alan,

It was great to see you at Pubcon. Let me know if you get out to Vancouver or if you're going to be at SMX Advanced.

Rob

Good Afternoon, I would like to invite you to tak...

2009-11-12T15:45:21.254-05:00

Good Afternoon,

I would like to invite you to take a look at http://keymetric.net/ KeyMetric has been tracking keywords to phone calls and other online conversions for years and is one of the market leaders in this space. They even take it a step deeper than any other analytics tool in this space by also tracking organic raw query back to the phone call and/or source.

It doesn't work in FireFox either. I'm going to t...

2009-11-12T15:05:38.218-05:00

It doesn't work in FireFox either.

I'm going to try Alan's blog...

Hi Alan, Just wanted to clarify that we haven't a...

2009-08-17T14:03:42.366-04:00

Hi Alan,

Just wanted to clarify that we haven't announced a release date for Analytics 9 as On Premise software.

On premise software is an important competitive differentiator for us. Government and data sensitive clients require software. We're not going to go all SaaS as long as our clients need on premise versions of our software.

We do roll out features more frequently on our SaaS environment for two reasons:

1) It takes more work to get code ready for diverse environments, whereas On Demand is a controlled space so with fewer variables to consider it's faster to get new code up and running.

2) As you said, our clients appreciate fewer updates with more stable code. Our current release cycle is 3 On Demand updates and 1 major On Premise update yearly.

The link to baidupro.com now just leads to a parke...

2009-02-24T16:44:00.000-05:00

The link to baidupro.com now just leads to a parked advertising site.

cg,You are correct in most cases the use of a 301 ...

2009-02-18T07:29:24.889-05:00

cg,

You are correct in most cases the use of a 301 redirect executed by the mini-url services should leave the original referrer intact.

This assumes that the min-url services are indeed correctly using 301s a. I've not tested them all, so I couldn't make that statement.

Using debugging products like Fiddler, generally will correctly show you the correct page details. Now the question is are the log files that your web analytics tool using capturing it correctly.

Hmmm. My experience is that the original site, not...

2009-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

Hmmm. My experience is that the original site, not the shortening site, shows as the referrer. I checked a number of links from different shortening sites just the other night, using Fiddler to see what referrer was in the hit to the destination URL. Maybe using Fiddler wasn't the right way to do it...

There are really no issues. IIS is a basic web ser...

2009-01-12T20:06:15.250-05:00

There are really no issues. IIS is a basic web server and depending on who you constructed your web pages, you simply need to add the SDC java script to the bottom of your web pages.

As for the SDC server, it is a ISAPI filter (plug-in for lack of a easy description) for IIS. It must run on port 80 and depending on the volume of traffic it is generally installed on its own server.

It is possible to have it installed on the same server as your web site, and under that scenario, your web server manager should be able to configure the virtual host correctly.

Hi,I am newbie to Webtrends,I would like to know t...

2009-01-12T17:27:00.000-05:00

Hi,
I am newbie to Webtrends,
I would like to know the common issues that you face while migrating/configuring IIS profile to SDC profiles.And how would it be re-solved.

Regards,
Jey

Add also the influence of the selected session tra...

2008-11-26T17:17:00.000-05:00

Add also the influence of the selected session tracking mode. If you use IP - User Agent, and the IP changes during the visit (which happens with some ISPs such as AOL). When the IP switches, WT identifies it as a new visitor, new visit, hence referred by the site the visitor was on. In WT, a high self referring rate is usually indicating that WT has some difficulty sessionizing.

Sorry I don't think that can be done.The only way ...

2008-09-23T20:34:33.276-04:00

Sorry I don't think that can be done.

The only way I could see it possibly being accomplished is to back-up your 8.0 installation upgrade your 8.0 installation to 8.5.

Once there you may be able to port the profiles to the other instance of WebTrends by some manipulation of the various reference file and the SQL Express database. Give WT tech support a call first.

If successful, you could then restore your 8.0 installation and have both running.

I know WebTrends has been working on a way to port profiles from one server to another (within the same version). I was hoping this was going to be in the 8.5 version, but I haven't found anything in the documentation. So perhaps in the next upgrade.

Sorry, but my question was something else. I have ...

2008-09-23T20:06:00.000-04:00

Sorry, but my question was something else. I have the 8.5 installed, and I have a bunch of profiles under a 8.0 which I'd like to copy to 8.5.

The answer to your question is yes. If you're doin...

2008-09-23T18:17:38.612-04:00

The answer to your question is yes. If you're doing the upgrade on the same server WebTrends does it automatically.

If you want to install the upgrade on a new server, you need to first install 8.1 on that server, transfer the appropriate files (in the documented way) and then do the upgrade.

If you need more specific needs, contact me through my companies web site www.knechtology.com and I'll see what we can do.

A quick question: After installing 8.5, is there a...

2008-09-23T18:09:00.000-04:00

A quick question: After installing 8.5, is there any way to transfer profiles from an older version (with MySQL database) to 8.5 which comes with MS SQL?

Works great!!Webtrends 6.0c and IExplorer 7 (7.0.5...

2008-09-02T08:42:00.000-04:00

Works great!!

Webtrends 6.0c and IExplorer 7 (7.0.5730.11)

Thank you, Matt.
Thank you, Alan.

Jose.

Gustav,I agree, it doesn't have to be an Israeli p...

2008-08-30T10:56:44.779-04:00

Gustav,

I agree, it doesn't have to be an Israeli phone book, how many John Smiths are in the UK, US or Canada phone books. I think is every society this is a problem. When it comes to phone books, I've noticed they generally go to a second sort of street name. This way someone looking for your phone number has a secondary reference.

The problem with the web is people just type in a name and perhaps a city. If information about you doesn't have your city then it is very possible that your twin will show up. What if you have Google Twins in the same city as yourself, how can someone figure out who's who?

I remember years ago working for a company and we had 3 Robert Johnstons working there. The original got to keep his name, one became Bob and another was Rob (not by choice). Back then we still had a central person answering the phones and she always had to ask when someone called asking for "Robert Johnston" or "Bob Johnston" etc. - "With which department are you looking for?". She couldn't rely on the outside world calling the individuals by the same version we did internally.

So goes life.

Hi, AllanYou are so right. From my own experience,...

2008-08-30T07:35:00.000-04:00

Hi, Allan
You are so right. From my own experience, I can testify that a search result of your own name, that brings up some else in the first page of results, can cause problems in incontinences. People on the net can assume about any name they want, and if your unlucky, you find yourself with a very doughty web twin.
One partial solution is to assume your own unique web name whom you reveal only to people who should know it.
Of course, this will not work when you have to go by your own name, who happens to be someone else's favorite.
I wonder, how is this solved on much older services. I mean, in Israel's phone book, there must be more than 200 people called “Moshe Cohen”. I don't know hoe the phone company sorts them and in what order (probably by address ?) but they sure don't use Google for it.
Anyway, I'll read the article and maybe it'll make me wiser.
Gusta.Thinks
http://gustavthinks.blogspot.com/

Your notes are going to be really helpful to other...

2008-07-01T12:29:00.000-04:00

Your notes are going to be really helpful to other users. Thanks!

According to the WebTrends Outsider blog (http://w...

2008-07-01T09:30:00.000-04:00

According to the WebTrends Outsider blog (http://webtrendsoutsider.com) it does have a new version of GeoTrends, apparently not being made high-profile by WebTrends Corp itself. I'm really hoping the new GT database resolves some issues and look forward to what you find out about it.

Thanks for the clarification on DS. I should have ...

2008-06-30T13:18:14.343-04:00

Thanks for the clarification on DS. I should have been more specific.

Glad to hear there will be a SES Toronto next year.

Alan - thnks for your thoughts on the show... just...

2008-06-30T12:27:00.000-04:00

Alan - thnks for your thoughts on the show... just a quick heads up, DS only programmed the event historically in conjunction with AG (he never actually ran the show). There will be a SES Toronto next year, keep an eye out for some exciting announcements about it in the coming months - Matt

Billy,The upgrade path is someone simple.Step 1 - ...

2008-05-04T16:59:04.772-04:00

Billy,

The upgrade path is someone simple.

Step 1 - pause all profiles
Step 2 - back-up everything this means everything in the Webtrends isnallation directory ../program files/webtrends plus all the sub-directories
Step 3 - Start the upgrades

You have it right, you need to upgrade but upgrade to 7.5b (I think that was the last version of 7.5).
Then you need to upgrade to 8.0d

After the upgrade to WebTrends 8.0d. Verify all profiles are fine (never had a problem) and even run one profile update. Then back it all up again and start the upgrade to 8.1a

Depending on how many profiles and how big the database is, I'd budget a minimum of 2 days for this upgrade if not 3 days.

Hey Alan,We're currently doing our very 1st Webtre...

2008-04-29T10:38:00.000-04:00

Hey Alan,

We're currently doing our very 1st Webtrends upgrade with the following path:

v7.5a to 8.0d to 8.1a

When I scour through the webtrends site, I can't see any documentation on Upgrading Webtrends, all the doc's seem to point to a fresh build. Although the readme points out that a "upgrade" can be done, theirs no guideline to follow.

I see in a previous post you stated you would be posting a upgrade guide

Ref: http://www.knecht-it.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

Do you happen to have that available?

Thanks In Advance,

Billy.

I've seen that problem in the past.What has most l...

2008-04-09T08:32:16.845-04:00

I've seen that problem in the past.

What has most likely happened is one of the following

1. Either you license key had expired (in which case you shouldn't have upgraded)
2. Your old key isn't compatible with WebTrends 8.1 and it should have automatically upgraded, but it failed

In either case, you need to call WebTrends Technical Support. They can issue you a compatible 8.1 key provided your license is current.

Hi,I tried installing the webtrends 8.1a. everythi...

2008-04-09T03:11:00.000-04:00

Hi,

I tried installing the webtrends 8.1a. everything went well but I am having problem in activating the account.

I tried to activate the account with the license key I have but unable to activate.

Coule you please help me in this if you have any idea.

Thanks in advance.

I figured out how to get WebTrends 6 to work with ...

2007-12-09T07:18:00.000-05:00

I figured out how to get WebTrends 6 to work with IE7 and Firefox. There is going to be a master wt_utils.js for the wwwroot and a wt_utils.js template, and all existing reports will have a wt_utils. All the files are the same, insert this code. The last line indicates you need to comment out that existing line. This let all browsers work and treated Firefox like Netscape 7. If you do not include the Firefox line for the wwwroot wt_utils.js, you will be able to admin using firefox.

this.ie6 = ((this.ie && agent.indexOf("msie 6") >= 0 ) || (this.ie && agent.indexOf("msie 7") >= 0 ));
if (agent.indexOf('Firefox') >= 0) { this.ns7 = true }
this.isSupportedbyWT = 1;
// Disabled browser version check
// this.isSupportedbyWT = ((this.ns4 || this.ie5up || this.ns7) && ! this.opera)

Enjoy!

Matt Oglesby
matto@ctcco.com

No WebTrends is not providing any fixes for IE 7 f...

2007-10-12T07:41:49.828-04:00

No WebTrends is not providing any fixes for IE 7 for any other version besides it's current version 8 web analytics (aka Reporting Center).

Fixes are on a go forward basis.

hello,is theat IE7 Fix also for version:Web Trends...

2007-10-12T04:02:00.000-04:00

hello,

is theat IE7 Fix also for version:

Web Trends Log Analyzer, Version 8.0, Build 7339 ?

Its a very old version, not working anymore since IE7.

thanks
marcus

Looking for fix for webtrends 6 to run on IE7. Wil...

2007-10-08T13:43:00.000-04:00

Looking for fix for webtrends 6 to run on IE7.

Will be really thankful to get it.

Thanks,
Swapnil

We upgraded to Webtrends 8.1, too. It seems, that ...

2007-08-23T08:36:00.000-04:00

We upgraded to Webtrends 8.1, too. It seems, that Webtrends is still using the Tomcat server. The new Geotrends database doesn't work. I tried to install the new geotrends with the Webtrends setup. But the setup doesn't copy the geotrends.dat. So I created a unattended installation script to run the geotrends MSI installer. But with the new geotrends version we got strange signs instead of countries. So I reinstalled the old geotrends data again.

Best regards from Germany,
Florian

The Geotrends database has also been updated. New ...

2007-08-14T09:50:00.000-04:00

The Geotrends database has also been updated. New version is 8.200707.

Version 8.1 is available on the webtrends ftp, but...

2007-08-13T10:18:00.000-04:00

Version 8.1 is available on the webtrends ftp, but I don't know if it is the final version:
ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/81/

Greetings,
Wolf

Alan,While no doubt Eric's Vendor Discovery tool i...

2007-05-30T11:01:00.000-04:00

Alan,

While no doubt Eric's Vendor Discovery tool is pretty good, have you tried the Web Analytics Solution Profiler (WASP)? This is a free Firefox extension developed by your fellow Canadian, Stéphane Hamel who is a well-respected web analytics practitioner and blogger.

It is very simple to use and you can find out what tags are used on a site in one touch while on the site

http://blog.immeria.net/2007/05/wasp-023-released-stay-tuned-for.html

I'm working on getting version 6 to work on IE7. I...

2007-05-24T10:17:00.000-04:00

I'm working on getting version 6 to work on IE7. I believe I have a solution.

WebTrends no longer supports any aspect of version...

2007-04-12T08:51:26.094-04:00

WebTrends no longer supports any aspect of version 6 Reporting Center. As such there will be no patches for it in support of IE 7.

All I can suggest is downloading an old vesion of Netscape that did work with it.

Do you know if Webtrend has released a patch for v...

2007-04-12T04:51:00.000-04:00

Do you know if Webtrend has released a patch for version 6? Is there any possibility to solve this problem with IE7 for people that use this old version?
Thanks
Cire

As I mentioned in a earlier comment, WebTrends Rep...

2007-03-19T16:12:07.592-04:00

As I mentioned in a earlier comment, WebTrends Reporting Center no longer supports Unix. It will only run on a Windows environment.

Does 8.x run on linux? I thought that discontined ...

2007-03-19T13:29:00.000-04:00

Does 8.x run on linux? I thought that discontined that, or is it only markering warehouse that runs on MS only?

It (WebTrends 8.0d) just became awailable on their...

2007-03-19T13:26:00.000-04:00

It (WebTrends 8.0d) just became awailable on their ftp. Im insalling it later today on a customer installation.

- Peter

Thanks Alan! I appreciate your posting information...

2007-03-07T19:24:00.000-05:00

Thanks Alan! I appreciate your posting information in response to my request. If you do get Canada-specific information on search engine usage, I would love to see it. Keep up the great work!

Lordjezo,I've run into that issue before and there...

2007-02-14T19:22:38.248-05:00

Lordjezo,

I've run into that issue before and there is a simple fix. You need to check some settings in WebTrends to ensure it is caching the DNS look-up.

As well check your local DNS server to make sure it is letting the WebTrends agent do the look-up. Did you install WebTrends to use a domain account or a local account.

If you need some help give me a call by clicking on the BitWine logo.

I sure wish they would get Geotrends working, we a...

2007-02-14T10:08:00.000-05:00

I sure wish they would get Geotrends working, we are always having issue with an unknown contry problem, it can never resolve anything on it's first pass but if we then go back and run a whole month at a time everything works fine.

WebTrends dropped support for Unix versions of its...

2006-12-28T08:41:03.303-05:00

WebTrends dropped support for Unix versions of its software when it moved from WRC 6 to WebTrends 7.

Last version to run on Unix systems was WRC 6. There are no upgrades or patches. One year ago they even dropped technical support for the product.

All my clients have now migrated from version 6 on Unix to the Windows based version.

Hello, do you know something about a Upgrade for L...

2006-12-28T03:11:00.000-05:00

Hello,
do you know something about a Upgrade for Linux? I did find only the .exe Files.

I highly doubt it will work on version 6. WebTren...

2006-12-05T09:57:54.928-05:00

I highly doubt it will work on version 6.

WebTrends doesn't support version 6 and the software was completely rewritten for version 7.

It might even be questionable if it will work 7, but it might be possilbe and worth a call to WebTrends technical support.

If your still using version 6, I think you'll be out of luck

Wonder if it'll work with Webtrends 6.1b

2006-12-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

Wonder if it'll work with Webtrends 6.1b

As far as I understand it, I believe the fix shoul...

2006-11-23T08:31:51.092-05:00

As far as I understand it, I believe the fix should work with version 7 as well. I haven't tested!!!

However, don't just take my word on it, call WebTrends technical support to confirm.

Do you have a fix for Webtrends 7. We have not up...

2006-11-22T11:47:00.000-05:00

Do you have a fix for Webtrends 7. We have not upgraded to Webtrends 8 and we have the same problem.

I have the fix, check out my latest blog posting a...

2006-11-08T20:40:34.120-05:00

I have the fix, check out my latest blog posting at http://www.knechtology.com/blog/2006/11/webtrends-ie7-fix-available.html

I installed IE7, and can no longer run WT. Even th...

2006-11-05T20:17:24.610-05:00

I installed IE7, and can no longer run WT. Even the login page won't appear and I am taken to a requirements page advising me to use IE5.0 onwards!

I will check with WT tomorrow, but please let me know if you did something spl to get it to work.

More accurate speed tests can be completed on Mond...

2006-09-22T05:06:47.646-04:00

More accurate speed tests can be completed on MondoSpeed Worldwide Speed Test (http://www.mondospeed.com/).

You can choose from a list of more than 40 high speed servers spread all around the world.

This server keeps in history all tests results ever.

http://www.mondospeed.com/

: )

2006-09-05T20:43:41.416-04:00

: )

Thanks for the feedback. My post was not intended ...

2006-08-30T08:20:35.240-04:00

Thanks for the feedback. My post was not intended to slight other products, just to point out how Google is postioning itself as an alternative to MS Office.

I'll be sure to take a look at EditGrid.

Hi, I am Cliff from EditGrid. Besides Google sprea...

2006-08-30T05:52:58.283-04:00

Hi, I am Cliff from EditGrid. Besides Google spreadsheets, there are various online spreadsheets working in different directions, includes EditGrid and Numbler which you may wish to try. EditGrid can get live stockquote and forex. Here is a demo.

Of course we wouldn't forget our fundamentals, the spreadsheet functions, drag and fill, advance number formatting, undo/redo... all are available. Here is a comparison between EditGrid and Google Spreadsheets.

Keith,I always encourage my clients to issue on-li...

2006-05-30T08:21:52.293-04:00

Keith,

I always encourage my clients to issue on-line press releases. I don't always go by how much traffic they generated. The traffic a press release generates is a factor of the topic of the press releases and the size of the audience.

So a press release that annouces a new on-line free service with a large audience is more likely to significantly increase traffic then a press release (like mine) that is simply a corporate announcement.

Corporate announcements have a benefit of getting your name out there for a specific subject in case a reporter, or someone else is searching on the subject. It's a great way to get interviewed by a leading publication etc.

As to my sites, PR6 as I tell people during my SEO traning workshops, my average page rank went down 3-5 positions for a variety of different phrases I target. So PR on its own is nothing, but good SEO content and a good PR does help.

Hi Alan, First of all, congratulations on having a...

2006-05-29T17:39:21.606-04:00

Hi Alan,

First of all, congratulations on having a PR6 web site. Nice work. I found your site while searching Google News with various quieries seeing where my own recent press release showed up.

I saw a 100% increase in traffic to my web site for two days after I launched my press release about webtrends and Typo3.

It seems online PR is still a good tool for driving traffic. What are your thoughts on the value of links generated by online press releases?

Keith
Agito Internet Marketing

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