Today, I received an email newsletter from Text Link Ads, part of which read,
If you are ready for an ad that can drive traffic and raise your natural search engine rankings head on over to TLA now
If I ran a search engine and I was aiming to deliver the most relevant results to my users then I’d also be concerned about people trying to take advantage of the careful developed ranking algorithms I’d put in place.
Whilst some websites using paid links might deserve a rankings boost i.e. they’re relevant for user search terms, but perhaps don’t yet have enough back-links to lift them into the limelight of the first three pages, paid links allow any website with a marketing budget to get those improvements regardless of whether or not they’re deserved.
Back-links are a handy natural voting system. Using back-links as votes may not be the perfect voting system, but it’s very effective. Is paying for votes any more ethical on the Internet than it is in the real world?
Technorati Tags: Paid links, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, TLA
An essential part of any search engine marketing campaign, I find, is to have accurate and up-to-date website statistics available. Not only does having this information tell me and my clients how the website is performing in an SEO context, but it also helps to map out how it should be promoted in the future.
What isn’t very helpful is when websites are hosted with 3rd party hosts who don’t update statistics frequently enough. For example, one of my clients has their website hosted by Register.com, a big name on the web, and yet their statistics (based upon Webalizer) are only updated on a monthly basis. Not only that, but they’re kept in a publicly accessible directory. Talk about stone age!
If I were stuck with that level of service then I’d be making changes very rapidly. Not being able to see the effect of changes on a daily basis means that I’d effectively be flying blind for the most part. By the time my statistics were updated, an opportunity could be lost.
I haven’t used Google Analytics (GA) up until now, but I have used Urchin before and found it to be very useful. I only stopped using Urchin when my hosts stopped providing it and then I switched to AWStats which is bundled with most cPanel-based hosting. In the case of this particular client, I’m going to explore the possibility of installing the GA software and being able to take advantage of this free software.
Technorati Tags: Google Analytics, website statistics, urchin, webalizer, awstats, hosting
Broke is probably the wrong word to use. Hammered would be better!
On the 9th April 2007, I wrote a piece about choosing Ubuntu over Microsoft Vista as a consumer operating system and it was referenced by a number of very popular Linux websites. The following 4 days saw a massive spike of visitors in my web statistics to the tune of over 7GB of bandwidth, over 20,000 visitors, and over 130,000 page views.
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