SEM Wired

A new search engine has just been launched and it’s time to update our analytics software.

Google hasn’t released any major update to automatically recognize traffic coming from Bing into Google Analytics but I guess it is not gonna take too long.

In the meantime we can easily tweak Google Analytics just playing around with our tracking code.

In order to add Bing as a search engine we need to use the addOrganic function: _addOrganic[domain, search query]

AddOrganic Function: how it works

The addOrganic function has two parameters:  domain and search query. It basically tells the Analytic engine to consider some referrals as proper search engines, hence appearing on keyword statistics.
This two parameters are embedded in every search query we forward to a search engine:

Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=[searchquery]

Yahoo:
http://us.search.yahoo.com/search?p=[search query]

So let’s take a look to a standard Bing query:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=[search query]

As you can see, the right AddOrganic sintaxy would be the following:

pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com", "q");

We just need to add this line right before the trackpageview() call into our Analytics code.

I think there’s an obvious update on the way but if you are already getting some decent organic traffic from Bing just add this line and see what happens.

We all know SEO is not science: most of SEO practices come from direct experience or reliable source but there’s som much uncertainity that makes everything blend into doubts.

That’s the reason why advices coming straight from Matt Cutts or the Google webmaster blog should be taken definetely seriously. We’ve already seen Matt getting into certain topics put into the spotlight of the SEO community and giving useful (altough sometimes ambigous) insight.

This time he realeased a bunch of slides he presented to the 2009 San Francisco Wordcamp

Following is a resume of the main points he discussed:

Crawlers and PageRank algorithm

• Google spiders go crowling pages in a pagerank order: highest pagerank pages get crawled before pages with a lower pagerank
• Being relevant and reputable is the actual criteria that works behind the Page Rank

Keywords and content optimization

• When it comes to keywords, put yourself into the user shoes: think about what he would type in his search string
• Do not think about stuffing your pages with keywords: write naturally.
• ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)

WordPress

• Set your permalink to domain.com/post-title (setting -> reading -> custom permalink structure /%postname%/)
• Modify your titles and file names (urls) acconrding to the content

This is the powerpoint format. Slides are also available from Google Docs.

Restrict access to users on WordPress

Have you ever thought of make some content of your WordPress blog available only to certain users? Do you need to restrict access only to a certain type of users to selected blog pages or post? Ever thought of create a reserved area for registered users on your WordPress blog?

Some time ago, while working on a client’s project with a*dult content, I came up with the idea of restricting access only to a certain type of users. This would have avoided any problem with underage visitors. The thing was that he only wanted to use WordPress, because it was the only content management system it was familiar with.

So I started thinking how this could be sorted out. Actually WordPress does not come out of the box with such a feature. What we needed was some sort of plugin able to distinguish between users according to some extra information.

The issue was promtly solved with two different plugins:

• Disclose Secret allows to restrict access to certain pages or posts only to users complying with certain criteria.
• Cimy Extra Fields for WordPress makes some more data available for any users. This extra fields can be used to distinguish in between differents types of users therefore setting up specific access to content

With these two plugins we can manage access to any type of content for any type of users, even feeds, archieves, homepages and search results.

WordPress is indeed versatile and fully customizable. However, if you really want to create reserved areas for users with a secured login procedure, there’s plenty of CMS out there which can do this job pretty well, even through a SSH connection.

Still, if you just want to make sure that you blog is read only by the right people, this might be the best option: simple, easy to deploy and safe enough.

We all know the importance in today web of social networks. Nowadays even seo firms consider specific actions such as social media optimization when working on linkbuilding strategies.

The ongoing democratization of the web is leading the internet towards a collaborative juggernaut which autonomsly decides what’s interesting and what it is not… finally the silent majority of the modern world has got a media to express itself. Therefore, a successful internet entity, whether it’s a company or a personal website, has to be able to manage its presence and reputation on social network platforms, also considering this as a standard metric for feedback.

Beside all this gibberish philosophical intro, the bottom line is: can we track traffic (and other metrics) coming from the main social network platforms with Google Analytics?

VKI studios came out with another great extension for firefox which basically appends at the end of each page report a list of social bookmark website in which the page has been mentioned.

By this time, the report includes the following social bookmarks:

• Reddit
• Stumble Upon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Sphinn (SEO social bookmark)
• Mixx

It also checks the page status on Yahoo Website Explorer. I hope this will come handy, but more importantly, to have your pages on one of these social bookmark

This plugin is available only in english and requires GreaseMonkey.

Gmail Filters made easy

Some time ago Google has made available a new feature by which you can upload filters with an XML file.

The good thing about this is that you can just write down a single file and define all the filters in there and then load them at once.

The file structure will look like this:

<entry>
    <title>Mail Filter</title>
    <apps:property name='from' value='semwired@gmail.com'/>
    <apps:property name='label' value='semwired mails'/>
</entry>

You can easily download, share and upload new filters from Settings -> Filters.