SEO/SEM News

Quicksilver is a new personal desktop search tool cum user command interface for OS X.

You would ask, another personal desk search tool? Don’t we have enough? I will have to agree, we DO have way too many desktop search tools already. However, as cliched as it sounds, Quicksilver is not your run-of-the-mill search tool. It is a revolutionary method of rethinking the Mac OS interface. In fact, one blogger even went as far as saying that with Quicksilver you’re not just using OS X - you begin owning it!

What exactly is quicksilver anyway? How will it help me with my Mac? What is all the buzz about for this little software tool from Black Tree, Inc.?

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Upon Arrival in the Philippines

Ok, I was away for 2 weeks and went to the Philippines for SEO events, at the same time to see my family as well. In the Ituloy AngSulong SEO contest, I was in 2nd and 3rd overall by the end of January and all that changed when everyone started catching up in February and I was not working that much. I arrived in the Philippines on February 19, 2007 and had no Internet connection as the connection of SmartBro was erractic. And was not able to know what was happening in the SEO Philippines contest. And I knew I still needed to place my required links and edit my confirmation file. I had to rent at some Internet cafe just to fix it. And I didn’t even memorize my passwords and I needed to work everything around just to get into my accounts. (more…)

Web statistics, web analytics, whatever you call it, what ever you use, Webalizer, AWStats, Analog Stats, SiteMeter, Google Analytics, Webtrends, WebsiteStory, Enquisite, Omniture and all these other visitor tracking number software may sometimes present different results. Maybe with small differences, could be neglible, but sometimes these could give significant differences that are large enough to doubt the validity of these generated data.

A common difference among these softwares can be based on how they acquire data. These are usually done in two ways:

• Reading Raw Session Logs generated on the server
• Javascript tagging and use of cookies by adding a small peice of code on every page you wish to monitor.

These two methods could give you two different results.

• On IP Addresses: Unique visits using raw session logs read IP addresses, Javascript tagging with cookies read browser cookies.
  A corporate ISP account can have many hits from many people, but in session logs, only 1 unique hit is recorded since the corporate account could be all on one IP, while tagging and using cookies will treat each browser hit on a different computer as separate unique hit.
• On Cookies: People that do not accept cookies and/or clear cookies will treat two separate visits from the same person on the same computer as two unique hits. Although most Javascript tagging softwares, if cookies are cleared, will move back to IP addresses. In some cases, if cookies are cleared, referer logs may not be detected well and considered to be direct hits.
• Proxy Servers: ISPs with proxy servers will not fetch websites from the servers source. This a hit will no be counted on raw server logs. Although Javascript tags are in the website’s source code and will run everytime the page is loaded.
• Partial page loads: On an uncompelted page, raw server logs are already recorded, but not exactly true with Javascript tagging where most of the time it is recommeded that the Javascript tag should be placed just before the closing </body> tag. In that way, we are sure that the visit to the page loaded a complete page before it is recorded as a valid hit.

So when looking at the numbers, note that there may be even more issues for differences in results and no single web analytics software will get it 100% correct.