Show me some id

Dynamically generated web pages will have a url containing a query string that might look something like this:

www.test.com/somedirectory/some.php?id=41&pageno=1

Taking the example shown above, the default set-up for the FlySoup tracking code will show some.php as the page visited in your stats report.

What most subscribers with dynamic/content managed sites will want to know is the specific id and page number in order that a more granular interpretation of the stats is possible.

location.search will do this for you.

To get the full query string make the following change in the tracking script:

look for and change wa_pageName=location.pathname; // you can customize the page name here

to read wa_pageName=location.pathname+location.search;

In an ideal world, your web designers would also use URL rewriting to provide a more intuitive URL so that as well as the script returning the full query string it does so in plain English rather than id=41&pageno=1.

How to avoid being a statistic

When was the last time you, or somebody from your company, visited your web site. It's quite possible that you represent one of the most frequent of returning visitors.

When analysing your traffic via FlySoup you probably don't want your own visits to muddy the figures. To avoid this you need to add your own I.P. address to an exclusion list. You do this by clicking on the '>Exclude IP Ranges From Tracking' link under the 'Account' '>Setup' menu.

Bear in mind if you are accessing your FlySoup stats from different locations - your desk bound office workstation and your laptop at home for example - then you will need to exclude both sets of I.P. addresses.

Your I.P. address is a a series of two and three digit numbers in four groups, separated by full stops. Like this, for example: 195.99.172.141 (an I.P. address that referenced The Equal Opportunities Commission mentioned in an earlier post).

How do you find your I.P. address?

FlySoup makes it easy to find and add the I.P. address of the machine you are currently using to access your stats. For a start it tells you what your I.P address is. So when you click the link to add a new range, simply put in the I.P. address it gives you as a starting address and for your finishing range address use the same number with the last digit increased by one. So if the last number was 141, make it 142.

This is all you need if you are the only one in the company accessing the site. If there are many people in the company who might reasonably be expected to be trawling the site on a regular basis then you will want to make the range wide enough to accommodate all the local I.P. address variants.

Any future traffic from I.P. addresses you have nominated in this way will be ignored and excluded from your stats.

You say potato...

... and I say... Maris Piper... spud... mash... yam. On the web, more than anywhere, it's a case of 'one man's meat is another man's offal'; or words to that effect.

Chances are that many of the words your prospects are using to find your product or service are not the same as the ones you use on your web site to describe your business. And if the search engines don't recognise your site for the phrase being searched, then you won't be returned in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Consequently a percentage of your potential traffic will pass you by.

You will of course get some traffic. Everyone does. But are the words and phrases you've chosen the one's that are going to deliver lots of relevant traffic. And if they are terms that people are searching on in abundance, are you going to be fighting your way to the top of the search engine listings in the face of an impossible number of competing sites.

In an ideal world you would want to focus your attention on just those phrases that are searched on in volume and yet provide little in the way of competition from other sites.

Finding the right words to express yourself.

Google Adwords Suggestion Tool is free and a useful starting point for finding alternatives to phrases that naturally spring to mind. And it will give you approximate averages for the previous month as well as longer-term average search volumes. It also gives an indication of 'adword' competition. But this doesn't really help that much in determining keyword targeting for the organic search listings.

For this you'd be better off using something like Wordtracker. It's one of the many tools we use in helping our clients arrive at a useful pool of phrases to build their content around.

The benefit of a service like Wordtracker is that it allows you to measure search volume and organic competition for phrases across a number of search engines so that you can end up with a cluster of phrases for which you will have a good chance of ranking well in the SERPS.

What you do with the words once you have them is another story.

By this time next year we'll all be millionaires.

That includes you, me and everyone else in the English speaking world.

Growing at a rate of one word every 98 minutes, experts have predicted that the English language will include a million words by the 29th April 2009. So that makes us all word rich but possibly lost for exactly the right word at the right time.

Just think of all the new words people will be using to search the internet. Will your web site be found for any of them?

We've been working with a number of clients to review the language they use on their web sites and more importantly the language their prospects are using when searching for their services. Most can confidently expect to be found for their company name or domain name but for many that's about as good as it gets. Which means, at best, they're preaching to the converted and only attracting those who are using the search engines as a navigational aid.

How do you rank highly without sacrificing the design of your site?

There is a widely held fear that in order to be visible to search engines you also have to be pretty unappealing to the average human visitor.

Content filled with keyword saturated copy and link text may leave you feeling that the site won't be worth the visit after a Search Engine Optimiser has had his way with it.

But, if you're not in the first three pages of results offered up by a search engine, you're not being seen by many visitors.

Assuming you want visitors to your site and you don't have money to promote your web site through mainstream advertising channels such as television, radio, press and poster campaigns - then Search Engine Optimisation is going to be an issue.

It's been said that a good web site needs to be visually arresting and capture the viewers imagination within 5 seconds or less. And for it to rank well in Search Engine Optimisation terms it has to have the level of content and supporting text of a fairly weighty brochure. Potentially uneasy bedfellows.

Compromise is inevitable but there are many things you can do to minimise any negative effects.

At one level, what it boils down to is less code and more content. Use CSS rather than tables and avoid the exclusively Flash-based homepage.

Missing Link

Much has been written about the lack of importance of reciprocal linking. It's widely put about that Google discounts reciprocal links in it's assessment of relevance. Effectively viewing reciprocal links as a method of implying popularity where none naturally exists.

Not an unreasonable assumption in most instances. Consequently many in-bound links have gone missing from web site's inventories.

That said, if there is real content attached to those reciprocal links then there is some evidence that Google recognises the fact - and rewards accordingly. And one-way inbound text links, using keywords and/or phrases with strong relevance to your core subject will definitely stand your site in good stead.

This has left many concentrating on building strong, one-way, inbound links and focusing on publicity, articles, directories, and other direct methods of building awareness.

However, building relationships (and reciprocal links) with associated but non-competing businesses is a solid route to increased, relevant traffic - and it has the benefit of being search engine independent.

No more worries about beating search engine 'checklists' - simply concentrate on providing good, relevant, content and a network to other good, relevant, content.

That way you're sure to climb to the top of the search engine rankings.

How can I resolve the IP address?

FlySoup is great at collecting data on web site traffic but it stops short of telling you exactly who has visited your site. However you can narrow it down to the domain level.

Often this is of marginal value since the IP address turns out to be a 'pool' address from AOL or BTinternet or some other large grouping.

Nevertheless, if the domain name is registered to a company or individual this will show up in the latest visitors report. Even then, this will often be expressed as a series of numbers separated by dots as in 195.99.172.141.

In this particular example the numbers resolve to The Equal Opportunities Commission. Check it for yourself with a piece of free trial software that converts IP numbers to their physical location at http://www.ip2location.com/free.asp

ip2location's primary use is for geo-location, allowing you to do things like: display pages in a native language or currency, filtering access from countries you don't or won't do business with and spam filtering by location.