Linux Tips & Tricks

When Google came up with its own browser, I heard a lot of unhappy moaning from some of my colleagues: “Common, another damn browser!” There were also certain worries heard from our fellow web developers who were afraid of more compatibility issues during web design process. I really did not mind Chrome but I was concerned about the impact of New Incognito Window on web analytics and search engine optimization results of my web analytics company. Well, the jury is still out there in regards of SEO but, overall, I think, I know one of the reasons why Google needed its own browser.

I can see that occasionally there are some issues with running Google applications in Microsoft Explorer and even Mozilla Firefox.  Guys, that I know, loaded so many add-ons that the browsers take longer time to load and sometimes timeout unexpectedly. Perhaps, that is why Chrome is so straightforward and unpretentious. It is lightning fast and can even turn separately each tab where the web page loading process crushed. You don’t have to shut down all the tabs and restart your browser each time.

There are some managers that tend to open up to 20 tabs and keep both browsers open without a worry on their minds. I wholeheartedly recommend Google Chrome installation for them, so they don’t have to bother poor overworked tech support guys when their whole OS suddenly hangs.

Anyways, Chrome is still beta and does not have a Linux version, so let’s wait and see how Google guys improve this project. As far as I remember, Gmail beta was converted into standard version pretty well. I wish the same luck for this new browser too.

Everywhere you go now, you hear people say these mysterious words like Search Engine Marketing. Some folks are so lazy to pronounce all three words, so they abbreviate them just to Search Marketing. When guys talk about SEM, they make it sound like this is some sort of voodoo magic. They try to figure out search engines behavior and algorithms, guess why a bunch of pages appear or disappear from the search. OK, so maybe, partially, they are right, maybe SEM is partially some secret magic. Yet, anyway, what is the big deal about Search Engine Marketing?

I am not going to give some simpleton examples, like they do in recent books, when they compare SEM to a car or a tree. No, folks, you are much smarter than that. Basically, Search Engine Marketing is about the ways to increase traffic to the website from the search engines. And then, simultaneously or consecutively, convert part of the visitors into buyers. This is, practically, all about it.

OK, smartie, you may say, we knew that before. But what about the methods to achieve this traffic increase? Well, as far as I know, there are three main SEM methods. Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for lazy folks), Pay Per Click Bids Management (you can shorten the first three words to PPC, although this sounds nasty), and Web Analytics (you may or may not call it WA).

Search Engine Optimization is about changing the code of your pages and the structure of your site in such a way that when an SE spiders, and other robots read the site, they can understand that the pages have valuable content related to your keywords, and then rank them high. And, sorry, spiders can read only regular HTML. They don’t understand anything fancier HTML, like JavaScript or Flash. SEO also tells about ways to increase your link popularity - the number of links from other high-ranked pages to your site. Most search engines consider your link popularity a vital ranking factor.

Pay Per Click Bids Management is all about the money you spend trying to maintain your search engine visibility in the sponsored listings, by controlling your bids. Usually you try to detect the best converting keywords and keyword groups, in order to increase bids on them; as well as decrease or take off bids on keywords that don’t break even. Dont’ forget to leverage your paid and organic listings, so you may spend less on paid advertising campaigns when you get enough traffic from natural results. You should, probably, also invest in paid advertising when an algorithm changes or strong competitors force you out from the top positions in the organic listings.

Web Analytics is all about Internet analysis. You need to be able to analyze the information you get from your web site visitors. Any kind of details may be extremely important. Their behavior on your site, navigation clicks that they use, the ways they found your site, the efficiency of referrers and advertising, conversion rates, and, naturally, e-commerce information.

I will continue publishing blog entries about SEM, because today, it is on the rise and part of sysadmin requirements is to learn how to quickly conduct the web site optimization, and web site analytics.