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Google Website Optimizer Available to Public
It’s been about half a year since Website Optimizer beta was released along with a two-part webinar series that introduced the nuts and bolts of the service. The first webinar was a little shaky from what I remember, and people had issues downloading the right software and getting the sound to work through the phonelines.
Okay. Enough digressing.
Prior to Website Optimizer, conducting A/B and multivariate testing would entail some complicated tailor-made sets of tracking code that was neither robust nor scalable. All of you analytics/ROI/tracking fanatics out there know what I’m talking about. Anyway, Website Optimizer has been declared out of beta and ready for the masses! I’m surprised that it wasn’t released earlier because it fills a void that few third-party systems out there can fill efficiently (and cheaply).
Their website says:
Website Optimizer, Google’s free website testing and optimization tool, allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a cent. Using Website Optimizer to test and optimize site content and design, you can quickly and easily increase revenue and ROI whether you’re new to marketing or an expert.
Website Optimizer is indeed free and a valuable tool for split testing, but I can only partially agree that it can be done "quickly and easily."
Tags: Google, SEM, toolsIndex and Root Pages Merged by Google
It’s taken awhile, but Google has finally merged the index page with the root page of a domain as long as the content was the same. That is, Google now interprets www.abc.com and its counterpart www.abc.com/index.html to be one page, rather than two separate pages. For you PageRank fanatics, this does implicitly mean that PageRank won’t be split amongst the two pages.
The merging could be the result of the duplicate content filter going to work, but for now there hasn’t been any official comment on the matter.
Inadvertently creating duplicate content through the naming structure of a website has always been an issue, and SEOs have had to carefully handle these situations with whatever they might have in their toolkit. Apache mod_rewrites come into play here, alongside careful inspections of how you link to your internal pages.
So, I don’t have to worry about all of this anymore, right? Wrong.
Tags: Google, PageRank, toolsGoogle Sites To Challenge Microsoft SharePoint
After over a year of acquiring JotSpot, a software company that specialized in enterprise social software, Google has finally launched Google Sites - a renaissance of JotSpot with Google branding.
Google Sites screenshot:
Long Tail Searches Are On The Rise
An introductory post was made here on SEP last November about capturing long tail search traffic, and this subject is getting more attention as of late. An exclusive meeting was held earlier this month, where Google’s Analytics expert Avinash Kaushik disclosed an interesting trend.
In Q4 of 2007, the average query on Google reached four words for the first time ever. All previous averages were limited to three words or less, and the three-word average was unwavering for quite a while. In light of discovering this trend, I thought it was time that we revisit the topic of long tail searches and how to optimize for them.
Tags: Google, keyword research, long tail, search traffic, SEO, toolsExcluding Poor Sites From Content Network
As many of us have come to realize, the seeds of search engine optimization can take months before bearing fruit. Pay-per-click advertising is a much quicker means in acquiring search engine traffic, although it’s usually more expensive as well. In this post we will discuss how to make pay-per-click advertising cheaper and ultimately improve your ROI.
There exists two main platforms when it comes to search marketing - the content network and the search network. The former is infamous in its delivery of low quality traffic, and often leads frustrated search marketers to exclude it altogether. Here’s what you should try instead.
Tags: AdWords, pay-per-click, search traffic, SEM, tools