Professional SEO Specialist - janet bartoli roussos

2008/23/September

I would like to update this entry - as it is now a year old and I have created a global strategy for Asia Pacific and Europac.  First things first, yes, keywords still rule and one of the best keyword research tools, no not word tracker thank you, but Google Insight!

 After much research I have found that #1 aspect for all international strategies should include “optimizing for local peoople first” and search engines 2nd, yes, like all SEO you should optimize for people first and the bots second.

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So, while I don’t talk enough about Yahoo, I figured I would this time around. Over the last month Yahoo has been nice enough to create what is know as a dynamic URL rewrite tool, in the event this is all very new to you, check out some Yahoo help

It is very straight forward, just let Yahoo know what parameters in your URLs you want to be ignored, then Yahoo will rewrite those while indexing your site to filter out uneeded parameters. It’s great for getting rid of all those tracking parameters and session IDs.

5 Simple easy steps:

1. Login to Yahoo Site Explorer.
2. Add your site to My Sites and then authenticate any sites that you own or manage.
3. For any sites that you have authenticated, you’ll see a Dynamic URLs tab where you can enter parameters you want Yahoo to either remove from URLs or always crawl with a specific value.
4. Once you enter the parameter, they’ll show you the # of URLs they estimate will be affected.
5. After you confirm the action, they’ll modify their crawler so that every time they see a URL from your site with that parameter, they’ll automatically rewrite it within their system

In using and reviewing various web analytics packages over the last few years, I have some favorites and some that I would just assume forget about. In order of my all time favorites here is a list of web analytics tools you should check out:

1 - Google Analytics: If you haven’t used this tool yet, I would ask why not? It is free and has been updated with a nice interface. It even has a wizard for A/B split and you can setup goals to see conversion rates and the monetary value of the traffic you receive - isn’t that what you’re looking to do anyway? I like its very graphical dashboard in addition to all the other very valuable info you can get to help your clients or your own site. It’s literally priceless!

2- Click Tracks - I do like the visual nature of this program. I have used the Pro version on a few clients and it does help tell a great story, with the little cartoonish people. Of course it does include all the very important stuff like conversion rates and the monetary value of the traffic you receive and has a click fraud report. I also like the “funnel report” this tells you very simply the which pages and sections are most influential to conversion.

3- HitBox aka WebSideStory - If you like to dig in and get lost, here’s your package. I do feel as though you need at least a 3-day course with this program. I don’t know about you, but I am real busy, and if I can’t find things very easily or it takes me 2 days to create a report that shouldn’t take more than 2 hours, then there’s too much info. Don’t get me wrong, this is a very robust analytics program, but if all I have to manage is (1) site, then I could spend months learning this program inside and out, but sadly, I do not.

If you have a analytics package you use and want to share your thoughts, shoot, I’d love to hear them. Or tell me I’m wrong, I know I can be on occasion.