How Unique Is A Unique Visitor? I access the web each day from at least seven browsers; Chrome on my macbook pro, Firefox on my macbook pro, Chrome on my windows desktop in the office, Firefox on our "kitchen laptop", Safari on our "kitchen laptop", The Android browser on my google phone, The blackberry browser on my Blackberry 9700 I know that I am not your typical web user. But I am illustrative of something important. Each of those browsers I use every day drops a cookie identifying me as a "unique visitor" and the web analytics software the website is using counts me as up to seven unique visitors when I am only one. I read some research done by a startup called Scout Analytics that reveals some interesting data on this trend.
Scout Analytics is a "behavioral analytics" provider. Scout Analytics used tracking techniques of device and biometric signatures to follow the behaviors of hundreds of thousands of named users accessing paid content products. Woopra - Website Tracking, Statistics and Analytics. WooRank Screens Your Website, For Free. WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly, free of charge. If this reminds you of what HubSpot built with its Website Grader tool, it’s because the concept is extremely similar.
WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. A premium version will be offered in about 3 months: for a yet-to-be-determined fee, publishers and marketers will then be able to screen Web sites based on up to 120 pre-defined critera, get served more personalized tips as well as references to online tools that they can use to increase the findability and performance of their Web sites.
Update: site seems to be down or at least terribly slow due to our coverage, so hang in there. Update 2: seems to be back and more stable now For more online tools, check out Website Grader but also HitTail and LotusJump. 2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore? The writing is on the wall. Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages. Search Half Moon Bay Sushi and you get real answers from sites that didn’t focus on SEO. Yeah, there are exceptions, but they are increasingly getting rare. With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. But there’s something deeper going on. No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Are you seeing the same trends in your business? Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White! | S. Top 7 CSS Tricks for Better SEO. As most of us know it is often really difficult to build websites for both the user and Google. Google still needs to be assisted in finding and assessing a website’s worth to such an extent that it can break the user experience altogether. Of course there are plenty of CSS solutions to remedy Google’s weaknesses.
Although I do not like the term tricks I have to refer to them as CSS tricks as in fact these are often workarounds to suit Google. Google spiders are still barely able to deal with most advanced web technologies like Flash or AJAX. Google spiders are like little children, you really have to assist them to find stuff and understand it. There are other search engines of course but they struggle even more so to keep it simple I will concentrate on Google, which is the by far dominant search engine in most of the western markets. On a side note: “trick” sounds like “black hat SEO” or cheating search engines. OK, then. 1. 2. 3. It’s like in 1999: you really need to use h1, h2 etc. 4. Matt Cutts Acknowledges SEO 2.0 Tactic of Linking Out as Ranking Factor (Nofollow is Dead) Finally Matt Cutts of Google has acknowledged one of the most used SEO 2.0 tactics, linking out, as an important ranking factor. Matt Cutts of Google is seldom relevant to the practice of SEO 2.0.
In contrast SEO 1.0 practitioners follow his every move like some CIA spies. I ignore him most of the time unless some person I trust links out to him and makes me read his blog. This time Andy Beard did. So I read the “nofollow is dead” posting which is of course called “PageRank sculpting” to hide the fact that Google admits its failure with the nofollow attribute. Mr. Like in dictatorships (I lived in one for 10 years) you have to read between the lines when Google or Matt Cutts say something on their blogs. They always try not give away any more info than possible and to stay ambiguous enough not to get sued. Now Mr. Also now it’s semi-official that nofollow is dead. Now where’s the SEO 2.0 linking out part of it? Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Google Filters: Exact Match Anchor Text Links Are the New Meta Keywords. It’s always fascinating to see how Google treats SEO techniques that have gone main stream.
Basically Google often uses filters on them. Of course many people out there abuse SEO techniques once they know they work. So called anchor text links are known to work quite well in SEO for several years. SEO practicioners know that they even can outmatch on-page factors like page titles, headlines etc. My suggestion is that by now exact match anchor text links have been abused so much that Google treats them almost as bad as meta keyword tags. We know that meta keyword tags aren’t a positive ranking factor. In the past months I’ve more than once experienced the following pattern: When optimizing my flagship blog content I noticed some pages already ranking well.
Instead of improving the pages I linked to basically vanished from the top positions in search results but only for the phrase I added. It happened once, it happened twice. What does this mean for webmasters? How a Search Engine Might Rerank Search Results Based upon Topics. If you search for the word “cold” and you’re using the search box for a health related site, chances are you want to find out something about the illness. If you search for “cold” at Google or Yahoo or Bing, there’s a chance that you might be interested in weather or airconditioning or a cold war or stuffy nose.
Different sites and pages might focus upon specific topics of interest, such as health or sports, or weather, or constuction. A way a search engine might use to try to get around some of the limitations of words with multiple meanings is to assign domain or topical scores to web pages and other items found on the Web, regardless of which queries they might be good results for. Then if a query seems to cover a specific domain or topic, to return pages that involve that topic, based upon a “domain score” for those pages.
Why Look at Domains (Categories of Interest) in Ranking Pages? There might be a number of ways to calculate a domain score for a page. Abstract Conclusion. How Google May Use Categories as a Search Ranking Factor. Does Google determine categories for pages and for queries, and can those play a role in how it ranks pages in search results? Almost everyday, I receive visitors on a query for “bookshelf plans,” on the strength of a past post about Google’s plans for virtual bookshelves in Google library. Most of those visitors probably aren’t surprised that the page is about an online library given the title and snippet appearing for the post, but most of the search results preceeding it describe wooden rather than virtual shelves. My page really doesn’t fit within the same category as the others.
When a search engine determines whether a page is relevant for a certain query, it does more than try to match the text of the query with a page that contains that text, and looking at the links pointing to the page. We are told that this kind of category matching addresses a couple of different problems. The patent is: Abstract A system and method for scoring documents is described. Product Search Example. Google and Metaweb: Named Entities and Mashup Search Results? Google’s recent purchase of Metaweb, who run the Freebase directory left many wondering at the motivations behind the acquisition. Did Google buy the company for its technology, for its Freebase directory, for the expertise of its employees? A Google patent application published today hints at one reason behind the deal, with a mention of Metaweb’s Freebase, and how it could be used by Google in a process that may expand the amount of information that the search giant shows us about specific people, places, and things (including ideas and concepts such as democracy) in search results.
It might also result in search results that are mashups of different information relating to queries involving named entities, such as seen in the image below: Why Broaden Results for Named Entities? Search results shown by the search engine might not be presented in a single list of web pages, news, videos, etc., but could instead be shown as a set of categorized lists. The patent filing is: Abstract. Sitemapgenerator - Project Hosting on Google Code. NOTE: We have no plan to enhance Google Sitemap Generator in a short term, and we encourage the community to contribute to this project. Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.
By creating and submitting Sitemaps to search engines, you are more likely to get better freshness and coverage in search engines. Google Sitemap Generator is a tool installed on your web server to generate the Sitemaps automatically. Unlike many other third party Sitemap generation tools, Google Sitemap Generator takes a different approach: it will monitor your web server traffic, and detect updates to your website automatically. PRIVACY WARNING: Any Sitemap information that you send to Google (including Sitemaps created using the Sitemap Generator) should be consistent with commitments you make to your users in your site's privacy policy. Getting Started Learn about Google Sitemap Generator. Flash SEO.