Category: Digital

Microsoft Windows Live Search lost market share from 12% of total online searches in November to 8.2%, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Source

A controversial study shows Google's true search market share to be 70%. Source

The SEOmoz Blog points out two heat map tracking software solutions.

CrazyEgg (I think Rand already talked about it), which is simple, easy to use and cost between 0,33$ - 0,80$ / 1 000 visits. I am not sure how deep the metrics are behind it. Has any of you tried it? It is worth it?

ClickDensity is the other one I found and seemed to offer wider and more detailed statistics. Setup seems to be a breeze. Costs seem lower per 1 000's.. They offer some nice A/B test splitting, allowing you to change snippets of html code as you like to compare conversions.

And of course, Google Analytics offers some primitive heat map capability in the form of their 'site overlay' report (see screenshot below).

Does Google use the Meta Description tag? Check out these comments. Some same Meta Description tags are ignored by Google. This Google Groups post by Google's Vanessa Fox has this comment saying you should use the meta description tag:

Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn't found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page -- in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page. Source

And this comment cements the need for unique Meta Description tags when optimizing for Google:

...by adding a meta description tag, a unique one, for each page, Google will use that information as extra criteria to determine the uniqueness of the page...Otherwise, Google will use the top text of your page's content, and that can potentially be your top navigation or worse. Source

Need to evaluate best-of-breed email marketing tools? For low to mid-range deployments, here are three good contenders to evaluate:

• http://www.intellicontact.com
• http://www.verticalresponse.com
• http://www.constantcontact.com

If you don't have a Google Sitemap now, with this breaking news, you'll especially want to set one up:

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to all support a unified system of submitting web pages through feeds to their crawlers. Called Sitemaps, taking its name from the precursor system that Google launched last year, all three search engines will now support the method.

More about Sitemaps is to be provided through the new Sitemaps.org site. As part of the announcement, the existing sitemaps protocol from Google gets a version upgrade to Sitemaps 0.9. However, no actual changes to the system have taken place. The new version number was simply done to reflect the protocol moving from an exclusive Google system to one that all three search engines now support. source

So what does a Sitemap look like? Check mine out at http://stanshinn.com/sitemap.xml.

You can generate them by hand, but even better is to install some software to generate it automatically.

The research by Akamai reveals online users are less patient than ever. If a website takes longer than four seconds to load, users are likely to abandon it. 75% of those users would not return to websites that took more than four seconds to load. Read more

Is your page too 'heavy' and need help loading faster? Need to measure how your website performs? Try out NetMechanic to diagnose this and other ailments that can drag down the usability of your web site.

Want to increase comments on your web site article? Try making the feedback option more prominent. Take a look at how ZDNet formats their comments button (on the left below):

Also note they add this to the top of the article page. See it in action at ZDNet.

Email market churn could reach 32 per cent, meaning that one in three customers could be switching to a new email provider within the next year. Source

Alexa isn't always spot-on accurate, but it has its uses. This site allows you to compare stats for up to five domains, side by side. An interesting tool for competitive analysis.

Alexaholic blends Alexa website traffic graphs with a lightweight ajax-enhanced interface to satisfy hard-core Alexa traffic chart junkies – aka Alexaholics.

Webmasters, SEO/SEM specialists, and domain owners can compare and measure website statistics for up to five domains at once, switch traffic chart types and ranges without page loads, and generate report pages that are easily bookmarked and shared.

Visit the site at: Alexaholic