Web analytics, web metrics, and how to use them to track and improve conversions

As my final post for April 2006 (it's April 30th after all) there's yet another gem from Microsoft called the Content Categorization Engine.

Looking at one of my clients' site I can now see what catagories Microsoft thinks it's in based on all it's semantic analysis:

This information is useful in both search term matching AND search term advertising - but how to best use that information is going to vary somewhat.  

When we look at the leading competition, coolhouseplans.com - the catagorization is different

URL  Go    See Categories

Categories                                Confidence     Work & Money\Companies 0.914 Personal\Home 0.032 Shopping\Buying Guides 0.016 Work & Money\Industries 0.007 Work & Money\Personal Finance 0.004 Lifestyle\Hobbies 0.001 Library\Humanities 0.001 Work & Money\Business 0.001 Library\Society 0.001 Lifestyle\Gardening 0.001

I don't know if that has anything to do with why the site tends to rank highly or not - and maybe I'm not the best judge of how to apply that information but I'm pointing to the tools are available to start using and testing and thinking.

Think about new ways to use these tools, new ways to compare sites and see if the search engines actually use any of these as ranking factors.