Jason Burby wrote a nice piece for ClickZ about the changing nature of web bahavior and analytics as tabbed browsers like Firefox (and soon to be released IE7) become the norm.  Jason identifies several aspects of analytics which are affected because of tabbed browsing, including the use of cookies, path analysis and time spent on site. 

While I'm not ashamed of being a Firefox-freak, I'm quite sure that I have wreaked havoc on web analytics specialists all around the world.  I typically open links in new tabs, and it's not uncommon for me to have 10-20 tabs open at a time.  Of course I also have to explain that type of behavior almost weekly when asked, "What's a good bounce rate?". 

Ted had asked me to review his site and give him some suggestions. The Vice-President of marketing for a large commercial real estate developer, his site for a new downtown multi-use center was "lost in space" as far as search engines were concerned.

The site had been up for over six months and still wasn't registering on Google or other search engines. He was paying a fortune in Pay-Per-Click  (PPC) to some company I'd never heard of, and nothing was happening there either. His plan, which made sense, was to use PPC for six-to-nine months while his ranking in Google and other search engines rose.

But that hadn't happened. In fact, you could "google" the name of the project and it didn't come up.

One look at his site had told me most of what i needed to know. I confirmed it by doing a spider search simulation to verify my facts.

Ted's site was one big Flash-construct. The only words on the landing page were the name of the project. I started explaining how spiders don't read Flash, and therefore the landing page, together with ten other pages his designer had built around Flash and Javascript (which spiders also don't read), weren't being indexed as a result. No indexing by spiders = no rankings.

For an hour I went back-and-forth. Ted wanted a "cool" site that would rank in the search engines. He wanted a site dominated by Flash and images. He didn't want a lot of "words." I gave him my recommendations and left.

Last time I checked, Ted's site still was unlisted on Google.

Google has indexed 8 Billion web pages and is hard at work on the next 8 Billion as you read this. They do this with a small army of search engine spiders.

If you're interested in getting high rankings on Goolge and other search engines, the spiders are your best friend. And you've got to know what to do to make them feel invited. Your website must be "spider-friendly" to make them feel welcome.

Spiders don't read websites the way you and I do. Spiders read the HTML, the web page source code. So if your site has bad code, or little or no code, the spiders don't care too much for your site. And they leave without having indexed you.

Spiders love websites with content (text) and good code. They dislike Javascript and images, since they can't read either one. That's not to say you can't allow them to "see" the images with good web design, they'll be more than happy to crawl over your image if you happen to attach an ALT tag to it.

It's a tricky business, designing a site that both human and search engine spider visitors will like. You want the human visitors to stop by, visit and potentially buy your product or service. And the best means to get your prospects to your site is to have sound web design: good content, good site design and good code.

At a minimum, those three items are necessary to get the spiders to crawl your site and index it. We won't even go into linking strategies, the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and valid XHTML, the latest generation in HTML standards, right now.

Once you're indexed, if you've done things correctly and continue to do so, you're on your way to the top of the rankings.

It's complicated. It's confusing. It can drive you nuts if you do it on your own.

And, yes, you can do it on your own, but as you see, there's a lot of work involved. But it's necessary work.

According to some surveys, as many as 86% of all people arrive at a particular website via the search engines. So if you want prospects to find you, you've got to have a site that is properly designed and search engine optimized.

A high ranking on the search engines can bring you highly targeted traffic, traffic that is searching for your service or product. You can't afford to miss these vistors just because you want a "cool" site and ignore proper SEO-freindly design conventions.

And by the way, if you get a smart webdesigner and copywriter together, you can have a site that is both "cool" and spider-friendly.

My suggestion? If you don't have time to educate yourself on spider-firendly webdesign, check into using a professional search engine optimization company.

Oddly enough I've been seeing more and more whacky things with Google and with various hosting companies out there.

Here are some of my favorites:

I implemented a canonical url fix on an apache server using mod_rewrite. In the rewriterule flag I declared the redirect to be a 301 ([R=301]). After checking the headers it redirected but the header returned only a 200 ok... Nice...


Here is a good one from Google:

A clients home page listing is showing up in Google as https://www.somedomain.com/

In Google's Help center http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35302 they recommend you deny the bots from the ssl by using the robots.txt file.

Since some hosts map the non ssl and ssl protocols to the same folder on the server you could literally tell Goolge to deny both....Not good....

Here is my favorite:

I built a site a while back and had 2 forms of navigation. The first for the user, it was a drop down form for ease of use, it would send the user to the correct page and the url was dynamic. The second form of navigation was text links and static urls via mod_rewrite to the exact same pages as the form.

This would allow search engines to completely see everything a user would see. No links went to the dynamic versions. All linking was done to the static mod rewrite version.

After doing a site:www.domain.com for the url I discovered Google had a cache on both dynamic and version.

Since when did Google put together the variables in a form and crawl the urls??? Go figure...

Our very own SEO expert Tyson Kirksey wrote a great article on risky SEO techniques in the fall issue of Search Marketing Standard Magazine.  Check it out!

After my first full week at Zunch, I am happy to report that I have been strengthening my knowledge of search engine optimization daily. The team is great. They really know their SEO.

Over the past few days, I have learned quite a bit about the exciting cutting edge linking strategies and Pay-Per-Click campaign management services that Zunch has to offer.

I'm very excited about joining this incredible team.

We have given Google way too much credit lately. 

A collegue and I were doing some research this morning, and we were both appalled at the pages which were ranking for some relatively non-competitive terms.  It wasn't the pages in the SERPs themselves that were spammy, but rather the backlinks of these pages.  It appears that while the SERPs themselves may be somewhat free from spammy pages, scraper sites and link farms still push legitimate pages up the SERPs. 

In an effort to compete, we've given our entire squad a challenge.  The employee who creates the most scraper SPAM sites by Friday gets an extra week of vacation.  OK, I made up the part about the vacation.

No, no, of course we didn't do that.  But if the engines don't get their act together and start picking up on this crap we're all going to have to band together.  Is is that hard to identify a scraper page and devalue all the links?

The Internet's leading search engines are teaming up with an advertising trade group to find a better way to identify and measure "click fraud," a scam that has raised doubts about the Web's trustworthiness as a marketing vehicle.

The initiative, announced Wednesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, will draw upon the expertise of Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the owners of the top online search engines, to attack a problem threatening to erode their profits. Combined, the three companies control 86 percent of the lucrative U.S. search engine market, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Two smaller search engines, InterActiveCorp.'s Ask.com and LookSmart Ltd., also have joined the alliance along with the Media Rating Council, a nonprofit group formed 42 years ago at the urging of Congress to help track and validate the sizes of advertising audiences.

http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articleArchive/aug2006/clickfraudteam.php

So maybe the law suits and, more importantly, advertiser's voice frustrations have actually had an impact on click fraud. This is probably a good move, especially if it moves towards 3rd party auditing. However, one has to question the reasoning in leaving advertisers out of this 'team'. Time will tell if the engines can work together and if they can be productive.