lucidCircus

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The Ultimate Comparison between Google Analytics & Yahoo Web Analytics – Blog – Insightr Consulting.

At Insightr Consulting we are big fans of free web analytics products for our clients. Free used to mean less capability, less reliability and less confidence that the product would be able to service the needs of business.

The last 12 months have seen the Google Analytics (GA) product evolve into a serious contender for a do-it-all product for most businesses, a period that has also seen Yahoo! get serious with analytics through the purchase of the not-so-well-know European product called Indextools – the decision by Yahoo! to make the Indextools product free with a rebrand into Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA) has turned the free market into a rich, dynamic, competitive space that’s seeing incredible product innovation.

Insightr Consulting are certified in Google Analytics through the Individual Certification programme as well as being a pioneer member of the Yahoo Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN). Our clients use a mixture of Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalyst and Yahoo Web Analytics, with the majority of new businesses adopting either GA or YWA. In Singapore where we are based (and indeed across Asia) budgets for analytics are not as formalised as they are in markets like the US and Europe, so free tools are very popular here.

This article is the outcome of over 5 weeks work carrying out a feature by feature comparison of the Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics products – a project that required a large overhaul after Google announced new features on the 20th October (more examples of the product innovation we’re seeing). Yahoo Web Analytics is still a largely unknown product to business and analysts alike as the product is only available through the YWACN or via Yahoo! advertising sales teams – this comparison should give you a pretty good feel for what you’re missing.

As our friends at Yahoo would say, this is perhaps an unfair comparison – as Indextools always liked to think of the old product as 80% of Omniture at 10% of the price. They weren’t wrong. In fact as an Omniture Site Catalyst user for over 7 years (how many of you can recall SC7?) the Yahoo offering is in many ways more powerful than Site Catalyst; especially when it comes to ‘advanced’ features such as segmentation which for Site Catalyst are only available with an additional “Discover on Demand” license.

Some of you will disagree with our analysis, and particularly with our scoring system – we’re hoping that the comparison is a thought starter and something that will lead to your consideration of the YWA product as a tool worth considering. We feel the scores are fair based on our usage of products and the way our clients will use them.

So, here’s the presentation – it’s best if you view it in full screen otherwise the screenshots will be too small. We apologise for the low quality of some of the screenshots – this was required to keep the file size down. It’s also a long document, over 50 pages – but that’s because both of these tools are powerful and are feature packed! We hope you enjoy it and get value from our work:

lucidCircus has worked with Prague based Ilincev Design for many years now.  Over the last couple of years we’ve been educating ourselves to offer SEO (search engine optimization) , PPC (pay-per-click) and now SMM (social media marketing).  Here is a mindmap of our SEO service offerings:

http://www.seobook.com/

Or just one?

Let’s take look at a web strategy that has a number of SEO and benefits: the hub and spoke strategy. A hub and spoke strategy is when you create one authoritative domain (the hub), and then hang various related websites off that domain (the spokes).

If you don’t yet have an authority site, it’s probably best to focus on that one site. However, once you’ve built an authority hub, it can be a good idea to specialize in a number of niches using multiple, smaller sites.

Let’s look at a few reasons why, in the context of dominating a niche.

Economics

Economic theory holds that division of labor increases profitability.

During the early days of the web, it was easy to make money by being a generalist. However, as the web got deeper and richer, it became difficult to maintain a generalist position unless you had significant resources.

Specialization, by way of niches, allows for greater targeting, and this targeting can increase value. Leads and advertising become more valuable, because the target audience can be reached more efficiently.

The hub and spoke approach is this theory in microcosm. The hub is the generalist authority, whilst the spokes allow for niche specialization.

We’ll see how this dove-tails with SEO shortly.

Full article: http://www.seobook.com/should-you-have-multiple-websites

article suggested by Ondrej Ilincev

http://askhowie.com/

Assess Your Search to Sale Efficiency Ratio

1. Profit

Start by writing down your profit needs. How much money do you need to make each month?

2. Sales

Next, factor in your cost of goods sold, if any. How much do you need to sell in order to make that profit?

3. Orders

How many sales do you need to make to hit your sales target?

4. Sales conversion rate

Next, how many visitors do you need to your website in order to make that many sales? In other words, what percentage of visitors become buyers? When you’re getting started, you don’t know this number. So to assess a market, choose a conservative number. Can you make this work with a 0.5% conversion rate?

5. Click through rate (CTR)

Now that you know how many visitors a month your business needs, simply divide that number by your CTR to determine the number of searches that will support your venture.

Again, at the beginning of your market research, you won’t have this number. So choose a conservative CTR. Can you make this work with a 0.6% CTR?

Full article : http://askhowie.com/bopzine/spinach-market/

http://smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/07/tag-clouds-gallery-examples-and-good-practices/

Compared to conventional navigation patterns tag clouds don’t necessarily offer a more convenient and intuitive navigation. However, used properly, they can provide visitors with an instant illustration of the main topics, giving a very specific and precise orientation of the site’s content. Since human beings tend to think in concepts and models, it’s easier to get an idea of presented content if the main concepts are given straight away — in digestible pieces, and prioritized by their weight. In fact, the main advantage of tag clouds lies in their ability to highlight the most important or/and popular subjects dynamically which is not the case in conventional navigation menus.

Tag clouds offer a quite interesting approach for site navigation; although the technique is sometimes considered to be an “alternative”, it shouldn’t replace the “common” navigation but support it giving users additional clues about the content of the site. Due to their “cloudy” form the design of tag clouds sets them apart from other design elements on a page. And although designers don’t really have that much choice in designing them, they still find their ways to break through the bounds of creativity and come up with some unusual approaches and solutions.

This article offers some selected examples of tag clouds, its shortcomings and also some suggestions for tagging data and links in a more profound and effective way.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-disconnect-in-ppc-vs-seo-spending

There’s a big disconnect in the way marketing dollars are allocated to search engine focused campaigns. Let me highlight:

Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013.
- Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008

OK.  So companies in the US spent $10 billion last year on paid search ads, and even more this year. How about SEO?

SEO: $1.3 billion (11%)
- Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008

SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.

That looks to me like most of the eyeballs are on the organic listings – the ones you can only influence with organic SEO… Huh? Maybe we should get more data on this subject. Let’s turn to Enquiro:

Organic Ranking Visibility

(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

Side sponsored ad visibility

(shown in percentage of participants looking at an ad in this location)

from the desk of
Ondrej Ilincev

http://ilincev.com

1 – 50%
2 – 40%
3 – 30%
4 – 20%
5 – 10%
6 – 10%
7 – 10%
8 – 10%
Continue reading…

Ondrej Ilincev

http://ilincev.com

Ondrej, who has been a design partner with lucidCircus for the last 8 years has of late become a guru when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Last year a half dozen of our clients started asking for SEO and PPC (Pay Per Click) work to be done so I’ve been working with Ondrej and his team closely and learning a lot in the process. It helps that whenever I have a question or a client has a question that I don’t know the answer to, Ondrej is usually ready with an article from one of the SEO focused blogs that explains in full. Since it’s all good intel that I want to be able to refer back to easily I’ll add them to this blog as I get them or find them in my chat logs.

Todays article is What Aspect Of SEO Should You Be Spending Most Of Your Time On? from seobook.com.

From the article:

3. The Five Most Important Areas Of SEO On Which To Spend Your Time

These are highly debatable, but here’s my ranking:

1. Produce Remarkable, Attention Grabbing Content

“What aspect of SEO should you be spending most of your time on? Optimizing the title tag, getting links, creating quality content? “

Everything starts with remarkable content i.e. content worth remarking on and linking to. Do you have unique, timely content? Does you content solve a problem? Does you content provide a new insight? Does you content spark controversy? Does you content start – or contribute to – a conversation?

2. Crawlability

If your content can’t be crawled, you won’t rank. Ensure your site is easily accessible to both humans and search engine spiders.

3. Build Links

Google’s algorithm is heavily weighted towards links. Beg, buy, or earn links, and rankings follow. Get your keywords into the link text. Building links also means building relationships with people. Spend a lot of time doing this, especially in the early stages.

4. Title Tag

It is debatable how much ranking value the title tag has, both it definitely has click-thru value. Your listing fights for attention with all the other links on page. What will make people click your link?
Learn the lessons of Adwords. Match your title tag to the keyword query. Solve a users problem. Arouse curiosity.

5. On-Page Content

Forget endless on-page tweaking. Largely a waste of time. Instead, keep a few keyword phrases in mind when writing. Use semantic variations of your terms in order to help catch long tail terms. Link your page to related pages, using keyword terms in the link.

Bonus: Watch Your Competition. Do What They Do

Download the toolbar. And keep a very close eye on your competition. Whatever they do, you need to do more of it

Summary

SEO used to be a technical exercise involving the isolation of specific factors that, when tweaked, lead to higher rank. It still is, to a certain extent, but much less so than it used to be. Therefore, there is little point looking at each factor in isolation.

SEO has become a lot more holistic and strategic, so by far the most important aspect is clearly outlining your goals, and defining a strategy to achieve those goals.

Continue reading…