What does this video have to do with SEO? Here’s a good quote by Mike Grehan at ClickZ

“…by using integrated marketing techniques to create awareness, build your brand, and create end-user demand, you can pull your clients into the search engine charts.”

Zen-like words at the end of this video also apply.

Below is an example of a visitor system  report I built with custom reports tool in Google Analytics:

How this report can help

This report measures the following multiple visitor parameters: uniques, avg. time on site, and bounce rate against some key system info like, browser, browser version, screen res, Flash version, and Java support. Once this report generates, click the percentage button (right-hand side) and view the data in an easy-to-digest pie chart.

It’s a very simple report structure but at the same time it is extremely helpful in determining how design changes like typography or backend development like jQuery and AJAX calls affect your user community.  Take the recent Firefox 3.6 upgrade which supports WOFF, really exciting design stuff is happening – which can also help give your Website a competitive advantage but how many of your visitors (and which visitors) would this design modification impact?

Developers also often run into issues with cross-browser compliance. This becomes a real pain point particularly with form validation. If your site depends on forms as the primary method of passing online leads to offline sales, understanding how different browsers handle your JavaScript validation, etc. is another critical area to master.

Finally, just seeing how your visitors measure up with the Web browser trending data may offer a bit more information about your visitor type, which is of interest for other integrated online marketing campaigns.

I’ve got a ton of custom reports I use but am always looking for more. So, please leave me a comment if you’ve got some that you’re willing to share.

I hate to admit it, but I guess I’m a bit skeptical about pursing follower count as a valid metric for discerning quality and relevancy.  I mean, how important is follower count, anyway?  What does it really mean?

Perhaps, this is more clear if you isolate this one data point. Let’s suppose follower count captures relevancy to some degree.  If you consider relevancy as a marker for good content, then it seems logical to think that the more followers one has, the higher the content is (in terms of relevancy for a particular audience).  So, if that’s true – follower count may not be a good measurement since it doesn’t really indicate how good your content is, especially since there are many different methods – outside of good tweets-  to get followers.

This reminds me a lot of basic search engine algorithms.  Think back to the days when keyword stuffing was all you really needed to gain good rankings. We all know that if search engines used this one metric for ranking today (instead of a combination of  page rank, inbound and outbound links, etc.) search result relevancy would be poor, at best.  In the same way search engines enhanced their algorithms, it seems like combining follower count with another metric would help improve discerning quality and relevancy. This could in turn, help Twitter users find high quality posts.

Tweet count is okay for measuring engagement, but it seems a bit one sided. Engagement as measured with a tool like Twitter Grader – doesn’t really satisfy how good  your tweets are to your community. It’s more about how many tweets you’re responsible for.  As for measuring “power” – that’s basically just follower count.

So, what about RTs? This seems like one such metric that could reveal a lot about tweet and profile quality. The retweet (RT), combined with follower count, could provide a better picture of who on Twitter is actually worth following. RTs allow you to see how many times someone shared your tweet. Therefore, the more RTs you have, it seems logical to think, the higher quality tweets you have, as well. This also seems to better quantify engagement, since users are sharing your content.

This is probably not a novel idea. However, it just seemed important enough for me to mention, since, after all, I’m getting tired of seeing all those DMs on improving follower count.

It’s too bad when those who hold the IP in high-tech organizations become unwilling to deliver high-value messaging through video.  We’ve all heard the statistics on how common the fear of presenting is. However, in this day and age, most everyone within the organization should have some experience presenting at some level and yes,  have even seen a vid or two on YouTube.

Unlike a live presentation, you’d think online videos would feel saver since they give presenters the opportunity to stop and repeat.Yet,  getting people to participate can be a huge time suck.

So, if you’re in a capacity to hire individuals who understand the in’s and outs of a specific technology (e.g. product marketers, engineers, etc.) I suggest you seriously consider adding a new bullet to the prerequisite for these job descriptions:  “Willingness to present  in online video presentations”.

However, a couple of days ago while sitting in the waiting room of my auto mechanic, I came across an article in New Hampshire Magazine on mountain climbing gear. The list looked pretty standard: product photo along with details and reviews. But, I noticed that each URL was masked with a Tinyurl for each product.  From the product photo alone, I couldn’t tell who the manufacture was. Since the URL was ‘tiny-arized’  I’d have to find some other way of remembering the URL in order to visit their Web site.

I can see some value of using URL shorteners in print since you can count click-through rates without having to create unique landing pages or vanity URLs.  However, at the time of this post, Tinyurl doesn’t offer any measurement data like Bit.ly does. In the case of an affliate link, it makes sense that posting the true URL would be a bad thing since you would give away the affliate’s link. However, in the case of print, it seems like NH mag would be better off knowing click-through data to understandard how popular a particular article was.

Don’t get me wrong. I think URL shorterners are useful; especially when you have a 140 character limit. But it makes me wonder what the fate of vanity URLs are as they become more advanced and widely used.  Shorterners like, Doiop and Metamark allow you customize your URL, giving users mini vanity URLs. This allows you to customize your URL for different audience types without having to create unique landing pages, for example.

If you don’t care about customizeing your short URL, make sure to pick one with measurement capabilities like Bit.ly or Su.pr and that use 301 redirects (most do) to pass pagerank.