Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

So you’ve started a website and now have an abundance of traffic coming in. That’s great! But where are these people coming from? How are they finding your site? And most importantly, how are they behaving when they’re on your site? This is where the importance of web analytics comes into play.

Web analytics is the study of how your site’s visitors behave. This includes the tracking of important statistics such as unique vistis, pageviews, bounce rates and conversion rates. For many small sites, the last two statistics are not as important, but for large sites or online businesses, the last two play a key roll in optimizing your site’s performance.

There are two main web analytics technologies: server logfile analysis and page tagging.

Server logfile analysis involves the reading of log files on a server in order to collect analytics data. During the early days of the Internet, server logfile analysis only tracked the number of requests made by a visitor to the web server. This was commonly know as a “hit” and was logical since many sites only consisted of a single HTML file at the time. As more elements were added to web pages (images, multiple pages, etc.), server logfile analysis became impractical, as it would count every server request on one page as a “hit”.

These complications led to the creation of new web analytic metrics: pageviews and visits. A pageview was defined as a request to the web server for a single page while a visit was defined as a series of requests from a single person that ended after a certain time frame. Eventually, cookies were used to track unique user sessions due to the evolution of proxy and dynamic IP technologies, which made the old “visit” statistic fairly useless.

Some of the most popular software programs for tracking web analytics use the server logfile analysis method. These include Webalizer, Urchin, WebTrends and the open-source AWStats.

Page tagging involves the placement of code on a page in order to track analytics data. The earliest form of page tagging was the website counter. These visible, numeric counters eventually evolved into invisible snippets of JavaScript. The small JavaScript code would be placed on a page and send data back to an analytics program or company for analysis. Just like the server logfile analysis method, page tagging also involves assigning cookies to each user in order to determine unique visitors.

One of the most popular page tagging analytics programs is Google Analytics. The service is free to anyone with a Google account and is the standard in web analytics for any person or company on a tight budget.

So why should you worry about web analytics? So you can increase the performance of your website of course!

Why do people leave your site? A “bounce” is when a visitor leaves your website after only viewing one page. Many analytics programs have a statistic called bounce rate, which measures the percentage of people that commit a “bounce”. This metric allows you to see which pages on your site are performing poorly and then make improvements or adjustments to that page. This statistic is extremely important for e-commerce sites or sites that would like a visitor to commit a certain action.

How much time do people spend on your site? This is known as session duration and is important to know because it allows you to see what pages on your site have content that is compelling your visitors to stay. It will also let you know what pages need additional content added in order for visitors to stay on them longer.

One thing you may have noticed if you have started writing Javascript to use cookies is that there is no actual delete command that can be used to delete a cookie after you have created it. This doesn’t mean that you can’t delete cookies, it just means that you need to understand how cookies work in order to be able to control when the system will delete them for you.

When you create a session cookie it will continue to exist for as long as the browser remains open and will be deleted as soon as the browser is closed. This is because session cookies are actually retained in memory by the browser and are never actually stored anywhere. You do not specify an expiry date when creating a session cookie.

If you want a cookie to last for a longer (or shorter) time than you get wioth a session cookie you need to create a first party cookie instead. With a first party cookie the cookie is actually stored in a file on your visitor’s hard drive. You specify an expiry date/time when creating a first party cookie that defines how long the cookie is to be retained on the hard drive. The cookie isn’t necessarily deleted when that date/time is reached but cookies that have passed their expiry date/’time are ignored and so as far as the browser is concerned they don’t exist.

So how does this help us if we decide that we need to delete a cookie befre the date/time that it is set to expire? Well the solution is quite simple, we change the expiry date of the cookie so that it will be considered to have already expired. Rather than having to remember what to do each time, let’s just create a small function for deleting whichever cookie that we want.

function del_cookie(name) {
document.cookie = name +
‘=; expires=Thu, 01-Jan-70 00:00:01 GMT;’;
}

Now all we need to do is to call this del_cookie() function passing it the name of whatever cookie it is that we wish to delete. The function will update the expiry date on the cookie to one long in the past so that the cookie will be considered to be expired and will be ignored by the browser exactly the same as if it didn’t exist.

Why choose that particular date for setting the expiry date to delete the cookie? Well it just happens that all of the date processing within Javascript sees the 1st January 1970 as its starting date and actually records all date/times internally as the number of milliseconds from midnight on that day. Using that date therefore is effectively equivalent to setting the expiry to zero which means that the cookie will be deleted even if your visitor has the date on their computer set incorrectly. Were we to choose a more recent date it would be possible (although very unlikely) that one of our visitors might have their computer date set incorrectly to one earlier than the exipry that we chose and so our attempt to delete the cookie wouldn’t then work for them.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is defined as (in my own words):

“The process of finding out the best keywords for a web site and by the use of optimizing the web site along with other off-page work making that web site attain a higher position in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for those selected words.”

Although the exact calculations used by the search engines are kept secret, there is lot of knowledge and observations in this field from thousands of webmasters worldwide.

It could be said to be a branch of online marketing. In general terms you can say that it means to make a web site more visible and make it look important in the eyes of search engines.

Not being familiar with SEO and not applying it compared to actually doing the right things can make a huge difference in terms of visitors to your web site.

Here’s tutorial on how you can use frames on your website for search engine optimization benefits when you need to hide something from Search engines but you still want your visitors to see it.

Never thought that I could use frames on a webpage as an SEO tactic. I probably would have never even tried it but my recent project has shown me that it is not just possible but it is a good option in certain situations. I had one of those exceptional situations recently so I decided to share.

This the question of which the answers you might be searching for hours on the net and getting dissatisfied again and again.

As you might be knowing that of the total of the internet search, Google has a share of 50%, Yahoo of 30% and MSN of 20% leaving other search engines like Altavista, Yamour, etc.

So if you want to increase the popularity of your site, you must, at first, try to increase the Google Pagerank of your site which can be done only after you have got your site in Google’s Directory. And to do this you might fill the add url form provided by google. But don’t do that ‘cos it is not likely to help you!

To add your url you must get your link on other site which has got pagerank. Why, I’ll explain it now; Google searches or crawls to search the required result, it means for example the search word is “weight loss”, so Google would first search an site of that keyword from its directory then search links on that site on that keyword for further results. And you can get indexed in Google within 48hrs. If you ask a site with higher pagerank to put your link on his site for some amount of money.

That would probably an easy way to get your site indexed.

Then lets think of bringing traffic to your site. You can give your site to a PTC site which would give you visitors, but not true visitors. In the eyes of Google the less words your title has, the more weight you gain.

So to get a nice title for your site, I recommend you to download GoodKeywords from www.goodkeywords.com and do research on the main subject of your site. Then get a title with good popularity but less competitors.

Yahoo! Finance was the leader in the category during May with 18.5 million visitors, up 58 percent versus year ago, followed by AOL Money & Finance with 15.2 million visitors (up 48 percent) and MSN Money with 13.7 million visitors (up 13 percent).

Here are the top 10 Financial News and Research Sites:

Total Unique Visitors (millions) May 2008
1. Yahoo! Finance 18.5
2. AOL Money & Finance 15.2
3. MSN Money 13.7
4. Forbes Property 7.0
5. Dow Jones & Company 6.6
6. CNN Money 6.0
7. BNET 5.6
8. TheStreet.com Sites 5.3
9. Reuters Sites 4.8
10. Reed Business Information 3.8

The category displayed visitor growth across virtually all demographic segments. However, certain segments contributed more than others.

The number of visitors to the category age 50 and older grew 46 percent versus year ago, while visitors under 50 grew by 32 percent. Above average growth was also seen in the following segments: households earning at least $60,000 annually (40 percent), households with children (38 percent) and households with at least 5 people (57 percent).

In other words, the segments displaying the greatest growth are those more likely to have greater financial responsibilities or challenges, such as paying for their kids to go to college, or needing to figure out how best to handle rapidly escalating monthly payments on home mortgages. And don’t get me started on rising gas prices.

Why should search engine marketers pay attention to this trend? Check out your favorite financial news site, search for a couple of publicly traded companies, and see how many press releases you can find in the results. Most of them have been distributed by Business Wire, Marketwire, PrimeNewswire and PR Newswire.

If you would like an alert box to display when your page loads, place the following code within the HTML of your web page between your <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

<script language=”Javascript”>
<!–
alert (”Alert Message”)
//–>
</script>

Change the text indicated in red to the message you would like to display.

Although you can use the above HTML code to display an alert box when your web page loads, please use it cautiously, as you don’t want to irritate your visitors.

You can create a mouseover alert box within a web page that will load an alert box when your visitor moves their mouse over a specified link.

To view this example, place your mouse over the above link, but do not click on it.

If you would like an alert box to appear when your visitors place their mouse over a link, place the code below within your HTML where you would like the link to appear.
<a href=”" onMouseOver=”alert(’Your Message’);return true;”>Link text</a>

Change the text where indicated in red to whatever you’d like.

The “Your Message” text indicates the text that will be displayed in your alert box.

The “Link text” text indicates the text that will be displayed with your link.

Although you can use the above code to load a mouseover alert box, use it carefully, as you don’t want to irritate your visitors.

You can create glowing hyperlinks within your web page.

This special effect will make your links appear to be glowing. Place the following code within your HTML where you would like your link to appear.

Glowing Text Link Example

<SPAN STYLE=”position:relative; width:200; height:25; filter:glow(color=#3A9DFA,strength=2)”>
<A href=”http://www.domain.com”>Glowing Text Link Example</A></SPAN>

Change the text indicated in “red” for customization.

Creating glowing web page links within your sales web pages is a great way to draw attention to your links by highlighting them. However, use this HTML code carefully, as you don’t want to confuse your visitors.

It’s a proven fact that the use of popup windows is an effective marketing technique that produces great results. However, they can be very irritating to your visitors. How can you use this powerful marketing technique without offending your visitors? Compromise and use a popup window that only displays the first time your visitor enters your site.

Place the following code within the <BODY> of your web page.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!–
function GetCookie(name) {
var arg=name+”=”;
var alen=arg.length;
var clen=document.cookie.length;
var i=0;
while (i<clen) {
var j=i+alen;
if (document.cookie.substring(i,j)==arg)
return “here”;
i=document.cookie.indexOf(” “,i)+1;
if (i==0) break;
}
return null;
}
var visit=GetCookie(”COOKIE1″);
if (visit==null){
var expire=new Date();
window.name = “thiswin”;
newwin=open(”yourpage.htm”, “dispwin”,
“width=450,height=455,scrollbars=yes,
menubar=no”);
expire=new Date(expire.getTime()+7776000000);
document.cookie=”COOKIE1=here; expires=”+expire;
}
// –>
</SCRIPT>

Change the text where indicated in red.

The “yourpage.htm” text specifies the popup window url.

Change the height and width to your preferred window size.