Archive for August, 2008

• Christmas Is Coming. Really.

  Having been approached a few weeks before Christmas by some online stores keen to boost their sales in peak season, last year, may I point out that planning your Christmas paid search activity should be in progress, now? For maximum impact, you’ll want purpose-designed landing pages to optimise conversion. That usually means running some experiments. [...]

  August 26th, 2008

• Social Network Marketing Experiments

  Regular readers of this blog will know that I tinker endlessly with why things work the way they do. My apologies if my latest experiment has come as an unpleasant surprise. I have a reasonably large email readership from that “Subscribe By Email” field to the right of the page, courtesy of FeedBurner. I adjusted [...]

  August 24th, 2008

• AdWords Quality Score Changing

  In possibly the most significant announced change to AdWords, the Quality Score is changing. This should, within a month or so, cause improvements in conversion if the details are correct. It would be quite possible to mess this up. I suspect that there will be some weeks of agony as first, users will assume that [...]

  August 22nd, 2008

• SEO, IIS case folding filenames, Spiders, Analytics, and Robots.Txt

  AFAICS, the best way to administer IIS for SEO purposes, seems to be to run screaming from the room and hide under a desk until you are allowed to use Apache. So many of the default behaviours create difficulties for users or SEO. Yes, I’ve been continuing to dig into web analytics and IIS web [...]

  August 20th, 2008

• IIS Cookieless Generates Spider Crawling Problems

  Another case of Web Server Log File Analysis on IIS being disturbed by bots, having the potential for SEO naughtiness and spamming the search engines. The problem is created by IIS’s cookieless model. The idea appears to be to present a unique string in the path so you can track sessions without needing a cookie. [...]

  August 18th, 2008

• A List Apart Surveys Designers, 2008

  I found the 2007 review to be interesting, but flawed. The 2008 survey has more focused questions and should present an interesting snapshot of the lives of web oriented workers. I’m not a graphic designer – this blog design isn’t a clue? – but I do spend a lot of time on interface design, information [...]

  August 2nd, 2008