…

Now that the excitement of the new Management API launch has just passed its zenith, you might have also noticed that there were some interesting changes to the Analytics for Developer pages on Google Code.Since Nick, Alex, and I were under the hood making docs and sample code for the Management API, it also seemed like a good time to spiff up the site and add some structure to handle this burgeoning developer resource…

They say we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but let’s face it: people are shallow.

We judge based on looks all the time. We’ll pass a dirty-looking, disheveled person on the street and assume he’s homeless, or crazy, or a drunk. We’ll meet a savvy woman at a meeting and assume her home is sharp-looking and neat.

Maybe that ragged man has a million in the bank…

Canonicalizing URL’s is a very important  aspect of Search Engine Optimization but also of Social Media Marketing. This morning, when checking my feeds, I noticed an example that I thought could help you understand the what and the why of it. What I noticed was this: Smashing Magazine had put out one of their usually very popular “100 … WordPress themes” posts. This time called: 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition…

Raise your hand if any of this sounds familiar to you:

• You just set up your tracking code and you’re wondering if it’s correct–and you want to know right now.
• You have decided to migrate your tracking to the new asynchronous syntax–but you want to know if your syntax has any errors.
• You finally decided to customize the tracking code for cross-domain tracking–but you’re worried that you might break your tracking…

 In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover tries to answer some of the hard questions in SEO. These include; "If you are such a good SEO, why don’t you rank number one for the keyword, SEO?" and "How can you provide advice on SEO if you don’t work for a search engine?". The answers to these and some other doozies are below.

View statistics for this video Embed video <object width="640" height="360" id="wistia_168957" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://seomoz-cdn…

Most every business, including Google’s, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger, faster.In a recent series on the Official Google Blog focused on small businesses, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. The team received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks…

AppSumo is at it again, this time offering a deal for us online specialists. The deal includes 5 of the best web optimization technologies for an incredible price of just $25 (regularly priced at over $500). The technologies include: Performable, Clicky, Visual Website optimizer, User Testing and Crazy Egg. Go here to get your package of online apps.

Here is a brief description of the 5 web apps:Clicky: Clicky is a real time web analytics service…

We’re very lucky here at Branded3 because a good percentage of our retained SEO clients are household brands. The fact we work with non-brands as well gives us a pretty good insight into the impact of “brand” on an SEO campaign and this post will hopefully convince a few people to start investing in brand campaigns again.

There are loads of reasons somebody might start a branding campaign and as long as you correctly track and monitor everything then each one is perfectly valid – as an SEO I’m mainly interested in two things:

• Increased traffic
• Increased conversion rate

Across our client base it’s very clear that brands have a much larger conversion rate than non-brands…

Many developers have asked for a faster, more powerful way to access Google Analytics account configuration data through the Data Export API. We’ve listened and today we’re releasing a preview of the new Google Analytics Management API.

The Management API provides read-only access to Google Analytics configuration data. It consists of 5 new Google Data Feeds that map directly to the Google Analytics data model…

India is a growing economy with $50B market in IT but the product area has not enjoyed such growth. According to reports, all Indian Products were a mere $1.6 B, which is less than the figure one year ago.But in such a pessimistic environment, an encouraging event (Tech Sparks 2010) was organized by Yourstory.in in association with CNBC TV 18, and sponsored by Microsoft and Cannan Partners.The event was successful to gather 17 emerging top technology companies defining the new product companies in India…

In this second part of our interview with Matt (you have listened to the first part, right?), we discuss VaultPress; Automattic’s new backup system. Matt explains the features, pricing. Going from that we discussed hosting and their uptimes.

Then the discussion shifted to the community, and how that’s built. We discussed how to get core commit access, and how Matt’s multiple roles within the community could collide…

After reading this post about the “WordPress white screen of death” I wanted to quickly share with you a quick hack I do in almost all WordPress installs I manage, that allows me to quickly switch on debug mode when needed.

In the file wp-config.php, usually found in your WordPress root, do the following:

if ( isset($_GET[’debug’]) && $_GET[’debug’] == ‘debug’)
define(’WP_DEBUG’, true);

Now I can open any page, and if something goes wrong there, like a white screen of death, I add ?debug=debug to its URL and see what’s causing the trouble…

Google released their latest addition to the bidding features family – Enhanced CPC. It’s been in beta since March, but Enhanced CPC officially launched yesterday, August 16th.

The premise of the tool, much like Conversion Optimizer, is to “boost your ROI with an easy to use, automated bidding tool.” Enhanced CPC will automatically adjust your max CPC bid based on the likelihood your ad will convert…

Google released their latest addition to the bidding features family – Enhanced CPC. It’s been in beta since March, but Enhanced CPC officially launched yesterday, August 16th.

The premise of the tool, much like Conversion Optimizer, is to “boost your ROI with an easy to use, automated bidding tool.” Enhanced CPC will automatically adjust your max CPC bid based on the likelihood your ad will convert…

I’ve just pushed out release 4.0.7 of my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. It contains a few minor bug fixes, and a little something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: a proper logo. It was designed especially for the plugin by Level Level, a Dutch WordPress specialist I’ve had the pleasure of working with before on the conversion of Dag.nl to WordPress. This is what the logo looks like:

The small version is used in the plugin heading on the admin page, a favicon version is used as a favicon for the admin page…

This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington !

I’ve been into web development since 1996. I started dabbling in high school and just couldn’t stop. I felt comforted, and challenged by the vast sea of knowledge that I could learn. Plus, since the languages, technologies, and trends were always changing – I knew I wouldn’t get bored with it…

With the arrival of my baby girl a couple of months ago, I’ve been looking for good educational apps for kids in the iPad app store. There actually isn’t a whole lot compared to the amount of games and business applications so a group of friends and I decided to build one for ourselves. It’s called Josh and Emma Go to the Beach (priced at $1.99) and it just hit the app store, so get it while it’s hot!Here’s a brief description of the iPad app:They are brother and sister and love to go on adventures with their mom and dad…

We’re excited to announce the launch of Enhanced CPC, a new automated bidding feature that can help you improve your ROI on your campaigns with manual bidding. Enhanced CPC uses your campaign’s historical conversion tracking data to automatically adjust your Max CPC bid based on the likelihood that your ad will convert. As a result, you should receive more conversions while maintaining or reducing your overall CPA and hopefully spend less time managing your Max CPC bids…

If you’re not careful, it can get out of hand.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube — they’re all powerful tools for marketing your business online, and you might be tempted to pursue them all. Before long, you’ll have half a dozen accounts, hundreds of people to respond to on each website, and a sense of dread about what’ll happen to your online reputation if you can’t manage it all…

PostRank is a leading provider of content engagement and real-time data analysis solutions. I was able to catch up PostRank’s Community Manager, Melanie Baker, who gave me a great walk through of PostRank Analytics. Check out our chat below, if you’re interested in test driving PostRank Analytics use the special coupon code, “WAWblog” (no quotation marks) you’ll receive three free months instead of one…

Hopefully, by now, you’re making good use of the Intelligence report in Google Analytics. If you’re looking to avoid the feeling that Google Analytics is “puking” too much data at you – a phrase coined by Google’s beloved analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik – you’re not alone. We’ve heard you, and Intelligence is your first stop. As we mentioned in a previous post introducing Intelligence, it’s your dedicated assistant, monitoring your website traffic for significant changes that you should know of…

Have you ever pulled up a landing page that makes you want to gag?

Probably more than once, right?

When it comes to designing landing pages, most people seem to believe ugly converts better. If it doesn’t have a gigantic red headline, lots of yellow highlights, and a blinking “BUY NOW!” button, then it can’t possibly be converting anyone, right?

Actually, no…

Twitter has introduced their own “official” button to add to web pages to facilitate sharing content:

When clicked a window pops up that either prompts the user to sign in to Twitter or, if already signed in, is populated with the page’s <title>.

The button may also has a counter with it to show the number of times it has been used:

Search Results, Stats

Clicking on the counter leads you to the real-time search results for that particular URL:

Seemingly missing are true, solid stats that can feed or integrate with analytics…

If you’ve ever wondered how to make sense of the long lists of keywords that appear in your reports, this week’s tip is for you. Look at the bottom of most tables in Google Analytics and you’ll see an Advanced Filter option. With this option, you can filter the data in your table according to almost any set of conditions you wish.Let’s say you’re only interested in keywords that brought in visitors who spent at least 2 minutes on your site…

Everyone’s crazy about search engine optimization.

You need to learn it. You have to have it. You have to do it.

The problem is that you really aren’t sure where to get started, and you can drive yourself nuts trying to "get it right." Keyword densities, back links, trustrank, neighborhoods, link architecture — who has time to do it all?

You’re a marketer, not an SEO specialist…

I get about 10 emails a day asking me for help with a website, not a specific plugin error or something like that, but more general requests for help, often relating to my WordPress SEO article. In the past I used to do this sometimes, for free. Recently I’ve begun treating those requests a bit differently: I’ll email back that I can do a site analysis and tell people what to improve, which plugins to use etc…

Eric Peterson has released a new whitepaper (sponsored by OpinionLab), titled The Mobile Measurement Framework: Making Sense of Your Mobile Efforts in the Context of Your Business. The result of the whitepaper is a rich set of key performance indicators focused on user experience, interaction, engagement, and costs that can be applied to mobile sites, mobile applications, and traditional web sites easily, effectively, and inexpensively…

Joost and Frederick interview the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, talking about loads of things. The entire interview was split in 2 because it was a bit lengthy, so you’ll hear part 2 next week.

In this part we discussed the ’3.org’ project: fixing everything about WordPress that is not WordPress itself, so we discussed WordPress profiles (check Joost’s here) and how they want to integrate those with WordCamps and some of the new APIs that the team is developing and improving…

Yay! It’s another episode of Web Analytics TV!

In this exciting series, with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, you ask, and vote on your favorite, web analytics questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

This episode was particularly awesome since there were some fantastic questions. Tough questions that made us think hard. But also questions that made us proud of how sophisticated Google Analytics users are…