How important is personalized search?
Google (and other search engines) want to give the most relevant search results. Knowing who is requesting the information with what intent is extremely important for this search relevance. If I search for “apache”, I might be looking for the Linux webserver; If my neighbor looks for it, he probably wants the helicopter gunship. So how does a search engine discover: a. the meaning of a word and b. the intention of the searcher?

The meaning of a word
Google doesn’t use a dictionary to find related words (only in a very small way), it uses other occurrances of the search term on other websites to find them. For normal ranking or when a single word can have several meanings (hononyms), these related words become extremely important for the search relevance.

If a large group of apache websites also mention something about webservers, PHP and Linux. Apache must be related to those terms and those websites must be about the same meaning of that word. If another group of sites mention nothing about webservers, but keep writing about geronimo, tipis, crazy horse and tribes, they are probably refering to indians.

Being related
The “occurrances of the search term on other websites” part is becoming extremely important in personalized search. Optimizing your relevance has to do with mentioning the same related words as other websites within your niche. Links to and from your website should contain those same related words. This relates you to your niche and that meaning of a hononym you might want to rank for.

Personalized search testing
After using different identities with a separate search history and behavior, the search results for several hononyms gave a very clear picture of how small changes in your behaviour can have a profound effect on the search results. And the same tests over time, gave us the impression that Google is increasing the importance of personalyzed search. Adding &pws=0 to the search result URL shows you the difference between your personalized results and normal ones.

Besides hononyms we’ve also seen very distinct search results for subniches of a topic. While only using a more generic term for a niche, websites that used related words that coincided with the subniche preference of the searcher where given more weight. So every search is influenced by personalized search in some way.

Intention of the searcher
So how does a search engine find out the user preference for a specific subniche or hononym of a search term? Mainly by looking at your recent searches and things you’ve clicked!

Let’s say you’ve searched for “apache” and after seeing pages full of server results, you re-specified your search to “AH 64 apache” and clicked a helicopter link. The next time you search for “comanche”, search results about the RAH 66 comanche helicopter are given extra weight. In this case some results about the comanche tribe still outrank the helicopter, but suddenly more helicopter links enter the top 100.

SEO for relevance
To become more relevant, you need to find out what you want to be relevant for. Define what audience you want to target and what they define as relevant. If they use terms like AH 64 and technical terms for weaponry, they might be a different audience than the ones using “apache squadron iraq” although they both mean the same helicopter.

Broader ranking is still possible, you will just need more superiority over the closer niche matches. Define the niche and then define the search terms. The exacter the niche, the better your focus and the easier it is to rank (link relevance).

Find out what the most visited (high Google ranking) websites in that niche are and look at the related words they use. Use the same related keywords in both your content, anchor texts to your websites and link to pages in that same niche.

SEO for personalization
SEO shouldn’t be about large amounts of traffic, but about converting visitors to a predefined goal (like “more sales”). Personalization should help you achieve that goal more easily, but you might want to rule more than just your niche. Any traffic is valuable as long as only one visitor converts. Getting people earlier in their decision process, before they know exactly what they are looking for, is becoming even more important with personalized search.

The websites found early in a search process define what more specific search queries someone will be using and they define what Google sees as personal related keywords that need to be given more weight. Therefore top rankers for more generic search terms define the keywords you need to incoorporate. The ones that are the most likely to be “clicked” are more important. The “Searches related to:” tab that is shown at the bottom of some search results helps you to find the terms that are mainly used for further specification.

Conclusion
So far personalized results mean: You have to already rank for a search term the old way, but extra weight is given to specific niche keyword relevance. This niche is mainly defined by search behavior, but the future it may include more personal information to be used.

For SEO’s this means they will have to use better subtopic specifications based on possible preferences and search history. Making a separate page for every subtopic, but mainly focussing on the same search term, might be a good solution if you aim for large amounts of traffic. For spammers it means they should use smarter scraping and text generation software. Personalization is here to stay!

Link acquisition methods
In linkbuilding we distinguish between three basic ways how new links are acquired.

• Script driven links
  These links are generated by scripts. Sites like Google scour the web and generate links. But also RSS feeds that are syndicated and other scripts generate links.
• Requested links
  These links are requested or submitted by the website owner or someone directly associated to him. It requires a manual or automated action to get the links.
• Human driven links
  These links are placed by people without the request of the webmaster. Just because they like the site or because it is very relevant for the content on their website.

Manually requested links
There are many link opportunities that require some kind of action on your part to get the link. For instance to get listed in directories, you can make use of automated directory submission services, but quality directories are still human edited. Your success rates will dramatically drop when you request all links with the same message.

A link request should be a personal message to the human editor and that is hard to automate. Not only directory submissions, but every link that requires a request needs to be as personal as possible. Even paid links need to be requested and a personal bond can make it cheaper.

Request administration
First create a list of every place where you would like to get a link. Once a list of possible link partners has been made, check which links are requestable. Human driven links can be gotten with just marketing and promotion, but once you have relevant content, you can also request the link. Script driven links are maintained automatically, but sometimes submitting for instance your RSS feed is required to get listed. It can at least speed up the process. You can use link administration software to help you categorize the links.

When do you automate, outsource or do your own link requests?
For every requestable link, find out what content is the most suitable for that site. Plan the creation of new content/linkbait for some of those links. See if that linkable content can be created through automation, requires normal written text or requires your expertise.

Then categorize the request process itself between automated, manual outsource and manual do-it-yourself. Don’t look just at the technical possibilities, but also look at the value of that link for your ranking, should it be placed. Use the RAT checklist to help determine its value. Also look at the quality of outsourced link builders. I use both cheap labour for easy links, experts for more difficult links and myself for the hardest links.

Making it easy for cheap labour
Marketing expertise is a trade you won’t find in cheap labour and a link request consists mainly of marketing. You have to model the link request process so that the email contact is just a tiny part of it all and the email contact can be outsourced to cheap labour. This can be done by:

• creating specific linkable content for every group of linkers,
• creating exchange methods (return links, promotion, money, etc.) as reward when your content isn’t enough,
• creating a couple of standard first messages that can be easily personalized to become unique,
• instructing ways to research the linker and his interests and standard ways to personalize the request message to that linker,
• instructing how to combine the right content for the right linker with the right anchor text and description and still making it unique,
• instructing link worth and when to use exchange methods and
• instructing how to react to certain replies.

As you can see you still have to do quite some work, but your effort doesn’t need to grow with an increasing amount of requests. If the request process involves thousands of personalized emails, you can better use cheap labour than doing it yourself. And you can always outsource this link building supervision to an expert and let him prepare everything for the cheap labour.

Hiring cheap labour
Sending emails and following your instructions requires: language skills, internet access and supervision. The language skills required determine how cheap the work can be.

People from India can be used for English. They’re relatively cheap, have internet access and also have highly educated people available to do the toughest work and give local supervision. For Dutch you can use people from Surinam; The French have northern Africa; For Spanish you can use South America; And the Chinese have their own cheap labour.

But most of the time I need quality work and I use local people. Local people can connect better to the linker and success rates are much higher. I hire students and housewives because the work can be done from home and whenever they want. When you pay them for every successfull request, they’ll be extra motivated. The Dutch language skills are better than people from Surinam and they are more creative in persuading the linker. Most of the time they also have more feeling with the product or service they are link building for.

Conclusion

• Hire linkbuilders as cheap as possible, but differentiate by skills required for a certain success rate.
• Hire separately for link bait creation and link acquisition.
• Hire locally for harder links and find people that could understand the field they are linkbuilding for.
• Hire experts to prepare, instruct and supervise the whole project. This is a real sub-expertise of search engine marketing and most SEO’s should stick with code and content. I do most of it myself, but that is because I’m a real cheapskate

Choosing a less competitive market and search terms with high traffic volumes can get you much cheaper traffic. But does that convert into sales? Here are a few examples how to get cheaper traffic for a better ROI.

1. Branding and creating awareness with search
2. Exposure is cheaper than clicks
3. Ensuring ROI with cheaper traffic
4. Profitting from high traffic search terms

Branding and creating awareness with search
Search engine marketing is normally “pull marketing”: Someone requests something and you offer it. But it can also be used as “push marketing”: Someone didn’t know he was looking for something until he came across your offer. Push marketing will probably convert less well into sales (or any other goal on your website), but for exposure/awareness purposes it can work even better than staying within your defined niche.

When there isn’t much awareness for the solutions you offer or when your audience doesn’t even know the problem it solves is relevant to them, you might need to try other (online) marketing solutions than search engines. Normally you could rent a bannerspace on somewhat relevant resources that target the same audience, but you can also get cheap exposure from search engines.

Exposure is cheaper than clicks
For instance in Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or MSN Adcenter; When you bid on a less relevant search term and you use a very specific proposition of the thing you offer, you won’t get the highest clickthrough-rate. But the traffic you recieve is relevant as long as you are honest in the adtext. You might pay more per click than other advertisers because of that lower CTR, but you don’t pay for the exposure, just for the clicks.

Example:
You offer logistic software for the transport business, then people might not search for your product often and they might even be unaware that they would need such a service. In that case try bidding on terms like “buying a truck” and then use an ad like “Buying a new truck? You might want to track what your drivers are doing. www.TruckTracker.com”. If that isn’t what someone was looking for, they might just haved spotted it and it made them think. So make sure you brand your message. Of course this is just one example, but it shows that search can be used as push marketing.

Ensuring ROI with cheaper traffic
Both paid and unpaid search listings suffer an ever increasing competition. This competition competes for just 21 spots (in Google 10 unpaid, 3 top ads and 8 paid results on the right) on the first page and the second page is rarely visited. Nowadays even the most specific long tails are targeted by all bigger players. The websites with the most revenue on that search term can outrank anyone in both the paid and unpaid (yes that too depends on effort and money) results and there is no place left for a highly relevant, smaller retailer. So how does the smaller retailer get his traffic? Or how do you maintain a high ROI without having to outbid everyone?

The trick in ROI is that effort equals money and wit can reduce the required effort. You have to be a good online salesman and you need to focus highly on usability, but turning less relevant volumes of traffic into conversions can reduce the cost per conversion enormously. This is best explained with an example. Let’s state the following:

You sell mortgages and loans nationwide and as you might guess; The competition is enormous and even though the revenues are high, traffic is expensive and thus your ROI is minimal. Long tails are targeted by all your competitors as well, so no cheap traffic there.
But what are the loans or mortgages used for? If you are used to the competition in the loan business, the competition in other businesses is peanuts and traffic is much cheaper. With loans, try focussing on terms related to buying a boat, refurbishing your house, buying a car, expensive holidays, new kitchens, buying a computer and many more, but make the traffic relevant.

Search term:
“buying boat”

Ad text:
“Buying a boat? Finance ready?”
Compare every loan provider
for tailored boat loans
www.loanCompare.com

Landing page:
And create a landing page tailored for boat financing with possibilities to get more information, but a clear button to request an estimate for their situation.

Where it says ad text, you can also say description in organic results, because even organic results can be steered in great detail. You can use this example for every slightly related topic. And making it relevant is easier than you might think. Cheap traffic is, irrelevant traffic turned into conversions.

Profitting from high traffic search terms
As you might have read in the previous topics: In paid search you don’t pay for exposure, just for clicks; Irrelevant traffic might be less competitive; And any traffic can lead to conversions when you make it relevant. These points are as true for normal searches as for very popular searches.

Take for instance news topics, popular people, government information or seemingly unexploitable topics. News (like war Afghanistan) gets high volumes of searches, but not many advertisers compete on related terms. Most popular people (like Clint Eastwood) get only a few ads for their name. Government information and social dilemmas (like unemployment) get little attention, although they are easily exploitable for commercial purposes.

• See your ad as free exposure and less as a cost per click based revenue maker.
• Brand the message and sometimes even prevent clicks.
• And make pages specifically for converting irrelevant traffic into sales.

Conclusion
Any traffic can be good traffic as long as you are clear about what your services are from the beginning. Prevent people from visiting your website or even contacting you with the wrong intentions. The costs of clicks, bandwith and your time can become your downfall if you don’t. These rules are as true for paid ads as for organic listings so read them as such.

I wish you much success in your business and try to give me feedback once you’ve tried it.

The best way to get any link, is to create content specifically as linkbait for that link or website. Normally a competitor will not intentionally link to you directly, but here’s where an intermediate site comes in. Use an existing intermediate or create your own one for full controll how the linkjuice is transfered.

Authoritive links
First let me tell you that apart from ranking factors like anchor text, relevance, PR and page location; The authority factor is domain wide. This means any link from for instance CNN.com gives much weight for ranking on many search queries (general authorities. A link from for instance ICANN.org gives some general weight, but extra weight for hosting companies selling domains.

Authority is something you build over time and getting authoritive links speeds it up. Any authority you build can be transfered to other domains without losing any of it yourself. Except when you mainly link to websites with a negative authority (spammers and indecent content) or act spammy yourself. Then you can lose the authority you have.

Finding authorities
You probably know what website is the most authoritive in your field. You probably also know a few more general authoritive sites. If you don’t, here’s where a high PageRank comes in. A site with a with a PR 7+ homepage is bound to have much authority as well. This is not a rule, but I’ve seen little exceptions. Also the first indexed dates in archive.org say something about authority as well. For more indicators see the Relevant Authority Transfer checklist.

Existing intermediates
Once you know on which domain you want the link, you can easily find out where it already links to. Thanks to Live.com’s “linkfromdomain:” you can just enter it as a query. http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=linkfromdomain%3Acnn.com gives you 300.000 possible intermediates so you’re bound to find one willing to link. Just create your linkbait for them in stead of begging directly to CNN. But if you still want a direct CNN link you can always see how all the linkfromdomain: sites got theirs.

Creating intermediates
A huge advantage of having your own intermediate website is “controll”. You can get the right anchor text and the exact right way to transfer the linklove to the right page within your website. The best way to redirect linklove is cloaking, but I don’t recommend any whitehat websites to use it. If you want an example: Cloaking for linkbuilding.

Linkbaiting intermediates
Creating linkbait is much easier with intermediates. You can even create different intermediates for all your linkbait. Here are some examples:

• Create a testimonial or comparison website and give the best review to the website that needs to do the linking.
• Create a seeming authority on a subniche of the industry. And some research or report claiming the unique-selling-point of the baited site is very important for that product or service.
• Create a tool that is ideal to calculate or research something specifically for your industry. A collection of seemingly unimportant tools creates great linkbait.
• Combine al RSS feeds in your industry into one website or feed. Collecting is always a good way to become an authority.

As you can see there are many ways to create linkbait. Just make the bait specifically for the site that needs to do the linking. Know as much as possible about the person responsible for placing the link. You can even meet them in person and become their friends (just for the links?).

You can get the authority of any site shine down on you. Just use intermediate websites to get it from the hardest places.

First let me tell you how much impact universal search will have. Google shows these extra results at the top, in the middle and/or at the end of search results. A search for “darth vader” shows it all. Images on top, a movieclip in the middle and related search and news results at the bottom.

These results really stand out and a visitor will more likely click one of the special results. Because they stand out so much, they hugely impact how people perceive the results. If this is something positive for Google usage remains to be seen, but it sure is something positive for us search result influencers. It is like the wild west has opened up again with new frontiers.

Reputation management
Before I tell how you can influence search verticals like image search, I would like to show an example of reputation management issues that will arise.

These are the results for the Dutch prime minister “balkenende”.

Because he looks somewhat geeky like “Harry Potter”, people created images showing him as Harry Potter. His reputation can only benefit from it, but in most cases having the wrong pictures on top of your name or company name search is something bad. I just got hired to boost pictures of a drunk CEO when searching for a company name. Although this isn’t very ethical, I wanted to try it (and I don’t have morals ).

Optimizing image search
No, search engines don’t look at the image itself! Most search engines have little image recognition skills (But look at this example to see what Google can do: image type: face). It would just take too much processing power. Duplicate images, x-rated and other unwanted pictures are filtered with some image recognition, but nothing very advanced.

So what do they look at?

1. Most search engines, including Google, prefer images that are used within the content of the website. Otherwise they would index your entire navigation and design.
   Some believe images after one of the first paragraphs are the most likely ones to be included in image search.
   Pages with texts containing just a few images are more likely to have high ranking images than entire galleries.
   Update: Someone just told me it matters if the image is also a link. He says it is better to have an unlinked image. I haven’t tested this, but it would make sense.
2. The used alt text and text in the immediate surrounding of the image tell the most about its content. Just be concise and descriptive and have it contain little more than the phrase you want to rank for. The title tag of the image seems to have some effect.
   The image name or URL should also contain the search term. Be sure to separate words with for instance a dash, slash, hyphen or dot. Relying on stemming isn’t always good.
3. If the image is contained by a page (and site) that ranks for the search term and also has many related links (with the correct anchor text) to it, that boosts the image ranking very much. Because not many images are optimized intentionally, a ranking page with an image in the content (that might not even contain a correct image) will be the most likely winner for most searches. To even appear in image search the image needs to be on a site with enough links to it in general.
4. An image that is requested from multiple websites (the url on the original source is used to show the image) with the right alt text etcetera has even more chance of ranking.
   I was also told that a copied image (same filename and image properties (bits, resolution, colors, size, etc.)) located on another website, helps the ranking of the original source, but I haven’t seen any proof yet.
5. An image situated on a strong website (for instance a high PR page) is more likely to get indexed. To see all listed images from a single domain, use the site:domain.com command in image search. I hope my site is strong enough to get some images listed, but otherwise I’ll try to boost them via stronger sites.

Example 1:
You should try to get an image of yourself rank for your own name. I haven’t got round to it before, but here it is: In the near future this ugly image should score for the phrase Peter van der Graaf.

Peter van der Graaf

I get many reactions because of my ugly avatar with the green background. I have to say all of this is intentional. It stands out on for instance MyBlogLog and people visit my site to see what weirdo has visited their site.

Example 2:
If this was the first paragraph of a page, it would contain some bla bla on the topic and it should contain the search phrase I wanted the image to rank for. In this case the image below needs to rank for “balkenende search results”. Bla bla as you might know premier balkenende is wel known for his raar kapsel. Jan Peter Balkenende looks a bit like harry potter. Look at the image below for the balkenende search results.

Balkenende search results

This would be the next paragraph with more related bla, but it doesn’t really matter what I type. As long as it is enough text to fill another paragraph. So here I go: Search results are bla di bla and prime minster or Wouter Bos is something related as well. I will type some more to fill some text, but now I am finished.

Check the image search results for “balkenende search results” in a few weeks and this image is sure to score. It takes a lot more time for the image to get indexed, than it does for a normal page.

How do you hide connections between websites?

How can search engines track you?
There are many characteristics that you, as an internet user, can be identified with. There are also characteristics that belong to your website. Both of these types of characteristics are used to see what other spammy tactics you have used on other websites that also need to be penalized. I will list a few very important characteristics, but there may be more, depending on what other utilities you use that search engines can detect characteristics from (for instance the Google toolbar or MSN Hotmail).

Your own characteristics:

1. Your IP address and access provider: Your IP address is the easiest way to detect who you are and it remains the same over time (most broadband users have a static IP address). Because IP’s might be shared or people might use more than one computer (IP), this doesn’t identify a single user.
2. Your search engine cookies: Most search engines track visitors by placing a cookie in your browser. When people use multiple browsers (and computers), clear cookies or don’t even accept them, this doesn’t identify a single user that well either.
3. Your search engine accounts: If you’ve logged in to for instance your Google account, Google can track everything you do within their websites. Because you probably don’t share your account, this is the best way to identify a single user. Because search engines also own services like Flickr, Blogger and Youtube, these users can be tracked as well.
4. Your search engine toolbar: Most seach engines offer their own toolbar that you can install in your browser. Besides the helpfull tools a toolbar might offer, it continuously sends all your http requests to for instance Google. There is no easier way for a search engine to find out what you do online. And when you are logged into your search engine account, they know that they are tracking an individual user.

Your website’s characteristics:

1. Domain whois information: Since Google is an ICANN-accredited registrar they can do unlimited whois requests for .com, .net and .org domains. For other domains (TLDs) they can’t do an unlimited amount of automated whois queries, but when a human editor checks you out, whois information becomes very important. Search engines can for instance look at contact-, registry- and DNS information and the whois change history.
2. Server IP and netblock: By looking at your IP address and netblock you can be associated with other websites that share these with you. Use tools like Netcraft and press the netblock owner link to find out what other domains share it.
3. Registry, nameservers and hosting provider: Just as netblock information, using he same hosting provider links you to other websites. But only when a registry, nameserver or netblock owner has just a small amount of websites sharing them it is used to link websites to each other
4. Content and links on your website: Sharing content, listing the same owner or address on websites or extreme interlinking all link websites to each other. Keep in mind that human editors need to be fooled and not a simple algorithm.
5. The way you code, link, design and other characteristics that are common over multiple of your websites also link them together. Try to use a common style that isn’t unique for just your websites. The combination of multiple characteristics that are simular in more of your websites make it a footprint.

Using different identities
As you see there are many things a human editor can check to link you to your spam. To make sure only the penalized website gets hurt, use different fake identities for every website at risk. But how do you hide an identity effectively?

1. Don’t use a toolbar (like the Google toolbar) when doing anything related to your spamming website. Even better, don’t use one at all. To see how much personal info a toolbar sends, install the liveHTTPheaders plugin for Firefox.
2. Use a unique IP with every identity and be extremely consequent in using it. Using a public anonymous proxy like one listed here might slow your connection and the IP’s might be blocked in some sites. Using multiple access providers also gives you different IPs, but that can cost you too much. Using paid proxy services (like these or this) is cheaper than separate connections and faster and more anonymous than public proxies. Use different services for every identity if you want even less ways to track you down.
3. The quickest way to change all browser settings like cookies and used proxy server is to link them to a Windows or Mac user. These settings are already stored at a user level, so you won’t easily mess up your settings.
4. Use little or no other services from search engines. Although this is getting harder now Google owns everything, only use the services from your real identity. They won’t read your personal email, but I’d even recommend not to use Gmail to recieve email from different identities.

Hiding website connections
Hiding the links between websites is easy when you consequently use your different identities. Just make sure you use entirely different hosting providers and domain owners. The domain owners should use a different address and name. But should you use fake identities or real people as domain owner? That is a question I still don’t have a real answer to.

You can’t use a fake identity for certain TLDs and in some cases you’re breaking the law when doing so. When the domain becomes valuable it will be harder to claim ownership and sell it.

Using someone real makes them the owner. Always use a contract with that person that makes you the real owner. The drawback is that you probably have to pay the person and you get linked to their other domains and activities.

There could also be certain footprints in your programming or SEO tactics. When you consequently code a certain way that is slightly unique to just you, it is fairly easy for search engine spamcops to link your websites to each other. They can probably search in the indexed html sources and they have certain tools to look for your signature. Make your code, urls and linking sources and structures as common as possible and try to change them somewhat with all your websites.

Summary
Using different identities to cover your tracks is getting more and more important as search engines get smarter. Spamcops have a great arsenal of tools and information to track you down. Especially when doing blackhat SEO, you need to use different identities. You need to hide your IP, be consequent with your users and use a different domain owner for every website. These factors will probably only be checked when you’ve already triggered enough red flags, so stay under the radar and you won’t need them.

P.s. I took the identity of Roger Horn once to do reputation management for another roger horn.

What can you do?

1. Change the high ranking page so it becomes or seems more positive
2. Change the high ranking page so it doesn’t rank well for your name anymore
3. Have any reference to your name or the entire ranking page removed from the website
4. Boost existing positive reviews to outrank the negative ones
5. Promote the creation of new positive reviews to outrank the negative ones

Make a list of positive and negative reviews
Check at least the first two search result pages on your name, domain name, company name, product name and any other unique reference you can think of. When someone is looking for opinions, they might refine their search query when the first results don’t show any. Also check if there is any difference in the results across the mayor search engines. Ask the question: “Where would your potential customer look?” Make a list categorized by the things you can do to combat the negative ones or boost the positive ones.

Make the result more positive
Most of the time negative comments are placed on a public website so everybody can add another opinion. In these cases the most important features you should check are:

1. Title
   People scan titles in the search results. If those are negative, those results need to be removed or placed far below the top 20. Most of the time you cannot change the title of an existing review, you can just add your own comment.
2. Description
   The description/snippet that appears in the search results is based on the section of text where the search term is abundant. If the description is negative, repeat your company name a few times (not too many) in a positive phrase.
3. Landing page above the fold and bottom
   In review sites, the first and last reviews are viewed more frequently. If these are positive, the overall review seems more positive. If another negative review is added, you will need to add another positive one to counteract it. If you do all the fake reviewing yourself, make sure you use a proxy IP to pass any spam filtering.

Make the result less relevant
When you can add text to a review page you can also change the main topic. When the page doesn’t have your company name in the title, you might still have a chance of lowering its ranking by doing this. Add multiple reviews or comments that have little or nothing to do with your company name. When a review has few links pointing to it, you can also lower its ranking by directing totally irrelevant links to it.

Have the review removed
You can request the owner of the website to have the review removed. But when he doesn’t, you can add slight pressure. If your company or product name is trademarked, you can order the removal of each appearance of that word (by most laws). It is pretty hard to rank for something without having it in the content. The drawback of an ordered removal is the possible negative publicity you can get. Use this only when the review is crossing a certain decency line.

Boost positive reviews
It is very easy to boost existing positive reviews to outrank the negative ones. Because you are the authority on your own name, everything you link to gets more relevant. Select or create an internal page in your website that is optimized for your name. Then add a link to the positive review. If you own directories or moderate certain websites, you can also add a link from there to the review (Use your company name in the anchor text).

Promote positive reviewing
You can add a “customers about …” section to your website with links to reviews on your customers websites. This can be beneficial to both you and your satisfied customer. They get link points and maybe visitors and you show potential customers how satisfied your real customers are. The link you direct to the review boosts the ranking of that page and thus creates high ranking positive reviews on your name.

Don’t give in to the dark side
How tempting it may be, don’t use this to ruin the reputation of your competitor. You can help existing negative reviews score better, but don’t create fake reviews. When people find out, it will backfire on you.

Analytics without javascript?
When you look at the analytics javascript code you see that it combines several sets of data into an image request. This image request sends the right data to Google (not the javascript). When you know what url you should use for the image, you can call the image directly and send the same data. Of course you need to be able to request the image url and that isn’t easy from another image, rss feed or pdf. This is why we request it “server side”.

Server side image requests
Javascript is “client side”; this means the browser does all the calculations and actions that the script requires. PHP, ASP, Perl and many others are server side scripting languages; which means the server that hosts the website does all required calculations. This means javascript knows more about the action of the user and PHP can easily request data from a database or other source.

PHP (I’ll focus on PHP in this example) can also request a file from the internet without executing or showing it. Just requesting the analytics image is enough to trigger a hit in your report and it will show up in your account. The downside of requesting the image from your server is: You lose the IP address and other data that Google records at the moment the image is requested. The server IP of your web server will be recorded.

Server side requests in a client side report will obscure your data. Create a separate Analytics profile for everything you log server side.

Who requests my RSS feed?
RSS feeds don’t execute javascript, but in some feed readers you can execute javascript once a post is read. This is why you need to log requests of your RSS XML file differently. You can either use a service like Feedburner or send an Analytics image request from PHP or ASP. The following example shows how you send specific data to Google Analytics from your RSS in PHP.

1. Create a new analytics profile with its own tracking code (not a copy of an existing profile). Activate the profile by temporarily changing the code on your homepage. After activating you return it to the original one.
2. Add the following PHP code to the file that produces your RSS (preferably at the bottom): urchin-image.txt
3. Update the urchin code, domain, user defined variable (if desired) and the fake page request you’d like to track.
4. I left all the other data intact because it works with them and they don’t impact the report, but when I have time I can probably clean it up some more.

Tracking PDF or Image requests
The script that produces your RSS feed is already executing PHP code. Images and PDF files don’t execute anything, so you need to add something extra to track these in a similar way. The following code shows you how you can request an image, PDF, SWF or for instance downloads and request the Google Analytics (Urchin) code at the same time.

1. Find out if your server supports mod_rewrite. If it does, you can produce cleaner URLs. As a RewriteRule in your htaccess you add something like: “RewriteRule ^tracker/(.*).gif$ /tracker.php?url=$1&filetype=gif [L]“. This requests the file tracker.php whenever a gif image from the (non-existing) directory tracker is requested. You can do the same with all other filetypes that don’t execute PHP code themselves.
2. Create tracker.php and add something like the following code: tracker.txt. Customize the script where needed and add content type headers for everything you’ve added to the htaccess.
3. Now you can open the extra profile you should have created and under “Content Optimization > Content Performance > Content Drilldown” you find the directory “tracker” with all image/file requests logged in it.

Here are all values you can fill: image-url-explained.txt

Most of the information needed for the statistics is gathered by the javascript file (and you can influence that data), but the other half is collected when the image is requested from the Google server. This means that that information belongs to your server and not to the user that did the real request. Converting server-side to client-side analytics is very usefull, but not flawless. I haven’t seen this type of Analytics tweak anywhere else, so please let me know if you would like me to post more similar tweaks or more information in the future.

Google Analytics is very good once you implement some of the following tweaks.

• Extra tracking features in Google Analytics
• Using filters in Google Analytics
• And of course the tweak shown above!

What are Analytics filters?
Google Analytics filters allow you to select specific visits or visitors on your website and either show only them, exclude them from your reports, or change the way they show up in your reports.

You can enter filters in the “Analytics Settings > Filter Manager” section of your account when you have administrator rights. Here you can enter filters that “Exclude all traffic from a domain”, “Exclude all traffic from an IP address”, “Include only traffic to a subdirectory” or make your own filter under “Custom filter”.

What can I do with Analytics filters?
The first two filters mentioned before help you to exclude visitors that cloud your reports with unrelevant visitors, for instance visits from your companies own IP address. The subdirectory filter allows you to separate subsections of your website into separate reports. More on separate website profiles later, but first let me explain how you can use the “Custom filter”.

Custom filter
In the custom filter section you can include, exclude or edit information based on many variables before they are simplified and combined in your analytics reports. The most important pieces of information to use in your filters are: Request URI, Visitor IP address and Referrer, but others like country and language can always come in handy. A full list can be found here.

Custom filters can use POSIX regular expressions. This means you define what format or sequence the filter should look for and you can extract information from it. I like using the “Advanced filter” from the “Custom filter” section. There you can use one or two fields and combine extracts from them into another field.

Full referrer URLs
Under “Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance > Referring Source” or “Marketing Optimization > Marketing Campaign Results > Referral Conversion” Analytics shows only partially where your visitors have come from. For instance the get variables (for instance ?name=analytics-filters) are excluded and it isn’t easy to just enter the referrer URL and visit it. To get the entire referral URL into your report you can use a custom-advanced filter. Here’s how:

1. Enter the Filter manager
2. Click “+ Add Filter”
3. Enter the filter name (like “Full Referral”) and select “Custom filter” from the drop-down box
4. From the radio buttons you select “Advanced”
5. For “Field A -> Extract A” you select “Referral” from the drop-down box and in the text field you enter “(.*)” (to select the entire URL)
6. Leave Field B empty and set “Output To -> Constructor” to “User Defined”. In the text field you enter “$A1″ to refer to the first selection of field A.

It should end up looking something like this:

Within a day full referral information will end up under “Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance > User-defined”

What have Adwords searchers really typed?
Another flaw in Google Analytics is the report on Google Adwords. Analytics only shows what matching option was triggered by the users search query, not what was exactly typed. In my earlier article on Analytics I showed how to fix this with javascript, but you can also use filters to extract this data. Here’s how that goes:

Copy the following screen to get referral data of cpc clicks into “Custom field 1″ (this field cannot be seen in your reports)

Copy the following screen to combine the data of “Custom field 1″ and the original data of “Campaign term” into one

From now the all reports that include Adwords search terms will also include the used query.

Using extra profiles

You can create extra profiles of the same website and filter specific traffic to only appear in all reports of that profile. I use this option to see if visitors that order something show other behaviour then other visitors, but you can also use it to differentiate Google traffic from Yahoo traffic, or new from returning visitors. This works in all your reports and you don’t need to use any cross segmentation within your reports.

Google Analytics can do almost anything expansive web analytics software can do. You just need to know how to retrieve the data.

1. Your first ever search engine will be either the default one on your computer or the one someone advices you to use. If you remain satisfied with the results you’re not likely to switch. This is why all search engines want to become the default on new computers.
2. Unexperienced searchers are more likely to type full sentences in stead of only keywords. As people become more acquainted with search they will use only key-words and even start using phrase and negative query options.
3. Unexperienced searchers won’t know the difference between sponsored and organic search results and are more likely to click ads. As experience grows they will sometimes create an automatic ad filter and they won’t even notice the ads anymore.
4. Websites that sell something are more likely to use sponsored listings. And because people aren’t always searching to buy something the sponsored listings are deemed less relevant in most cases. Only when someone is looking to buy, they are more likely to look at and click on ads.
5. The decision phase someone is in determines what keywords they use and what they click. The Search Funnel (pdf) can be used to determine what keywords belong in which phase and shows you which steps need to be taken to end up with a buying customer. Down the AIDA funnel (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action). In which Action can be buying something.

   
   (Click for PDF)

   To get a buying customer someone needs to go through the entire decision making process. If you get your website visitor in the “attention” phase you need to offer him all the following steps and information without loosing him to a search engine which might be able to give him more information then your site does. The further down the search funnel you get your visitor, the more likely someone is willing to buy or take any other desired action. Maybe this article can help: Best landing page layout.

   Target keywords from all phases, but make sure you offer the desired information for that phase. Guide them to the desired action on your site, but in these steps offer answers to possible questions in every decision phase.

6. Most websites are written in only one writing style. They can for instance use commercial language, corporate language or informal language. They’re also written from a specific knowledge level with the presumption that the visitor has that same knowledge. Write your text from all different standpoints, all knowledge levels and every possible writing style that is suitable for your product or service. Just figure out a way to do it all in one website and target all possible search queries.
7. Organic and Sponsored search results are almost always placed in the format Title, Description and URL. Eye-tracking studies on the Google result pages show that it is not only important to be amongst the first five search results, but it is even more important to be have a relevant and attractive result. The second result can easily convert better then the first as long as it is more relevant to what the searcher was looking for or even more then he was looking for.

   
   (Click for full page)

   The different colors show how much time was focussed on a specific region of the page.
   The X-es show where the user clicked.
   The red lines show how far someone scrolled.

   As you can see people don’t scroll much, but that depends on the first five results. If they are exactly what the searcher was looking for, they will click those. If it was nothing like what they were looking for, they will click the search box to refine the search. If it was somewhat what they were looking for, they will scroll to see if there is something better in those results.

   People scan the results for what they were looking for. Having the keyword in your title and description makes them bold. Something bold ate the beginning or end of the line attracts extra attention.

   Make sure your result stands out of the crowd. Titles in search engines are your page titles, the descriptions (snippets) are either: 1. Your DMOZ or Yahoo directory description. 2. Your description metatag. 3. A specific piece of text from your page where the search phrase is situated. Test titles and descriptoins in payed search and reflect the successfull ones in your webpages.

8. The future of search is in personal search, custom result page layouts and vertical search. All of these result types make it harder to predict where and how your result will be shown. Make sure you end up in every relevant vertical search type. In a future post I will focus on influencing personal and vertical searches. It isn’t very important yet, but just realize that this is coming!

These are just a few of my findings. The article would become too long if I continued. Maybe I’ll focus more future posts on this subject.