One thing about Avinash Kaushik - he writes great posts in his blog Occam’s Razor.  I feel that Avinash has actually done it this time…he’s written "gold" - gave out something that no one has ever said before about conversion rate considerations.

First, Avinash gives a convincing arguement for using Unique Visitors to measure conversions against pageviews or visits.

"Using Unique Visitors is a better read of what is really happening on your website because it accommodates this dance and gives you “credit” for those prior sessions when the dance was on.  More importantly being a practitioner I feel metric definitions should incorporate on the ground reality and using Unique Visitors accommodates that reality. (Matt Belkin, you have read his interview on this blog, has a great alternative point of view on this, click here for that.)"

Avinash has a tip of measuring cycles of time that’s different than what I have heard from anyone else:

"# 6 : Trend over time and don’t forget seasonality. If you have read this blog for any amount of time you know I love two things: trends and segmentation (more on this later). Most definitely trend conversion rate numbers but what is unique about this metric is that more than others it is really impacted by seasonality and so do things like 13 month trends or look at 5 quarters or 8 days. "

Understanding acquistion strategy seems like a tough thing to do fully grasp for some clients.

# 5 : Understand exactly what the acquisition strategy of your website / company is. This is not a report, it is a conversation / investigation with your business partners and it is an extremely important step that any analyst needs complete. Figure out what is your core acquisition strategy and then measure conversion rate for those elements. Is your company heavily into Direct Marketing (email, snail mail etc)? Are you spending excessively on PPC (Pay Per Click)? Or maybe you are about to plunk down a million dollars on a new affiliate marketing strategy or maybe on SEO.

This is fine for  most of my clients - but the large corporations are too complex to brake down like this.

Getting the conversion rate by the top places they get traffic seems like a good thing to do - I’ve never done it that way - but with one client - I can now do it using KeywordMax which makes it pretty easy to get those answers.

# 4 : Conversion rate by top five referring url’s. This sounds really simple and silly but there is usually a disconnect between what the company strategy is and where the traffic really comes from.

But it’s great that Avinash Kaushik also tells you what to avoid doing - and he says to avoid measuring conversion rate by the page or by the link.

"In the click density (site overlay) report some web analytics tools show conversion rate for each link on the page. The hypothesis is that x % of people who clicked on this link purchased. Unless all these links lead to the checkout this is a useless piece of information.

In a multi page complex path web experience simply the fact that someone saw a page or clicked on a link is not enough to attribute any credit that page / link in terms of conversion rate. (If you want to measure value of a page see the approach described in this post and look for the section where we talk about “page influence”.)

Again, I found the best scorecard for segmentation by conversion rate was produced by KeywordMax.  I’m sure the other analytics packages do this too, to some extent, but Keywordmax - that’s it’s speciality.

Also, place conversion rate and revenue next to each other is a great idea and I’ll start doing it more often.

MSN Search  can be used to find topical links to help your site become more popular according to Tony Hill.

1) Start by going to http://search.msn.com.

2) Click on the “+Search Building” right below the search box.
Punch in your keyword , choose “exact match” and be sure to click the “Add to search” button.

3)Click on “Sites/Domain” from left menu and choose to exclude your site
Select “Results ranking” from the left menu. Then choose the “very popular” slider and slide that puppy all the way up.

Then start searching…

I tried this with "craftsman house plan" - I’m familiar with most of the house plans sites and know some of them personally - as well as particular problems with getting good links from other architectural firms (who are competitors).

Here was the command I used:

craftsman house plans -site:www.mascord.com {popl=100}

it seems to me that you don’t really need the search builder - you can just put the keywords and site in there you want to use.

I did find some sites that were new but most were familiar to me and while very on topic - would be next to impossible to get a link from.

But that brings up the issue of finding pages that are great to have a link from but that you’ll never be able to get a link.  One of my former clients is a collection of architects that formed a "consortium" to compete with the bigger sites.   The only problem is they also all competed against each other.  Each of the sites was an excellent source of back links for each other but I was unable to get them to see past their own professional rivalry with each other.

It turns out the best way to get links from the sites you really need them from is to give things away (a 50 dollar Starbucks gift certificate for example - might get you a good link from someone).  It turned out the consortium of architects was totally unimaginative about what they needed. 

I left the consortium to fight it up among themselves, instead, focusing on working with just one architect from the group - the most progressive and open minded one - and also one of the more successful of the group.   It’s no surprise to me that success, brains and insight go together.

Matt Cutts released 3 new Google Videos that explain some basic SEO stuff.

Session 1: Including qualities of a good site.

Session 2: Including some SEO Myths.

Session 3: Should you Optimize for Search Engines or for Users?

I listed to video 2 (above) about common SEO Myths; sounds like Matt is addressing some of my clients, like the one that has 11 million pages and wanted all the pages indexed.

I like the Radio Show format - I kinda think Matt Cutts should produce is own Online Video every week or more often and focus on SEO/SEM issues.

The Wall Street Journal profiles the Moguls of New Media today.

"On the popular Web site MySpace.com, members set up profiles with information about their interests and then network across the site, recruiting other members to link to their pages."

But there’s someone with the screen name "Forbidden" that claims to have 1 million friends!

"As one of the first 15,000 members to join the site, launched in July 2003 (MySpace now has 96 million members), she (Forbidden) built an early following that grew along with the site’s membership."

"A 24-year-old cosmetologist who until a few months ago worked at a makeup counter in a mall, she now has a manager and a start-up jeans company and has won promotional deals for two mainstream consumer brands."

Here’s a list of the New-Media Power List that includes David Nevue - a musician who I bought an ebook from almost 4 years ago - I had no idea he was so popular - all of this happened after I bought the ebook which focused on Music and the Internet.

I know Webmetricsguru.com is a Web Metrics blog - though some people who love Metrics also love art - and for those people there’s two Artist interviews I just published on ArtNYC.  

Interview with Amy Crehore, Painter of Pierrots & Monkeys - Part 1

Interview with Amy Crehore, Painter of Pierrots & Monkeys - Part 2

 

Olan Montgomery - In Person Artist Interview - Part 1

Olan Montgomery - In Person Artist Interview - Continued

In both cases, I tried to look for things that would be 1) different than what other people ask in interviews and 2) when there’s a metric to be found, what’s the metric for success (be it a show, a painting or a website).

Also, my interview with Olan gave me some ideas on the representation of visitor segmentation of traffic as themes in my life - sorta taking ClickTracks and heat maps to another level. 

If anyone gets a chance to read my interviews with Amy Crehore and Olan, drop me a line and let me know how you like them (now.seo AT gmail dot com).

Now that anything can be sold on Ebay (including body parts) it should be no surprise that someone wants to sell their own DIGG profile on Ebay.

With all of the recent news about top Digg users being offered cash by Netscape to move over to their competing platform, I’m not surprised to see that someone has apparently placed their top 100 Digg profile up for sale on eBay.

The auction, which started a few hours ago, is for the Digg username GeekForLife. The user has submitted 748 Digg stories, 39 of which have made it to the Digg home page. There are no bidders as of 4 pm PST on Sunday.

There are two arguments for the account having value. First, of course, is the fact that Netscape is now paying top Digg users to switch over. Netscape is looking for actual users, not accounts, though, and so there’s little chance of this account being turned into a valuable income stream at Netscape. Second, high ranking Digg accounts count more than others when they Digg a story, making that story more likely to go to the home page. The account therefore has value, if Digg doesn’t simply turn it off.

This story has, of course, already been put on Digg.

I reported on the the recent news about top Digg users being offered cash by Netscape to move over to their competing platform earlier this month - Jason Calacanis offers to buy out each top digg users for 12,000 year.

However, YouTube channels may be more valuable than DIGG profiles according to Celulares who left a comment at TechCrunch about this story.

Something I find even more valuable are YouTube channels. There are a couple of kids who are very influencial on youtube and have manage to get hundreds of thousands of views and more importantly channel subscribers. I even went about offering some money for an account in the top ten who only has one video uploaded.

I think this is more of a publicity stunt as I can’t imagine anyone is going to pay for an account that means little or nothing without the person who created it.

I was eating Maggie Moo ice cream last week with my son Adam, an ice cream lover.  Adam was eating a cup of Cinnamoo™ and I asked him for a taste; once I tried the Cinnamoo™ I noticed it tasted exactly like Pepto Bismol!!!!!    I dismissed the idea that it really was Pepto Bismol - but in the back of my mind ….i said - why not?  I mean Pepto Bismol is not such a bad tasting grog.    Now someone actually went out and made Pepto Bismol Ice Cream!

No stranger to the drink, blogger Fraser decided to combine his two favorite hangover cures: Pepto Bismol and ice cream. The result looks like yummy pink goodness. Fraser says:

The taste? Actually, it’s quite nice. The vanilla and sugar temper the metallic bitterness of the medicine, giving the end result a flavour not too dissimilar to black cherry. And as a hangover cure? Initial studies are encouraging, with no negative side-effects experienced as yet. A mild mid-week drinking session provided the first test, and while my cross-breed concoction certainly didn’t eliminate the suffering altogether, the benefits did not go unnoticed.

Do you think it’s actually Maggie Moo’s ice cream - they just decided to use Pepto Bismol?   I guess I’d be curious to try Cinnamoo™ and this Pepto Ice Cream and see if they taste the same.

I read Jim Boykin’s blog occasionally and while I have probably listened to him speak at SES NY or Webmasterworld, I have never personally met him.    Jim has a very clearcut way of presenting information and he seems to have put a lot of himself in a presentation he gave at Hostingcon in Las Vegas last week.

The actual presentation he gave is here.  I downloaded the presentation and here’s what I think - SEO to SEO.

Slide 7 really shows you that 60% of all the search engine share is coming from Google and there’s really only 4 major search engines now - that’s your focus - and 60% is Google - and most sites I look at get at least 60% of their search traffic from Google in most cases, so those numbers are accurate as far as I can tell.

On Slide 10 Jim tells you that if you just do metadata optimization but don’t get links your site is going to be nowhere in rankings and you need to look at Yahoo for backlinks as it gets more accurate counts.  But more likely you will want to get links from older sites that have higher pagerank (slide 16).

I never heard before that Similar pages in Google have similar backlinks - but that is what Jim Boykin is saying on slide 20.  I have no reason not to believe him - I just have not heard that stated anywhere else.

On slide 28 Jim mentions how to be proactive in searching for links - that makes sense because Google likes informational sites for organic ranking over commercial sites - and when your site is more informational - you have a better shot of doing well for natural results.

And then, getting good links is something that you can influence - these are one way links.  For example, if your a business you can give away somethings for free for a link to sites you’d like a link from (slide 30).

We Build Pages tools are pretty good - I’ve used them at times when I’m in a crunch and need a free web based tool - he’s got some of the best tools on his site.

Too bad I was not planning on going to SES next week - I’d love to say hello - maybe I’ll do it at Webmasterworld or some other conference we both attend.

A new application from Mircosoft Live Labs promices to change the way we explore places via Virtual Tours.

Imagine being able to click your way through the Eiffel tower with perfect photographic reality…or walk the Venice Beach boardwalk…or simply show off your new living room to your friends over the net. Well, it’s all about to become real. Photosynth is an incredible new application takes multiple photographs of any location and merges them together to create a interactive 3D landscape. In the not too distant future we all might be able to walk the globe…through Photosynth. Is that cool or what?

"Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an Architect of PhotoSynth, which is a super cool 3-D image "tourism" application that enables a new methodology for exploring related groups of images using a complex imaging algorithm developed in part by Microsoft Research. Here, Charles sits down with Blaise to learn the details of the What How and Why of this highly innovative distributed 3-D image processing application. PhotoSynth enables a whole new way of exlporing images!"

I looked at both movies and the program looks pretty interesting.

According to the Onion, Wikipedia celebrated 750 years of American Independence!

 

Marshall’s Death of WikiPedia painting (above).

NEW YORK—Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday.

Enlarge Image

Three girls march toward the White House on Elm St. in Washington, DC, as part of the Inderpendance Day Parade.

"It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. "At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world’s oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition," Wales said. "According to our database, that’s 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven."

"In fact," added Wales, "at three-quarters of a millennium, the USA has been around almost as long as technology."

The commemorative page is one of the most detailed on the site, rivaling entries for Firefly and the Treaty Of Algeron for sheer length. Subheadings include "Origins Of Colonial Discontent," "Some Famous Guys In Wigs And Three-Cornered Hats," and "Christmastime In Gettysburg." It also features detailed maps of the original colonies—including Narnia, the central ice deserts, and Westeros—as well as profiles of famous American historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Special Agent Jack Bauer, and Samuel Adams who is also a defensive tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals.

"On July 25, 1256, delegates gathered at Comerica Park to sign the Declaration Of Independence, which rejected the rule of the British over its 15 coastal North American colonies," reads an excerpt from the entry. "Little did such founding fathers as George Washington, George Jefferson, and ***ERIC IS A FAG*** know that their small, querulous republic would later become the most powerful and prosperous nation in history, the Unified States Of America."

 

"All our lives, we are taught about the achievements of Washington, Jefferson, and FAG, but we seldom consider the factors and conditions that led them to risk everything for a republican cause," Wales said. "What was it really like to be a patriot in those times? How did the colonists’ perception of democracy conform and contrast with our modern one? Did Betsy Ross, as legend has it, really have the biggest boobies in the New World? It’s these types of questions I want Wikipedia to be a forum for, all at the click of a mouse."

The exhaustive entry also includes links to video clips of the First Thanksgiving, hosted by YouTube.

The special anniversary tribute refutes many myths about the period and American history. According to the entry, the American Revolution was in fact instigated by Chuck Norris, who incinerated the Stamp Act by looking at it, then roundhouse-kicked the entire British army into the Atlantic Ocean. A group of Massachusetts Minutemaids then unleashed the zombie-generating T-Virus on London, crippling the British economy and severely limiting its naval capabilities.

The entry also addresses several traditionally taboo subjects, such as the influence of LSD on the drafting of the Constitution and the role of funk-slaves in painting the White House black.

While other news and information websites chose to mark the anniversary in a muted fashion, if at all, Wikipedia gave it prominent emphasis over other important historical events from the same day, including the independence of the nation of Africa in 1847, the 1984 ascension of Constantine to Emperor of the Holy Roman Emperor, and the 1998 birth of Smokey, a calico cat belonging to Mark and Becky Rousch of Erie, PA.

Founder Wales, a closeted homosexual and hot-dog freak, according to his user-edited bio on the site, also hosted a symposium of amateur historians at the New School in New York on Saturday.

"The Revolution’s main adversaries were the patriots and the people from Braveheart," said speaker Tim Capodice, who has edited hundreds of Wikipedia entries on subjects as diverse as Euclidian geometry and Ratfucking. "The patriots, being a rag-tag group of misfits, almost lost on several occasions. But after a string of military antics and a convoluted scheme involving chicken feathers and an inflatable woman, the British were eventually defeated despite a last-minute surge, by a score of 89-87."

Despite spirited discussions bloggers present later described as "eluminating" and "sweet," the symposium was cut short when differences of opinion among the panelists degenerated into personal insults and name-calling.

While Wikipedia’s "American Inderpendance" page remains available to all site visitors, administrators have suspended additions and further edits to its content due to vandalism.