In the last couple of weeks I’ve spent quite a large amount of time playing with analytics, most specifically Omniture.

I don’t know about other analytics packages (well, I do but I can’t be arsed to think about it), but Omniture has a massive implementation flaw, which of course opens the door for some fun.

There seems to be no security tie between the page containing the beacon and Omniutre, what I mean is, that Omniture servers will accept a beacon ping from anywhere, any page on the internet.

Sooo, for instance, I could wander over to Apple and have a quick shifty at their Omniture beacon and then copy it into any page on the web, and that page would start contributing data into Apple’s Omniture account. They have no domain blacklist / whitelist you see.

So this is where any SEO would start thinking, ‘How can I push this ?’

Well, since the ping to the server is javascript generated, this means you can easily script the beacon transmit function ( s.t() ) to send all manner of fun stuff into the Apple Omniture account.

Obviously, once you can push false stats into a sites analytics, you’re going to be able to generate a shitload of headscratching by anyone within the organisation that spends time analysing those stats for leverage, which is usually the SEO guy.

kekekekekekeke

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Advertising

Most Search Engines generate revenue from advertising, some search engines facilitate this advertising on 3rd party sites (we don’t display ads, but wordpress even has easy plugins for publishing these adverts). There’s some guidelines about what you can publish, etc.

The basic model, as I’m sure you are aware is that a Merchant asks a Search Engine to display an advert in some way when a certain phrase or word is searched for and then will pay on each click, or to contextually analyse the page surrounding the advert and deliver the Merchants advert into places where the contextualisation is correct. In this second model, the website displaying the advert gets a portion of the click revenue when an action is performed.

All this works terribly well, and barring some clickfraud skullduggery it’s a model which seems set to continue.

Micropayments

The more astute amongst you will have realised where this is going already.

Forever, Business has been working on a way of acquiring micropayments for web content. But have generally failed to come up with a pain free way of harvesting these from passing Audience who generally feel that web content should be free.

Obviously, Business is doing it the wrong way round, and there’s no alternative for them.

Tips Jar

Imagine, during your general trawling around the web, say from Digg or Fark or B3ta or wherever, you had a low impact mechanism to thank a publisher of some content you liked by dropping a few proper real world coins into their tip jar. All it would take would be about 3 mouse clicks.

Would you do it?

You go to a site, you see something that genuinely interested you written by a small time website owner desperate to make a few bucks here and there from his site.

Would you do it? Would you?

If you do, just make sure you visit a few pages wherever you end up.

There was some uncertainty whether the tales he told were true, or tall. It didn’t matter, he was a force of nature, often infuriating, often cocky but always full of ideas on how he was going to make the world better.

I knew him while he lived in London, always talking about the 8 bedroom apartment he was going to rent in Kensington and flat share with several super models who ironed his shirts. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, this is the enigma that was Martin Schaedel.

The loss of Martin in a light aircraft accident at Santa Monica airport leaves the world a lot less colourful and definitely more lonely.

Rest In Peace, Martin Scheadel.

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And this works for them, they’ll get the call offering them some money to go mend something somewhere .. and panic.

For people with an ounce of knowledge about SEO, the U.S. has always appeared behind the curve, this is fine for them, their audience is vast and a teensy bit of SEO knowledge can make some gains, changing an ‘and’ to an ‘&’ in a title tag say. They still constantly whitter about PageRank and Keyphrase density and spam tagcoulds onto anything they can find – Zzzzz.

There are a few U.S. SEOs that we know of that actually ‘get it’ – the whole thing, the whole kit and kaboodle, everything from stats implementation and shortcomings, through Business Intelligence, onward through prioritised reccomendations, into implementation and through Executive reporting (‘here’s a graph, it goes up … that’s a Good Thing for your company’

Jessica Bowman

It was through Jessica (indirectly, she doesn’t know me), that I landed on this article – which is possibly one of the most intelligent writings I’ve seen about SEO so far this year (and by far one of the most interesting to come out of the U.S.)

Have a read, It starts of with an interview of Stephan Spencer who nails it, and then moves to Jessica who puts icing on the cake

enjoy

SEO at Enterprise level is a flop

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We recently exposed the use of Google Analytics on the Yahoo! Rivals site which was bad enough.

You can imagine my shock when I discovered Google Analytics code on the Yahoo! Search Blog:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-6563788-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

Great PR.

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Because we are fucking useless

by the way

PARIS HILTON SEX TAPE FREE DOWNLOAD

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This ad is designed to get families to change their lifestyles so that they can eat better, move more, live longer, blah blah blah. Anyway, at the end of the ad was an unusual call-to-action (I think Orange have used it in the past). I was instructed to ‘search for change4life’ (or google ‘change4life’ as most people will do).

Ok so I do that and get the following SERP:

Now as you know, people are a lot more ‘SERP savvy’ these days and trust organic listings more than sponsored listings. Hence why PPC and SEO must work together in the SERP’ so you would think that the Change4life site would have secured first place in the organic listings. WRONG! Even though there is an NHS article about the Change4life campaign in first position, the intended site that they want us to go to is in second position and we all know the importance of securing first position, oh dear. You may argue that they have some sort of coverage with the article in first position but you have to navigate way below the fold (after muchos content) for the actual link to the intended site.

Moving on. A lot of people will also search for the obvious variant ‘change for life’. I did this, and got the following:

Once again, PPC is all good but look, there’s no sign of any organic listings. WTF! Surely, getting some sort of organic exposure for an obvious search-term variant is vital? Granted, it doesn’t happen overnight but why not use another URL to promote? One that doesn’t have any obvious variants.

Does all this really matter? Well, I certainly have no reason to use this site so a no for me. However, this campaign is funded by taxpayer’s money so yes it does matter.

Is all our hard-earned taxpayer’s money going straight to Adwords? If so, what a flipping waste. If they sorted out their SEO and maybe invested in a decent URL, there wouldn’t be the need to invest in PPC. Instead, this money could be invested in something far more useful OR are people ignoring the sponsored ads, clicking on the first result in the organic listings and finding it’s irrelevant? If so, it seems as though we won’t eat better, move more and live longer after all.

Ok rant over and back to bed.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-EfRLaZFSU

So, 2008 on average, you were great. Any old idiot could knock up a website and somehow make some money on it. Sarah Beeny may (or may not) have said something which resonates into all corners of the current economy, ‘Gone now are the days when any old imbecile could buy a property that needed nothing doing to it, completely fuck it up and sell it for a 50% profit’. This cuts to the core of the economic re-adjustments that’s going on into the start of 2009.

Any old idiot could buy a URL completely make a mess of it and somehow mostly be ok.

Any old idiot could start a curtain design consultancy and somehow make money.

It’s all based on money that never existed.

Come 2009 any Business will be looking at it’s assets and trying to wring every last ounce of value out of it. There’s no such thing as an over-performing website, all websites, whatever they do, could do better – we’re seeing this with the now aggressive stance Google is taking to it’s primary products, and Google is the most successful website in the world.

There are some disciplines which should flourish in the next year, SEO should be one of them as part of a CRM/PPC push trying to increase engagement and ROI on websites – and not before time. Without trying we’ve found and highlighted some terrible sites and tried to show why they’re cruddy on the few postings we’ve made so far on here.

If ever there was a time to sort the good SEOs from the shit ones, 2009 feels like it will be it.

Happy & Prosperous New Year to you, it will be neither prosperous nor happy – Good Luck

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