tech tips - Paul Fleming - Paul Fleming - Flemo: Between Sydney, Philadelphia and the World Wide Web

We’re all curious. We’re all also a bit competitive by nature. We all have our business nemesis, that guy that keeps turning up at networking events, whose website keeps appearing under search terms you’re targeting, whose name keeps cropping up during prospective client discussions. Even though we may highly respect them, a bit of healthy competition never goes astray so it’s also a good idea to keep a close eye on them (and maybe grab a few good ideas along the way). Fortunately online, there are plenty of tools to allow you to do that. Here are a couple of my favorites

Social Mention – There are several monitoring tools out there but I like this the best (though I find Trackur to be slightly more comprehensive, just more expensive for a cheap bastard like myself). It’s also more comprehensive than Google Alerts and also sends you alerts via email and rss depending on your preference. Pop in your competitor domain name and see if there’s any chatter.

Twitter – mainstream adoption of Twitter has given rise to an increased ability to snoop. If your competitor has a twitter handle, following them may be very handy otherwise creating a couple of columns in your favorite twitter client (tweetdeck is mine but there are plenty of others). Pop in their domain or a persons name or business name and see what they’re up to.

Compete, Quantcast, Alexa and Google Insights – I’m lumping these all together because quite often, by themselves, they may be a little short on data. Out of these compete.com probably has the most data available and you can put your competitor’s website alongside your own. Keep in mind that accuracy may be questionable and this should not be taken as lore.

Open Site Explorer – one of my favorite SEO tools can also give you an overview at how you stack up against your competition. In addition to the overall stats you can also take a peek at who is linking to them and maybe some additional reasons why.

There are some additional ‘geekier’ options if you’re interested in delving a little deeper like checking their website server environment, domain age or to compare search engine rankings but now you’re starting to get a little obsessive so time to get back to concentrating on your own business. Any other useful tools?

We manage a number of WordPress websites and the immense popularity of the platform can certainly open it up to malicious coders. I recently noticed that a couple of older websites had become fodder for malware infections. These blogs were both hosted on Dreamhost and I have since discovered that the issue seems limited to Bluehost and Dreamhost at the moment. Many of the files contained the eval(base64_decode code and manually removing the code (or overwrite these files) may provide a temporary fix but the issue is most likely lurking elsewhere.

So after some prodding and poking and browsing online, I came across this post from Sucuri that solved the problem in about 2 minutes.

Today Google rolled out their Google Instant Search results which, in a nutshell, reveals more search results based on every letter you type into their search box. This realtime stream of results yields a flurry of activity on the page below while you busily type your search term. Users have to be logged in to get this so it’s most likely based on your search history as much as their data. I thought I would hate it but I don’t. In fact I like it enough to switch regularly from using my toolbar to search when appropriate. With significant adoption, it’s going to affect client search data but as a user, it’s a nicer way to search.

What does this mean for searchers? As you type and scan it becomes more and more obvious that you have found what you are looking for, saving 2-5 seconds per search according to Google research. No longer will you have to stop at “Philadelphia Cafe” which gives you results from all over Philly:

but may want to continue on to “Philadelphia Cafe South St” to find a potential destination without having to leave the comfort of your search box.

What does this mean for SEO’s? Essentially the technology remains the same so we’re planning to continue doing what we do. With increased adoption, it does seem like there may be some interesting analytics data to crunch and I’m wondering if this will impact the long-tail rather than the head phrases but I’m leaning towards the latter in this case. There are some that are going in the other direction.

It’s really this sort of innovation that keeps Google forging ahead in their space and something that Yahoo could have utlized when they had the chance (although they never did really improve their poor search relevancy). It certainly won’t kill the SEO and it’s uncertain as to whether or not users will accept it across the board but for those who use search a lot, there’s no doubt that Instant will bring about significant productivity improvements.

There may be an occasion where you have text or a logo or hotbutton on your website or a client website and you’re curious as to how many folks are clicking on it before leaving your website. Normally it’s not going to show up on your analytics and you possibly don’t want to go and add more complexity to your setup by installing a script or additional software but by modifying your links you can add some additional data for a campaign or simply assuage your curiosity.

OnClick Google Analytics Link Adjustment

Let’s have a look at our website Dinkum Interactive which offers an image link back to our Twitter account. We are limited in tracking the number of folks who sign up to our twitter account but where they come from remains a mystery. At the very least, we would like to see who is heading to twitter from our website via a button on our home page. Not very interesting but for the sake of an example, right now the code looks something like:

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/mydinkum”><img src=”images/twittericon.png” alt=”twitter icon” width=”83″ height=”76″ /></a>

So the first part of that link is the destination, the second part is the source of the image file. We are mostly concerned with the first part which we will adjust to accommodate for the onclick and will look something like this:

<a onclick=”javascript:pagetracker._trackPageview (‘/outgoing/www.twitter.com’);” href=”http://www.twitter.com/mydinkum” target=”_blank”></a>

Then we would combine that with the image source code <img src=”images/twittericon.png” alt=”twitter icon” width=”83″ height=”76″ /> to give you your final link.

I use ‘outgoing’ but I know others use different names for that, plus I believe you can pretty much use anything to tag the outgoing URL landing page, you just need to be able to remember it when you’re checking your data which is why I like to keep consistent with it.

Checking Your Data

Now you’re going to have to head over to your Google Analytics account and make your way to the Content Section:

You will then go to Top Content which will display a list of your most popular pages.

Below this list will be a Filter option. Type in the relevant word here. I’ll use “outgoing” but I could also do www.twitter.com if i wanted.

This will reveal the details of visitors who have clicked on our link or logo or a hotbutton…or for you, whatever you have decided to track.

There may be occasions where something like this will come in handy, particularly if you are working with other websites who don’t have any form of analytics installed. You may need to let them know how generous you are and there’s nothing like hard and fast data to back you up.