Measuring Success

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been a part of my background since starting my career in the digital industry (since 1997). In fact it remains a major part of working with clients, though now social media is a bigger part of the mix. Hence I still speak at conferences such as SES London – as I did recently. http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/2010/02/12/interview-with-brian-clifton-author-of-advanced-web-metrics-with-google-analytics/ I was therefore honoured when Kelvin Newman  asked me to do a pre-show SES interview for his SiteVisibility blog. Below is reprint of the interview I did last month. I reproduce here to keep my thoughts in one place…

As you may have heard, bing.com is the new search engine from Microsoft. Although tracking bing.com visitors in Google Analytics will take place automatically, the caveat is, that at present it is reported as a standard referrer – as if a link from another website. That means it is not grouped with other search engines in your reports and no keyword information is available. This update allows you to track Bing.com as a search engine in Google Analytics with visitor keyword detail. Background Search still has a long way to go in helping people efficiently find information other than for product search, so reading the Bing press release certainly caught my attention. Also see my latest post tracking regional search engines. Although Google will no doubt apply a bing.com fix in the near future, the “Tracking regional search engines” hack is a script that allows you to define your own [...]

Many people use Google Analytics for Search Engine Optimisation. As you may know, I started my digital life way back(!) in 1997 in web development and SEO – odd as it seems now, at that time Alta Vista was the Google of its day and Google was still a university project at Standford called Backrub. Although I now focus more on the overall performance of websites for clients, I am still very active when it comes to search engine optimisation. I was therefore honoured when Dave Chaffey asked me to do an interview for his Marketing Insights blog. Below is reprint of the interview I did last month. I reporduce here to keep my thoughts in one place… BTW, I am a regular reader of Dave’s material – both at Marketing Insights and his work for eConsultancy . Both are great resources for the digital marketer – end of plug [...]

On Weds 30th May, I had the pleasure of attending SES Milan for the first time. I started my career with web development and SEO back in 1997(!), so over the years I have been to many of the SES events. Its great to observe that the search market has evolved since those “smoke-n-mirror days” as well as discover country/regional differences around the world. As a pan-EMEA manager I am ashamed to admit that my language abilities are poor – just English and a small amount of Russian (I am always amazed at how some people can simply switch between languages – both in thought and speech. Or do they always think in their native language I wonder?). Of course SES events are held in their local language and Milan was no exception. So many thanks to Sante Achille (SES moderator) who found the time to summarise the Measuring Search [...]