Piwik as your web analytics software!
I know, you would probably argue with me on Google Analytics being the best of them all, but what’s the harm in knowing about this new web analytics tool on the block? Piwik, as its website claims, is an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?
Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:
Latent Symantec Indexing
In some of my previous posts, I have discussed about the factors that help in getting a site optimized to the highest rank in the Google search pages. Today we will be discussing about the ranking algorithms that Google uses to find the relevant results for your search query. The latest on the block being ...
SEO: TRICKS OF THE TRADE
To start with, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is nothing but the betterment of rank and placement of a site in the search engine pages. This concept has become a very important part of E-marketing. When we enter a keyword or keywords in sentential form and submit to a search engine, it ends up in showing a list of sites, which are relevant to the keywords entered. This process might seem to be a simple one, but it is definitely a bit tricky! SEO experts say that one needs to follow some tactics in order to succeed in a better page ranking in search engines. However, remarkably, you do not need to be sound enough, technically, in order to learn these tactics.
The traffic in search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN is massive. You will have to go that extra mile in order to break through this traffic, and make your passage smooth. I will now discuss some of the points in brief that you should keep in mind when you plan to optimize your website for search engines.
Website Visitor Conversion in a B2B Environment
Last month I had the good fortune of becoming ‘certified’ in Landing Page Optimization through MarketingExperiments out of Jacksonville Beach Florida. Several times a year, their team brings a hundred or so marketers through the 2-day workshop. The material is similar to that of their free Wednesday web clinics but in a much more intense, and hands-on workshop environment.
After attending the workshop I felt a renewed sense of purpose as a search engine marketer towards challenging my clients to focus on and improve their conversion rates, I wanted to provide some of the highlights in my next few columns. Conversion defined
Personalize Your Link Building
The ethnographic method is an approach of studying a person or group of people by participating in the culture of interest while still remaining a bit of an outsider. At its core is the focus on cultural relativism, which is seeing something through the eyes of the involved. Thus, to get to know someone or a group of people, you have to lose your own set of beliefs and views and start from scratch as you seek out the functional reasons why things happen.
This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.
Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.
Writing personas
Generating Leads in a Web 2.0 World
Marketing is going through a revolution online, thanks to the continual adoption of the Web 2.0 concepts originally defined by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty.
If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson's blog, Trends in the Living Networks.
A New Conversation
Social networking has removed many of the obstacles that got in the way of better understanding prospects and customers, and serving them.
Linked, Tagged, Tweeted, and Feeded – Three Real Time Link Trackers
As link builders, one challenge we all have is showing our clients evidence that our work is having the effect we said it would. What would make this part of the process easier is if there was one single universal tool that could identify every single instance when a site is mentioned, linked, tagged, tweeted, or feeded. The sheer size of the web and the volume of new content every day make such a tool impossible, but a few weeks ago Delicious unveiled a relaunch, and what was once really a pain is now a breeze.
Delicious will show the which users are linking to (bookmarking) which URLs, sorted by most recently bookmarked. Go here:
http://delicious.com/url/
Enter your company URL, or whatever URL you want. Click the arrow to get your results.
Here’s where it gets fun. Delicious feedifies that results page, so you can subscribe to a feed for any URL, and by doing so, whenever someone bookmarks your site at delicious, your feed will have that new link at the top of your feed.
