I have a terrible habit. Every morning, I get on the scales to check to see if I’ve lost weight or fat. In fact, the habit is so bad that sometimes I’ll get on two or three times a morning and even through the day. Measurement is fine and good but sometimes daily measurement of small or difficult to measure changes can be frustrating and inaccurate (unless it says I lost weight – then it’s accurate).

The other day I noticed that by simply allowing 30 minutes to lapse without doing anything, my body fat percentage dropped by four percent and I lost 100g (apparently). Well, I thought, forgo food and activity and by lunch I should be at a decent percentage body fat and a pound lighter! Obviously my instrument of measurement was not reliable.

I had an experience with a web analytics tool which seemed to be under reporting for a site I was working on. I was making changes, seeing the effect in other ways (sign-ups) but analytics refused to budge. Analysis of the code showed some variations but apparently it was all OK. There was something wrong though in my opinion and an audit of our raw log file stats illustrated in tangible terms what I had been struggling with for weeks – the measurement was indeed flawed.

Relying on web analytics has become something of an addiction among some businesses. With constant feeds of web traffic, the minute-by-minute tracking of where traffic is going to on their site and pages ranked by popularity real-time, web analytics are as essential as their other addictions – coffee, toast and antacid tablets. The problem with this is that most web analytics are wrong and are misreporting statistics. Add to the mix a misunderstanding of some of the analysis of the data and it’s a recipe for stress.

There was a comparison of the various statistics packages which showed the variation among the packages available in 2007 and how differently they reported on the exact same website. In the report Stone Temple assert that “as Jim Sterne is fond of saying, if your yardstick measures 39 inches instead of 36 inches, it’s still great to have a measurement tool”. I would argue that some statistic packages are not continuously measuring 36 inches as 39 inches due to cookie reliance, poor implementation and other factors and thus are not a proper measurement tool in those conditions.

How can web business operate in an environment where reliance on web analytics has to be tempered with something else? Using more than one measurement tool can help. With the former Urchin product, now Google analytics, now available for free it is easier than before to run two statistics packages. I would argue that someone in your organization should make web analytics their project. If possible, train up someone to dedicate at least an hour a day to web analytics. The more this web analytics person understands, the more appropriate use your company can make of sometimes flawed analytics.

Web Analytics are not the be all and end all of measurement online. I’d argue that a holistic approach needs to be taken and that online is the same as offline – it’s simply not conducted face to face. Footfalls are not the only measurement of a shop’s success and nor is unique users. Sales are not the only measure of a company’s success and nor are sales online. Websites are more than just online brochures, they are a way for people to engage with your brand.

I’ll still get on the scales every morning, but Sunday is the day I use now to benchmark my weekly weight loss. Diet, exercise and health levels all cause variance in my scales ability to correctly measure me. Your website’s health, code implementation and use of first or third party cookies (the code kind, websites don’t eat cookies) will determine the accuracy of your web analytics. Don’t rely on analytics alone, find an internal champion and make sure your website code is correct for a happy, healthy web analytics experience

I read an interesting article the other day which discussed the importance of targeting and bounce rates and it got me to thinking about the clients that I have had, past and present and the buckets of money I have seen thrown away. So, I decided to put a list together of 10 ways you or your client may be wasting money they could be paying you:

1. Stop sending paid traffic to your home!
   1. Your homepage is rarely the page your potential customers are looking for. If I am searching for “buy sony flatscreen 1080p” PLEASE send me to a page with sony flat screen tv’s on it!
   2. Check your homepage’s bounce rate. It is 60% than you should only be sending people searching for “sitename.com” to that page otherwise, you are throwing at least 60% of your money away. Why do I say at least? Because if you are sending all your paid traffic to your homepage than you probably haven’t optimized your paid search ads and are just looking for a high click through rate.
2. Stop duplicating terms in your paid search accounts
   1. It never ceases to amaze me when clients are using the same keyword in multiple ad groups with the same geo-targeting and timing. Don’t do this
3. Have goals for your website
   1. Set goals for your website. “I want to make money.” Isn’t a sufficient goal. Come up with trackable metrics to get you there so you can optimize your website to eventually make you some more money.
   2. Publishing sites - # of page views, repeat visitors, high CPM.
   3. Ecommerce – lifetime value
   4. Lead-gen sites are a monster in and of themselves. If you generate leads so that they become sales then focusing on the lead only is going to inhibit you from making money. Remember, unless you are selling leads, they don’ t make you any money until they become a sale.
4. Don’t cut the long-tail
   1. If you aren’t tracking performance over-time, you are probably missing all of your long-tail terms. Don’t cut terms that are attracting people in the educational phase of the sales-cycle. If you market to them differently you can increase your conversion rate over time. Don’t cut them just because these phrases take a little longer to convert - MARKET TO THEM DIFFERENTLY. These are long sales cycle leads
5. Use negative keywords in your paid search campaigns
   1. This may sound basic, but if you aren’t using negative keywords than you are paying for traffic that will NEVER make you a dollar, pound or euro. If you have paid-search clients or use paid search and using mostly broad match than you really need to spend some time investigating exactly what terms are being clicked on.
6. Learn what terms lead to conversion and optimize your site accordingly
   1. Welcome to the beauty of the internet and web analytics. You can actually tell how people get to your site, what they do there and if they are making you money. It’s brilliant. So why are you optimizing your site based on what you think will work well?
7. Stop making creative decisions based on what your boss thinks is a good idea.
   1. See point 6. We have the ability to test and optimize, which means we can run multiple ad creatives (banner and search) and see what drives the greatest revenue rather than based on the CxO’s affinity to the color blue. Back your decisions with data
8. Test, test, test and SPLIT TEST!
   1. See point 7. Products like Google website optimizer and Omniture’s Test and Target (formerly Offermatica) can optimize your landing pages based on conversions. There is no excuse for not testing your landing pages and assuming that your designers first try is always correct. In all likelihood it is not optimal and assuming it is will make an ass out you but not me because I’m split testing
9. Track how changes to your website affect your bottom line
   1. If designers, programmers, your kids or whomever are making website changes that affect your business– especially your homepage – you should be recording that this is being done and how this is affecting organic placement and conversions. If there is no tracking there is no accountability.
10. Know what your users are clicking on
    1. Heatmaps and click analysis tools, like Crazy Egg are great at letting you know what your users are clicking on and responding to. Using this information to optimize page layout should help you to make the most of the traffic that you have.

The call came late into the evening. One of my clients who I had been involved with from almost the time I started was frantic on the other end of the phone.
He sounded stressed as he breathed “I need you right now. It’s urgent - please - I need you to come right away!”

“Can’t we do this over the phone,” I asked “it’s late and I’m across town at the moment in no fit state to be seen.”

“No no no - I need you here. Please - you know I never call like this unless it’s urgent.”

That’s true - of all my clients he’s always been the one who was most considerate. Most people think that because you’re doing it for money they can order you to do anything at anytime of the day or night but it doesn’t work that way. I do this because I enjoy it. Well, maybe not all of it, but most of it.

“OK,” I acquiesce “I’ll get ready for you and be over as quickly as I can.” I know where he’ll want me to show up and it isn’t that far for me.

“Oh thank you so much! I’ll pay you double for this!” he almost seems in tears on the other end of the phone.

I grimace, still not used to that kind of talk. “Usual place I assume.”

“Of course” I hear him smile down the phone slightly and ring off.

Luckily, I know that occasionally I’ll have to go out quickly with little notice so I have a box of tricks I can grab quickly and easy to don outfits suitable for visiting a client in. In this industry clients do expect a certain style of dress no matter how little lead time they give you.

My ‘box of tricks’, which is actually a bag, contains everything I’ve found most clients require on a visit. Some items are never used, some are often required. Quickly washing and jumping in to something I know the client will appreciate, I head out to hail a taxi on the street.

I find that it’s always best to call the client in these situations so they don’t wind themselves up too much “Hi… I’m on my way now. I should be with you shortly”

“Oh thank goodness. I can’t wait - please hurry” he moans. Sometimes I wonder about my clients mental state but this one I know. I can imagine him right now and what he’s doing waiting for me. I’m fairly sure alcohol will be involved and I know other things will already be going on. In fact, I’m sure he’s started without me knowing him.

Pulling up outside the place I look up. One of the swankiest places around, it always takes my breath away. I walk in past the man at the front desk who looks me up and down disapprovingly as I go to the elevators. It’s very late and few people are up and about right now.

Arriving at the 5th floor, one of the doors is slightly ajar and going towards it, I can see inside a flickering light. He has started without me and I know something of the mess I’ll find. Straightening up my outfit, I knock on the door.

“George? George are you in there?” I raise my voice slightly as I poke my head in through the door.

“Yes, back here” I hear him call along with a slight rustling of fabric. He has started without me.

I walk through the front area and come across him on all fours under a desk. Biting my tongue against my immediate reaction of a snide remark, I clear my throat and he bangs his head in an attempt to crawl out quickly.

As he emerges, I see a tangle of wires and a few hard drives hanging by wires and nothing else. “Everything crashed and the mail server is down. I just need you to recover that for me now and I can get everything else done overnight.” Which is easy really but for some reason it seems difficult.

Taking less than two hours, the mail server was back up and in less than six the whole system was repaired.

—

For the post number 555 I thought I’d get all nostalgic about technical support days gone by.  Sometimes nothing happened when I covered 24h support, sometimes I never got a moment’s paid sleep and sometimes I helped a customer find a problem so obscure for which they were so thankful I got chocolate

It’s 6 o’clock in the morning, I got up especially early (whilst my daughter is still asleep) to write this post as I feel I can’t just let what I read yesterday rest and not comment.

As you may know SMX Advanced in Seattle was on last week, I didn’t go this year but attended last year. SMX Advanced is where funnily enough ADVANCED SEOs speak and attend to; learn more, broaden our horizon, share and network. Well at least that’s what I thought.

Yesterday I read this blogpost on Bruce Clay by Lisa Barone where she writes about “SMX Advanced going to the “dark” side.” The blogpost truly shocked me (and as Lisa Barone is prime blogger that might even been her intention) In fact it disturbed me to the point I even considered to put a no-follow on the link to the post, but decided to leave it, as rightly everyone should be able to voice their opinion, although I strongly disagree with Lisa’s comments and the way she went about this blogpost.

But even more so I am really disappointed and a little disturbed of Danny Sullivans comments in this blogpost. Yes of course he has his SMX brand to protect but don’t pooh on your own doorstep. At one point he literally singles out individuals:
“I’ll single out Jay Young. No, I don’t think it’s anything goes. I do think there are ethics in marketing and limits you don’t go past….” I don’t think it was needed to single out anyone really. I know Jay very well, and he is a first class SEO and respected in this industry. Jay simply stated the obvious saying that buying links can still improve your rankings. Because it does! Most SEOs STILL do buy links, he was simply saying don’t by 100,000 of them, over night and from a link farm. Be clever about it. Yes it can be argued that this is black hat’ish, BUT why is it blackhat? Because the Googlesaurus say so, that’s why. If the Google Algorithm didn’t put such a big emphasis on incoming links and other areas such as age of domain you wouldn’t call link buying black hat technique. Who says a new site is less relevant than an old site? The algorithm says so, that doesn’t mean that its actually true!!! That’s for the user to decide!! Hang on, I’m actually going somewhere with this….

I think the stamp “black hat seo” should be based on INTENT not necessarily technique. Still with me? Basically if you are doing SEO for a (new) site that is in a highly competitive market, it is NOT going to be possible to rank and gain traffic on a well constructed and content optimised site alone. That’s just a fact. Buying a few links and investing in a proper link building campaign is something you have to do to get into the really competitive market. Unless you are not planning on ranking before 2048!!! BUT that doesn’t mean the website in question isn’t relevant or useful to the user. And the end of the day, that’s what we are all working for right? Both SEOs (well most) and the engines, getting fantastic relevant and good quality websites ranked so that the user will be satisfied and find what they were looking for!!

Back to the point, so called “black hat seo” techniques are important for the development of your skills as an SEO. That doesn’t mean you have to use this knowledge and techniques, but KNOWING them WILL help you understand how the engines work, what you can and can’t do. We NEED these people to share, we should be grateful that they will share not condemn them and pick on them. I can with my hand on my heart say that I am a white hat SEO, BUT you know what, the ONE person I have learned the MOST from in this industry, is in fact a black hat, and a very skilled one as well. That doesn’t mean he is some dodgy marketer spamming the web with any random crappy website to rank his clients. A good black hat doesn’t do that

Anyway, I’ll leave the black hats that attended SMX advanced a suggestion for a T-shirt to wear to the next event (so that people don’t mistake advice for orders!!)

Gareth Davies just forwarded me this fun list of 21 Signs a Girl Geek Likes you

These were my favourites *giggle*

You know a girl geek is in to you if….

“She stops blogging in front of the TV and talks to you.”
“She invites you to “301 back to my place” after a night out.”
“She always tags you for memes.”

Maybe we should do a seperate one for SEO girl geeks

To be successful with your SEO campaign, you need to see beyond the simplistic ABC’s of search - looking past the typical optimization rules to get inspired. Find inspiration outside of the (chiclet) box, and you’ll likely find ways to improve both rankings and conversions!

Quick “Outside The Chiclet Box” Sources of Inspiration:

1. Help someone else. By giving ideas to another, you’ll be thinking outside of your own limited topic areas. That expansion of mind will not only help the other person, it will also help you apply similar ideas to your own campaign.
2. Future-think. What would a site in your niche look like 50 years from now? What kinds of content might it have within it? Try to bring some of that future into the present. Get creative with content, whether textual or visual.
3. Have a beer (or root beer). Find a group of creative folks in your area and meet up with them in your local tavern (or oxygen bar, or whatever watering hole works for you). Combine the party atmosphere with a group thinktank to help each other come up with off the wall ideas.

Those are just a few quickies that you can apply to your own inspirational wanderings. Nevertheless, even just one venture outside (the box) can produce an amazing array of ideas to stimulate your search rankings. Be bold; be adventurous; be boxless.

Inspiration = Creativity = Success