Linux Tips & Tricks

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.

Like its big brother Sendmail, Postfix is an open source mail transfer agent (MTA) for routing and delivery of e-mail. It is fast and easy to administer. You can even use for administration a nice web inteface of Webmin.  Postfix was originally written by Wietse Venema and released somewhere in 1999.  The majority of our web analytics company MTAs are Sendmail servers, but we also use a couple of Postfix machines for handling humongous amounts of statistical reports that our Web analysts send back and forth.

Since 1999, Postfix definitely matured.  Right now, I see two major strong points for using this MTA.  Fist of all, it has amazing resilience against buffer overflows. Sendmail is more vulnerable, I must say (although, I love Sendmail).

Second major plus is the way Postfix is handling huge amounts of e-mail.  This baby just does not go down, no matter what!  Another one is its handling of large amounts of e-mail. Its creator Wietse Venema (also a creator of tcp wrappers)  built Postfix  as a cooperating network of different daemons. Each daemon fulfills a single task using minimum privileges.  Even if a daemon is compromised, the impact remains limited to that daemon. It cannot spread throughout your entire system. There is only one process with root privileges, and a few that actually write to disk or invoke external programs. Besides, most Postfix daemons can be easily chrooted.

There are several nice books on Postfix that you can buy at Amazon.com.  One of them is really good. Yet, here is what I say. Save yourself some money. I suggest you go straight to Postfix online documentation and get everything that is written in the books for free. I am not kidding, it is true.  Click on the link above and check it out yourself. If you think, that this is too complicated, choose from here Postfix basic configuration online tutorial.