Web Deployment: Web.Config Transformation

We have earlier discussed about Web Deployment and Web Packaging quite a bit, today I wanted to dive into web.config transformation. If you would like to check out the other topics please read through the earlier blog posts below:

• Web Deployment with VS 2010 and IIS
• Web Packaging: Creating a Web Package using VS 2010

• Web Packaging: Creating web packages using MSBuild

• How does Web Deployment with VS 10 & MSDeploy Work?

• Installing Web Packages using Command Line

Usually web applications go through a chain of server deployments before being finally being deployed to production environment. Some of these environments can be Developer box (Debug), QA Server, Staging/Pre-Production, Production (Release). While transitioning between these environments various settings of the web application residing in web.config file change, some of these settings can be items like application settings, connection strings, debug flags, web services end points etc.

VS10’s new web.config transformation model allows you to modify your web.config file in an automated fashion during deployment of your applications to various server environments. To help command line based deployments, Web.Config transformation is implemented as an MSBuild task behind the scene hence you can simply call it even outside of deployment realm.

I will try to go through below steps to explain web.config transformation in detail

1. Creating a “Staging” Configuration on your developer box

2. Adding a “Staging” Web.Config Transform file to your project

3. Writing simple transforms to change developer box connection string settings into “Staging” environment settings

4. Generating a new transformed web.config file for “Staging” environment from command line

5. Generating a new transformed web.config file for “Staging” environment from VS UI

6. Understanding various available web.config Transforms and Locators

7. Using Web.config transformation toolset for config files in sub-folders within the project

Step 1: Creating a “Staging” Configuration on your developer box

Debug and Release build configurations are available by default within Visual Studio but if you would like to add more build configurations (for various server environments like “Dev”, “QA”, “Staging”, “Production” etc then you can do so by going to the Project menu Build --> Configuration Manager… Learn more about creating build configurations.

Step 2: Adding a “Staging” Web.Config Transform file to your project

One of the goals while designing web.config transformation was to make sure that the original runtime web.config file does not need to be modified to ensure that there would be no performance impacts and also to make sure that the design time syntax is not mixed with runtime syntax. To support this goal the concept of Configuration specific web.config files was introduced.

These web.config files follow a naming convention of web.configuration.config. For example the web.config files for various Visual Studio + Custom configurations will look as below:

Any new Web Application Project (WAP) created in VS10 will by default have Web.Debug.config and Web.Release.config files added to the project. If you add new configurations (e.g. “Staging”) or if you upgrade pre-VS10 projects to VS10 then you will have to issue a command to VS to generate the Configuration specific Transform files as needed.

To add configuration specific transform file (e.g. Web.Staging.Config) you can right click the original web.config file and click the context menu command “Add Config Transforms” as shown below:

On clicking the “Add Config Transform” command VS10 will detect the configurations that do not have a transform associated with them and will automatically create the missing transform files. It will not overwrite an existing transform file. If you do not want a particular configuration transform file then you can feel free to delete it off.

Note: In case of VB Web Application Projects the web.configuration.config transform files will not be visible till you enable the hidden file views as shown below:

The transform files are design time files only and will not be deployed or packaged by VS10. If you are going to xCopy deploy your web application it is advised that you should explicitly leave out these files from deployment just like you do with project (.csproj/.vbproj) or user (.user) files…

Note: These transform files should not be harmful even if deployed as runtime does not use them in any fashion and additionally ASP.NET makes sure that .config files are not browsable in any way.

Step 3: Writing simple transforms to change developer box connection string settings into “Staging” environment settings

Web.Config Transformation Engine is a simple XML Transformation Engine which takes a source file (your project’s original web.config file) and a transform file (e.g. web.staging.config) and produces an output file (web.config ready for staging environment).

The Transform file (e.g. web.staging.config ) needs to have XML Document Transform namespace registered at the root node as shown below:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">
</configuration>

Note: The transform web.config file needs to be a well formed XML.

Inside the XML-Document-Transform namespace two new attributes are defined. These attributes are important to understand as they drive the XML Transformation Engine.

Transform – This attribute inside the Web.Staging.config informs the Transformation engine the way to modify web.config file for specific configuration (i.e. staging). Some examples of what Transforms can do are:

• Replacing a node

• Inserting a node

• Delete a node

• Removing Attributes

• Setting Attributes

Locator – This attribute inside the web.staging.config helps the Transformation engine to exactly pin-point the web.config node that the transform from web.staging.config should be applied to. Some examples of what Locators can do are:

• Match on value of a node’s attribute

• Exact XPath of where to find a node

• A condition match to find a node

Based on the above basic understanding let us try to transform connection string from original web.config file to match Staging environment’s connection string

Let us examine the original web.config file and identify the items to replace... Let’s assume that the original Web Config file’s connection string section looks as below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="personalDB"
     connectionString="Server=DevBox; Database=personal; User Id=admin; password=P@ssw0rd" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
    <add name="professionalDB"
     connectionString="Server=DevBox; Database=professional; User Id=admin; password=P@ssw0rd" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
</connectionStrings>
....
....
</configuration>

NOTE: It is not advisable to keep connection string unencrypted in the web.config file, my example is just for demonstration purposes.

Let us assume that we would like to make following changes to web.config file when moving to staging environment

• For “personalDB” we would like to change the connectionString to reflect Server=StagingBox, UserId=admin, passoword=StagingPersonalPassword”

• For “professionalDB” we would like to change the connectionString to reflect Server=StagingBox, UserId=professional, passoword=StagingProfessionalPassword”

To make the above change happen we will have to open web.Staging.Config file and write the below piece of code

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">
     <connectionStrings>
        <add name="personalDB"
          connectionString="Server=StagingBox; Database=personal; User Id=admin; password=StagingPersonalPassword"
          providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" xdt:Transform="Replace" xdt:Locator="Match(name)" />
        <add name="professionalDB"
         connectionString="Server=StagingBox; Database=professional; User Id=professional; password=StagingProfessionalPassword"
         providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" xdt:Transform="Replace" xdt:Locator="Match(name)"/>
       </connectionStrings>
</configuration>

The above syntax in web.staging.config has Transform and Locator attributes from the xdt namespace. If we analyze the connection string node syntax we can notice that the Transform used here is “Replace” which is instructing the Transformation Engine to Replace the entire node

Further if we notice the Locator used here is “Match” which is informing Transformation engine that among all the “configuration/connectionStrings/add” nodes that are found, pick up the node whose name attribute matches with the name attribute of <add> node in web.Staging.config.

Also if you notice web.Staging.config does not contain anything else but the connectionStrings section (i.e. it does not have <system.web> and various other sections that web.config file usually has, this is because of the fact that the Transformation Engine does not require a complete web.config file in web.staging.config. It does the merging for you thus saving you duplication of all the rest of the sections in web.config file.

Simplest Approach: If you do not mind replicating the entire web.config file in web.staging.config then you can certainly do so by copying the entire web.config content into web.staging.config and change the relevant nodes inside web.staging.config. In such a situation you will just have to put xdt:Transform="Replace" attribute on the topmost node (i.e. configuration) of web.staging.config. You will not need xdt:Locator attribute at all as you are replacing your entire web.config file with web.staging.config without Matching anything.

So far we have seen one Transform (i.e. Replace) and one Locator (i.e. Match), we will see various other Transforms and Locators further in the post but first let us understand how we can produce the Transformed web.config file for the Staging environment after using original web.config and web.staging.config.

Step 4: Generating a new transformed web.config file for “Staging” environment from command line

Open Visual Studio Command prompt by going to Start --> Program Files –> Visual Studio v10.0 –> Visual Studio tools –> Visual Studio 10.0 Command Prompt

Type “MSBuild “Path to Application project file (.csproj/.vbproj) ” /t:TransformWebConfig /p:Configuration=Staging" and hit enter as shown below:

Once the transformation is successful the web.config for the “Staging” configuration will be stored under obj -->Staging folder under your project root (In solution explorer you can access this folder by first un-hiding the hidden files) :

• In the solution explorer click the button to show hidden files
• Open the Obj folder

• Navigate to your Active configuration (in our current case it is “Staging”)

• You can find the transformed web.config there

You can now verify that the new staging web.config file generated has the changed connection string section.

Step 5: Generating a new transformed web.config file for “Staging” environment from VS UI

Right Click on your project and click Package –> Create Package

The Create Package step already does web.config transformation as one of its intermediate steps before creating a package and hence you should be able to find the transformed web.config file in the same place as described in Step 4

Step 6: Understanding various available web.config Transforms and Locators

xdt:Locators

The inbuilt xdt:Locators are discussed below.

• Match - In the provided syntax sample below the Replace transform will occur only when the name Northwind matches in the list of connection strings in the source web.config.Do note that Match Locator can take multiple attributeNames as parameters e.g. Match(name, providerName) ]

<connectionStrings>
     <add name="Northwind" connectionString="connectionString goes    here" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" xdt:Transform="Replace" xdt:Locator="Match(name)" />
</connectionStrings>

·         Condition - Condition Locator will create an XPath predicate which will be appended to current element’s XPath. The resultant XPath generated in the below example is “/configuration/connectionStrings/add[@name='Northwind or @providerName=’ System.Data.SqlClient’ ]”

This XPath is then used to search for the correct node in the source web.config file

<connectionStrings>
      <add name="Northwind" connectionString="connectionString goes here" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" xdt:Transform="Replace" xdt:Locator="Condition(@name=’Northwind or @providerName=’System.Data.SqlClient’)" />
</connectionStrings>

·         XPath- This Locator will support complicated XPath expressions to identify the source web.config nodes. In the syntax example we can see that the XPath provided will allow user to replace system.web section no matter where it is located inside the web.config (i.e. all the system.web sections under any location tag will be removed.)

<location path="c:\MySite\Admin" >
    <system.web xdt:Transform="RemoveAll" xdt:Locator="XPath(//system.web)">
    ...
    </system.web>
</location>

xdt:Transform

• Replace - Completely replaces the first matching element along with all of its children from the destination web.config (e.g. staging environment’s web.config file). Do note that transforms do not modify your source web.config file.
  <assemblies xdt:Transform="Replace">
      <add assembly="System.Core, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089" />
  </assemblies>

·         Remove - Removes the first matching element along with all of its children
<assemblies xdt:Transform="Remove"></assemblies>

·         RemoveAll - Removes all the matching elements from the destination’s web.config (e.g. staging environment’s web.config file).

<connectionStrings>
    <add xdt:Transform="RemoveAll"/>
</connectionStrings>

·         Insert - Inserts the element defined in web.staging.config at the bottom of the list of all the siblings in the destination web.config (e.g. staging environment’s web.config file).

<authorization>
     <deny users="*" xdt:Transform="Insert"/>
</authorization>

·         SetAttributes - Takes the value of the specified attributes from the web.staging.config and sets the attributes of the matching element in the destination web.config. This Transform takes a comma separated list of attributes which need to be set. If no attributes are given to SetAttributes transform then it assumes that you would like to Set all the attributes present on the corresponding node in web.staging.config
<compilation batch="false"xdt:Transform="SetAttributes(batch)">

   …

   </compilation>

·         RemoveAttributes - Removes the specified attributes from the destination web.config (i.e. staging environment’s web.config file). The syntax example shows how multiple attributes can be removed.

<compilation xdt:Transform="RemoveAttributes(debug,batch)">
</compilation>

• InsertAfter (XPath) - Inserts the element defined in the web.staging.config exactly after the element defined by the specified XPath passed to “InsertAfter()” transform. In the syntax example the element <deny users="Vishal" />will be exactly inserted after the element <allow roles="Admins" /> in the destinationXML.

<authorization>
     <deny users="Vishal" xdt:Transform="InsertAfter(/configuration/system.web/authorization/allow[@roles='Admins'])” />

</authorization>

• InsertBefore (XPath) - Inserts the element defined in the web.staging.config exactly before the element defined by the specified XPath passed to “InsertBefore()” transform. In the syntax example the element <allow roles="Admins" />will be exactly inserted before the element <deny users="*" />in the destinationXML.

<authorization>
      <allow roles=" Admins" xdt:Transform="InsertBefore(/configuration/system.web/authorization/ deny[@users='*'])" />
</authorization>

Some advanced points to note:

• If the Transformation Engine does not find a xdt:Transform attribute specified on a node in web.staging.config file then that node is ignored for Transformation and the Tranformation engine moves ahead traversing the rest of the web.staging.config.

• A xdt:Transform attribute on a parent can very easily impact child elements even if there is no Transform specified for child e.g. If xdt:Transform=”Replace” is put on <system.web> then everything underneath <system.web> node will be replaced with the content from web.staging.config

• It is completely valid to place xdt:Locators attributes on arbitrary nodes inside web.staging.config just for filtering purposes. xdt:Locator does not need to be accompanied with xdt:Transform attribute. (great example here is <location> tag which might just be used for filtering… The example code here would be:

<location path="c:\MySite\Admin" xdt:Locator="Match(path)">>
        <system.web>
          ... Bunch of transforms written under here will
          .... only apply if location path = C:\MySite\Admin
        </system.web>
</location>

Step 7: Using Web.config transformation toolset for config files in sub-folders within the project

All of the above discussion directly applies to any web.config file present in sub folders of your project (e.g. if you have a separate web.config file for say “Admin” folder then VS 10 will support transforms for them too). You can add transform files within sub-folders and use the same packaging functionality mentioned in all of the above steps to create transformed web.config files for web.config files specific to the sub folders within your project.

I think this has become a rather long post; but I hope it helps!!

Vishal R. Joshi | Program Manager | Visual Studio Web Developer

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Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.

A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to ?store? the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called ?data center?. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

What are the different types of web hosting? There are different kinds of web hosting companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:

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SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the important considerations that any Internet web-site needs to design with in mind.  A non-trivial percentage of Internet traffic to sites is driven by search engines, and good SEO techniques can help increase site traffic even further.

Likewise, small mistakes can significantly impact the search relevance of your site?s content and cause you to miss out on the traffic that you should be receiving.  Some of these mistakes include: multiple URLs on a site leading to the same content, broken links from a page, poorly chosen titles, descriptions, and keywords, large amounts of viewstate, invalid markup, etc.  These mistakes are often easy to fix - the challenge is how to discover and pinpoint them within a site.

Introducing the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

Today we are shipping the first beta of a new free tool - the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit - that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it.

You can install the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer I blogged about earlier this week.  You can install it through WebPI using the ?install now? link on the IIS SEO Toolkit home. 

Once installed, you?ll find a new ?Search Engine Optimization? section within the IIS 7 admin tool, and several SEO tools available within it:

The Robots and SiteMap tools enable you to easily create and manage robots.txt and sitemap.xml files for your site that help guide search engines on what URLs they should and shouldn?t crawl and follow.

The Site Analysis tool enables you to crawl a site like a search engine would, and then analyze the content using a variety of rules that help identify SEO, Accessibility, and Performance problems within it.

Using the IIS SEO Toolkit?s Site Analysis Tool

Let?s take a look at how we can use the Site Analysis tool to quickly review SEO issues with a site.  To avoid embarrassing anyone else by turning the tool loose on their site, I?ve decided to instead use the analysis tool on one of my own sites: www.scottgu.com.  This is a site I wrote many years ago (last update in 2005 I think).  If you install the IIS SEO Toolkit you can point it at my site and duplicate the steps below to drill into the SEO analysis of it.

Open the Site Analysis Tool

We?ll begin by launching the IIS Admin Tool (inetmgr) and clicking on the root node in the left-pane tree-view of the IIS7 admin tool (the machine name ? in this case ?Scottgu-PC?).  We?ll then select the ?Site Analysis? icon within the Search Engine Optimization section on the right.  Opening the Site Analysis tool at the machine level like this will allow us to run the analysis tool against any remote server (if we had instead opened it with a site selected then we would only be able to run analysis against local sites on the box). 

Opening the Site Analysis tool causes the below screen to display ? it lists any previously saved site analysis reports that we have created in the past.  Since this is the first time we?ve opened the tool, it is an empty list.  We?ll click the ?New Analysis?? action link on the right-hand side of the admin tool to create a new analysis report:

Clicking the ?New Analysis?? link brings up a dialog like below, which allows us to name the report as well as configure what site we want to crawl and how deep we want to examine it. 

We?ll name our new report ?scottgu.com? and configure it to start with the http://www.scottgu.com URL and then crawl up to 10,000 pages within the site (note: if you don?t see a ?Start URL? textbox in the dialog it is because you didn?t select the root machine node in the left-hand pane of the admin tool and instead opened it at the site level ? cancel out, select the root machine node, and then click the Site Analysis link).

When we click the ?Ok? button in the dialog above the Site Analysis tool will request the http://www.scottgu.com URL, examine the returned HTML content, and then crawl the site just like a search engine would.  My site has 407 different URLs on it, and it only took 13 seconds for the IIS SEO Toolkit to crawl all of them and perform analysis on the content that was downloaded. 

Once it is done it will open a report summary view detailing what it found.  Below you can see that it found 721 violations of various kinds within my site (ouch):

We can click on any of the items within the violations summary view to drill into details about them.  We?ll look into a few of them below.

Looking at the ?description is missing? violations

You?ll notice above that I have 137 ?The description is missing? violations.  Let?s double click on the rule to learn more about it and see details about the individual violations.  Double clicking the description rule above will open up a new query tab that automatically provides a filtered view of just the description violations (note: you can customize the query if you want ? and optionally export it into Excel if you want to do even richer data analysis):

Double clicking any of the violations in the list above will open up details about it.  Each violation has details about what exactly the problem is, and recommended action on how to fix it:

Notice above that I forgot to add a <meta> description element to my photos page (along with all the other pages too).  Because my photos page just displays images right now, a search engine has no way of knowing what content is on it.  A 25 to 150 character long description would be able to explain that this URL is my photo album of pictures and provide much more context. 

The ?Word Analysis? tab is often useful when coming up with description text.  This tab shows details about the page (its title, keywords, etc) and displays a list of all words used in the HTML within it ? as well as how many times they are duplicated.  It also allows you to see all two-word and three-word phrases that are repeated on the page.  It also lists the <a> text used on other page to link to this page ? all of which is useful to come up with a description:

Looking at the URL is linked using different casing violations

Let's now at the ?URL is linked using different casing? violations.  We can do this by going back to our summary report page and by then clicking on this specific rule violation:

Search engines count the number of pages on the Internet that link to a URL, and use that number as part of the weighting algorithm they use to determine the relevancy of the content the URL exposes.  What this means is that if 1000 pages link to a URL that talks about a topic, search engines will assume the content on that URL has much higher relevance than a URL with the same topic content that only has 10 people linking to it.

A lot of people don?t realize that search engines are case sensitive, though, and treat differently cased URLs as different actual URLs.  That means that a link to /Photos.aspx and /photos.aspx will often be treated not as one URL by a search engine ? but instead as two different URLs.  That means that if half of the incoming links go to /Photos.aspx and the other half go to /photos.aspx, then search engines will not credit the photos page as being as relevant as it actually is (instead it will be half as relevant ? since its links are split up amongst the two).  Finding and fixing any place where we use differently cased URLs within our site is therefore really important.

If we click on the ?URL is linked using different casing? violation above we?ll get a listing of all 104 URLs that are being used on the site with multiple capitalization casings:

Clicking on any of the URLs will pull up details about that specific violation and the multiple ways it is being cased on the site.  Notice below how it details both of the URLs it found on the site that differ simply by capitalization casing. In this case I am linking to this URL using a querystring parameter named "AlbumId".  Elsewhere on the site I am also linking to the URL using a querystring parameter named "albumid" (lower-case ?a? and ?i?).  Search engines will as a result treat these URLs as different, and so I won?t maximize the page ranking for the content:

Knowing there is a problem like this in a site is the first step. The second step is typically harder: trying to figure out all the different paths that have to be taken in order for this URL to be used like this.  Often you'll make a fix and assume that fixes everything - only to discover there was another path through the site that you weren't aware of that also causes the casing problem. To help with scenarios like this, you can click the "Actions" dropdown in the top-right of the violations dialog and select the "View Routes to this Page" link within it.

This will pull up a dialog that displays all of the steps the crawler took that led to the particular URL in question being executed. Below it is showing that it found two ways to reach this particular URL:

Being able to get details about the exact casing problems, as well as analyze the exact steps followed to reach a particular URL casing, makes it dramatically easier to fix these types of issues.

Looking at the page contains multiple canonical format violations

Fixing the casing issues like we did above is a good first step to improving page counts.  We also want to fix scenarios where the same content can be retrieved using URLs that differ by more than casing.  To do this we?ll return to our summary page and pull up the ?page contains multiple canonical format violations? report:

Drilling into this report lists all of the URLs on our site that can be accessed in multiple ?canonical? ways:

Clicking on any of them will pull up details about the issue. Notice below how the analysis tool has detected that sometimes we refer to the home page of the site as "/" and sometimes as "/Default.aspx". While our web-server will interpret both as executing the same page, search engines will treat them as two separate URLs - which means the search relevancy is not as high as it should be (since the weighting gets split up across two URLs instead of being combined as one).

We can see all of the cases where the /Default.aspx URL is being used by clicking on the ?Links? tab above.  This shows all of the pages that link to the /Default.aspx URL, as well as all URLs that it in turn links to:

We can switch to see details about where and how the related ?/? URL is being used by clicking the ?Related URLs? drop-down above ? this will show all other URLs that resolve to the same content, and allow us to quickly pull their details up as well:

Like we did with the casing violations, we can use the ?View Routes to this Page? option to figure out of all the paths within the site that lead to these different URLs and use this to help us hunt down and change them so that we always use a common consistent URL to link to these pages. 

Note: Fixing the casing and canonicalization issues for all internal links within our site is a good first step.  External sites might also be linking to our URLs, though, and those will be harder to all get updated.  One way to fix our search ranking without requiring the externals to update their links is to download and install the IIS URL Rewrite module on our web server (it is available as a free download using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer).  We can then configure a URL Rewrite rule that automatically does a permanent redirect to the correct canonical URL ? which will cause search engines to treat them as the same (read Carlos? IIS7 and URL Rewrite: Make your Site SEO blog post to learn how to do this). 

Looking up redirect violations

As a last step let?s look at some redirect violations on the site:

Drilling into this rule category reminded me of something I did a few years ago (when i transferred my blog to a different site) - that I just discovered was apparently pretty dumb. 

When I first setup the site I had originally had a simple blog page at: www.scottgu.com/blog.aspx  After a few weeks, I decided to move my blog to weblogs.asp.net/scottgu.  Rather than go through all my pages and change the link to the new address, I thought I?d be clever and just update the blog.aspx page to do a server-side redirect to the new weblogs.asp.net/scottgu URL. 

This works from an end-user perspective, but what I didn?t realize until I ran the analysis tool today was that search engines are not able to follow the link.  The reason is because my blog.aspx page is doing a server-side redirect to the weblogs.asp.net/scottgu URL.  But for SEO reasons of its own, the blog software (Community Server) on weblogs.asp.net is in turn doing a second redirect to fix the incoming weblogs.asp.net/scottgu URL to instead be http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/ (note the trailing slash is being added).

According to the rule violation in the Site Analysis tool, search engines will give up when you perform two server redirects in a row. It detected that my blog.aspx redirect links to an external link that in turn does another redirect - at which point the search engine crawlers give up:

I was able to confirm this was the problem without having to open up the server code of the blog.aspx page. All I needed to-do was click the "Headers" tab within the violation dialog and see the redirect HTTP response that the blog.aspx page sent back. Notice it doesn't have a trailing slash (and so causes Community Server to do another redirect when it receives it):

Fixing this issue is easy. I never would have realized I actually had an issue, though, without the Site Analysis tool pointing me to it.

Future Automatic Correction Support

There are a bunch of additional violations and content issues that the Site Analysis tool identified when doing its crawl of my web-site.  Identifying and fixing them is straight-forward and very similar to the above steps.  Each issue I fix makes my site cleaner, easier to crawl, and helps it have even higher search relevancy.  This in turn will generate an increase of traffic coming to my site from search engines ? which is a very cost effective return on investment.  Once a report is generated and saved, it will show up in the list of previous reports within the IIS admin tool.  You can at any point right-click it and tell the IIS SEO Toolkit to re-run it ? allowing you to periodically validate that no regressions have been introduced.

The preview build of the Site Analysis tool today verifies about 50 rules when it crawls a site.  Over time we?ll add more rules that check for additional issues and scenarios.  In future preview releases you?ll also start to see even more intelligence built-into the SEO Analysis tool that will allow it to also verify on the server-side that you have the URL Rewrite module installed with a good set of SEO-friendly rules configured.  The Site Analysis tool will also allow you to fix certain violations automatically by suggesting rewrite rules that you can add to your site from directly within the site analysis report tool (for example: to fix issues like the ?/? and ?/Default.aspx? canonicalization issue we looked at before).  This will make it even easier to help enforce good SEO on the site.  Until then, I?d recommend reading these links to learn more about manually configuring URL Rewrite for SEO:

• IIS7 and URL Rewrite: Make your Site SEO
• 10 URL Rewriting Tips and Tricks
• URL Rewrite Module
• URL Rewrite Walkthrough

Summary

The IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit makes it easy to analyze and assess how search engine friendly your web-site is.  It pinpoints SEO violations, and provides instructions on how to fix them.  You can learn more about the toolkit and how to best take advantage of it from these links:

• IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Home (including download link)
• Walkthrough: Using Site Analysis to Crawl a Website
• Walkthrough: Using Site Analysis Reports
• Carlos Aguilar Mares? IIS Search Engine Optimization Blog Post (he is the guy who built it!)

The IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is free, takes less than a minute to install, and can be run against any existing web-server or web-site.  There is no need to install anything on a remote server to use it ? just type in the URL of the site and you?ll get a report back a site analysis report with actionable items that that you can use immediately to improve it.

Today?s release is a beta release, so please use the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Forum to let us know if you run into any issues or have feature suggestions.

Hope this helps,

Scott 

 

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Affordable Seo Services India, Outsource Seo Services India, Cheap Seo Services India, Mumbai
Affordable SEO which works for Small Busines. Try our Affordable Seo Services, Cheap Seo Services, Discounted Seo for Mumbai, Outsource Seo Services to India, Low cost Seo for Mumbai.
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8/7/2008 Dynamic SEO's Launched Expert Seo Services | The Seo Traffic || Many Seo experts joined their hands along with The SEO Traffic to help those people who are fighting for the search engine positioning. They are welcoming their clients with a free competitor / market analysis, which every wise businessman is more than aware of. Out of the present expensive market, Theseotraffic.com made the seo affordable for every small business marketers too... online press release distributed by http://www.epicpr.com.
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NEW YORK-(Business Wire)-April 7, 2009 - PhotoShelter, the leader in portfolio websites, photo sales and archiving tools for photographers, today released the first comprehensive, free guide to getting photography websites listed on search engines and achieving top results with search engine...
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Web Packaging: Installing Web Packages using Command Line

Today I want to advance our discussions around Web Deployment in Visual Studio 10…  To catch up on the previous discussions in this series check out:

Web Deployment with VS 2010 and IIS

Web Packaging: Creating a Web Package using VS 2010

Web Packaging: Creating web packages using MSBuild

How does Web Deployment with VS 10 & MSDeploy Work? 

In this post I will focus on installing the MSDeploy based Web Packages to IIS.  You can actually install/deploy web packages using multiple different avenues listed below:

1. Using IIS Manager UI
2. Using command file created by Visual Studio 10
3. Using command line using MSDeploy.exe
4. Using Power Shell support provided by MS Deploy
5. Using managed APIs provided by MS Deploy

VS 10 will create Web Packages for you based on your settings in the “Publish” tab of the Web Application Projects (WAPs) property pages.  In the Publish tab you also specify the location where you want the package to be created.  In the same “Publish” tab, you also get an option to specify your destination information (i.e. IIS Application Name, Physical Location on the server)…

Check out the section of “Publish” tab below which will give you an idea of the same:

 

After setting all the above information when you right click on your project and click Package –> Create Package then the web package is created at the location specified in “Package Location” setting. To know more read Web Package Creation post.

When you create a package VS creates three files of interest in folder specified by “Package Location” in “Publish” tab; those three files are:

Web Package : The package  itself is produced, which can be either a ZIP file or a folder called “Achieve”.  The choice between .zip vs folder is determined based on your settings in “Publish” tab

Destination Manifest:  This is the file which will allow you to change the destination information at the time of install eg. connection string, IIS Application name etc

Deploy Command File:  VS creates a .cmd file encapsulating MSDeploy command for you so that you don’t even have to type the MSDeploy command while installing the package..

So on your dev box below is what happens:

Now when you want to install the package created all you have to do is to take these three files to the destination server and run the command file.  Typically you can hand out these three files to your server administrator and he/she can run the command on the server (as developers will typically not have access to the servers directly).

In the earlier post we talked about how to create a web package for BlogEngine.Web solution in staging configuration, let us look at how the solution explorer looks like after the package is created:

Notice the package file, destination manifest and the command file in the above image.

If you remember our Package settings while creating the web package; in “Publish” tab we provided Destination IIS Application Name as  “Default Web Site/VS10-Blog”  and Destination IIS Physical Path as “C:\TR8\VS10-Blog”.  If we install the package that is where we would expect the install to go (unless I overwrite it using destination manifest and the deploy command file)

I am now going to emulate a Server Admin and try to install the web package which was handed to me by the developer by going to Start—>All Programs –> IIS  7.0 Extensions –> MSDeploy Command Console (as Admin)

Note: In IIS 5.1 or IIS 6 you can just start regular command prompt and navigate to MSDeploy install location which is typically %Program Files%\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy

Also note that server admins can very easily automate these process by writing simple batch files.

In MSdeploy command console I will now try to call “BlogEngine.Web.Deploy.cmd”.  I have ensured that the destination manifest, command file and the package are all in the same folder; see the image below:

In MSDeploy Command prompt I can run the VS 10 generated .cmd files in two different modes:

1. /T – This is the Trial run switch.  It will allow your server admin to verify whether your package is not going to do something really bad :-)… But in essence this mode invokes msdeploy in –what if mode which allows you to see what all package will do on the server.
2. /Y – This switch will actually install the package and get it set up on the server.

Below is how my command propmpt looks after running the BlogEngine.Web.Deploy.cmd file with /T switch

Notice the /T switch on the cmd file which in result calls msdeploy in –what if mode…  I truncated the overall out put to show you the final set of information which is “Change Count”…

Now when you run the command file with /Y switch the installation will succeed with the above change count… Now, let us go and inspect IIS Manager to make sure VS-10 blog application is correctly created with below traits:

• Application name is VS10-Blog
• Physical directory for the application is “C:\TR8\VS10-Blog
• Classic .NET App Pool setting that we configured in Step 2: Configure IIS Settings in IIS Manager in the previous blog post is also correctly configured.

If you run this application now, it should be fully functional as well…

If you are trying to automate your deployment process then I recommend using the instructions in MSBuild based package creation post to create your web packages in an automated fashion and eventually use the instructions in this post to go ahead and deploy the web package.

I hope that the above few posts will help you get your web apps up and running with using the VS 10 Web Packaging support….

Vishal R. Joshi | Program Manager | Visual Studio Web Developer

Technorati Tags: Web Deployment,Web Packaging,MSDeploy,MSBuild,VS10,Visual Studio,Vishal R. Joshi,Visual Studio 2010

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Web Hosting Leader Go Daddy Wins “Best of the Best” Award (TopHosts.com)
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Design Your Website For Traffic

Design your site for traffic :

What better way to start the new year than with more traffic to your web site. Web traffic is a critical part of your internet business and it is imperative that you design it to bring you the most amount of traffic possible.

 

 

Designing your site for traffic includes offering good content, easy navigation and a logical flow. Additionally you must also build your site to draw traffic from the search engines because if you can obtain high search engine ranking, you can enjoy free traffic.

It's important to note, however that good ranking won't do you much good without a well designed site and a well designed site can't bring you visitors if no one knows it's there. Both high ranking and good design need to work together.

How do we pull all this together? Let's take a look.

Design your site for traffic : A word about Design

A huge mistake I see many website owners make is that they get caught up in making their site cute. They love the little animations, buttons and dramatic backgrounds. What they fail to consider is that these things are worthless if you
don't offer good content, easy navigation and a logical flow.

First of all don't try to be everything to everyone. Design your site around a theme, preferably a niche theme. Don't confuse your readers with links all over the page. Design a logical flow.
Lead your viewers to where you would like them to go. Leave plenty of white space and keep your pages organized. Clearly state at the top of your pages what you are about and what you would like your viewers to do.

Secondly, I don't recommend pop-ups. I find that the majority of internet users find them annoying. The demand for pop-up blockers is a good indication that viewers don't want to see them.

Thirdly, offer good content. Provide information on your site that will help viewers solve a problem. Offer information that they might not get elsewhere. Write reviews regarding your products. Write newsletters and articles and most importantly offer something of value for free. Give your viewers a reason to come back. It will also build trust in you.

Design your site for traffic : Traffic builders

Good search engine ranking can bring lots of visitors to your site. It often takes a few months to rank well but the payoff is lots of qualified traffic. While it's not practical to depend solely on search engines for traffic it can complement your other advertising campaigns nicely. Aiming for high search engine placement is always a plus. Keep these in mind when developing your site for the search engines:

 

Design your site for traffic -Domain names

Choose a domain name that has your site keywords in it. For example, if you're a site about pet care, try to include the words "pet care" or words related to pet care in your domain name if you can.

 

Design your site for traffic -Keywords

Keywords require research and there are several tools to help you out in this area. Here are my favorites:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

I suggest focusing on only one keyword or keyword phrase per page of your website. This may not seem like a lot but if your site has 20 pages you can focus on 20 keywords. Each page should be considered a landing page for your site.
If you have proper navigation on your pages it will easily allow viewers to see everything you have to offer.

Include your keyword or keyword phrase at the top of your page as well as in at least one header phrase. Also work the keywords into the body of your text as often as you can without sounding redundant.

Your keywords should be in the Title tag as well as in your page description tag. Many search engines no longer look at the keyword tags but I recommend using them and including the plural forms as well.

 

Design your site for traffic - Alt Tags

Search engines don't index images, therefore any text on your site that is presented in image format won't get indexed. To solve this problem, you can enter the image description in the ALT tag. To be sure that the search engines recognize all the content on your site, fill in your ALT tags with
your keywords. This will boost your keyword frequency and help your site achieve better ranking.

Design your site for traffic - Linking

Search engines will rate your site by who is linking to your site, so it's important to establish quality, related links. This can be accomplished in a few ways. One way is to establish reciprocal links with other like sites. When exchanging links be sure to include your keywords in your site title.

Review the page you are exchanging links with. Be sure it is a site that you find easy to navigate and informative. I also recommend that the site's index page have a Google PR rating of at least one. This ensures that the site is not being penalized by Google. If it is a penalized site then you could be penalized as well for linking to it.
Include a 'tell a friend' and 'bookmark' script on your site. This gives viewers an easy way to bookmark you and most of all return to your site.

 

- Include a Site Map

Site Maps let visitors know what information you have, how it's organized, where it is located with respect to other information, and how to get to that information with the least amount of clicks possible.

Site maps also provide spider food for search engine robots. This can increase your chances of becoming indexed because a site map allows the search engines to easily visit every page of your site.

A site map works best if you include a link to your site map in the navigation of every page on your site.

Finally, don't let your site become stale. I have found that my search engine rankings improve when I periodically add new pages to my site and keep the content new and fresh. Follow these tips and 2005 may be your year for traffic.

website optimisation rankings Search engine optimisation services are designed specially to make sure that your web site reaches both its target audience and creates massive return on investment (ROI). We work hard to reach the highest ranking possible using the latest search engine algorithms.
Service Includes:
Web site analysis and recommendations.

Targeted keyword research.

website Optimisation of Home Page (up to 3 keywords)

website Optimisation of other pages (1 – 2 keywords)

Creation of meta tags (title, description, keywords).

In short website optimisation rankings will audit your existing online visibility and then research the keywords and phrases that are specific to your business. We will then craft the optimised code for each individual page on your site and load it into your web site.

website optimisation rankings appreciate that success can only be achieved when a customer's web site can truly demonstrate return on investmen.

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Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the IIS default web site

So I was visiting with a friend last night, and he indicated that he was having a bit of a problem with his WSS 3.0 installation.  Short story is that he has a dedicated Win2k8 box acting as a web server on his domain for internal sites.  They have several web-based LOB apps that run on that box, all as virtual directories under the default web site.  Even though they are running SBS 2003 with its WSS 2.0 companyweb, they wanted to install WSS 3 to take advantage of the new wiki site template.  So, they installed WSS 3 on the web server, which immediately broke their LOB apps.

So what happened?

When you first install WSS 3.0 and run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard, SharePoint creates a new web application (SharePoint – 80) and creates a new web site in IIS that takes over the default site.  Dana recognized this, so within IIS he edited the bindings for the SharePoint site to use port 81, allowing him to re-enable the original default website in IIS and get his LOB apps back.  The problem?  Not only was it a pain having to enter :81 after the servername to access the site, but clicking links on the SharePoint site continued to want to use port 80, resulting in constant 404 errors.

So how did we fix it?

If you’re new to SharePoint, it is worth taking a little time to explain some of the architecture and terminology around SharePoint 3.0 to help put the answer in to context.  First, it is important to understand the distinction between a SharePoint web application, and an IIS web site.  SharePoint (whether WSS or MOSS) can have multiple web applications.  These are created via SharePoint Central Administration.  You can think of a SharePoint Web Application as your top-level SharePoint site – but it is distinctly different from a website in IIS.  An IIS site that is mapped to a SharePoint web application can be thought of as a gateway to access the SharePoint web application.  You can delete the site from IIS without affecting any of the content in the SharePoint application.  (Obviously you won’t be able to access the SharePoint web application without an IIS site, but none of the SharePoint web application content or configuration is stored in the IIS site). 

There are several benefits to this approach – including the ability to have multiple IIS sites mapped to a single web application, with each site being bound by a different SharePoint security zone.  The distinction between the web application and the IIS site in Dana’s situation is that the original IIS site that was bound to port 80 with no host header was separate from the actual SharePoint web application, and even though that was the initial IIS site created to access the SharePoint web application, it isn’t necessary to use that IIS site.

The simplest solution for Dana was to create a new IIS site that used a host header to access his SharePoint web application.  This is actually very simple and straight-forward to do from within SharePoint Central Administration:

1. Open SharePoint Central Administration  (Start | Administrative Tools | SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration) on your SharePoint server.
2. Click on the Application Management tab
3. Click on the link to Create or Extend an Existing Web Application
4. Click the link to Extend an Existing Web Application  (we are extending an existing web application to another IIS site)
5. Select the web application you want to extend.  (The default SharePoint web application on a stand-alone WSS installation is SharePoint – 80.  On SBS 2008, the companyweb application is  remote.yourdomain.com:987  )
6. Select the option to create a new website and enter a description that is meaningful to you  (this will display in IIS)
7. Change the port to 80
8. Enter a value for the host header  (in Dana’s case, we used   wiki  - obviously, you will need to create the necessary DNS records so your host header name can be resolved via your internal DNS.  I personally prefer to create a CNAME (alias) that resolves to the host (server) that is running SharePoint.  Alternately, you could also create a new A record).
9. In a typical small business deployment, you will accept the default security configuration options
10. Select the appropriate zone and click OK.

This will create a new site in IIS that is mapped to the web application you selected.  After we had created the new site for Dana and created the necessary CNAME record for  wiki  in his DNS, we were able to browse to http://wiki on his internal systems and access the SharePoint application successfully, and navigate without 404 errors.

Additionally, we were able to delete the original IIS site that Dana had changed the bindings to port 81.  Since Dana & co were now accessing the web application via the new site (http://wiki) we didn’t need the original site on port 81 any more.  We also did this within SharePoint central administration:

1. Go to the Application Management tab
2. Click the link to Remove SharePoint from IIS Web Site
3. Select the web application
4. Select the site
5. Optionally select to delete the site from IIS  (which we did select in Dana’s case)

So why was Dana getting the 404 errors after he changed the bindings to a new port number in IIS?  If you go back to the page where we extended the web application, take note of the description under the Load Balanced URL section:

The description reads:  “The load balanced URL is the domain name for all sites users will access in this SharePoint Web application.  This URL domain will be used in all links shown on pages within the web application.  By default, it is set to the current servername and port.”

When the SharePoint Configuration Wizard created the initial web site in IIS, the SharePoint load balanced URL for that site was http://servername:80  -  which will resolve to the default website on that server.  When Dana changed the port to 81 and re-enabled the original default website, links in the SharePoint web application (when accessed from the original IIS site) all used the Load Balanced URL, which resolved to the re-enabled default website on port 80 – thus resulting in the 404 errors.

The moral of the story here?  Well there are a couple:

• You can have as many IIS sites linked to a single SharePoint web application as you want.
• When administering SharePoint, do as much as you can in SharePoint Central Administration.  Chances are you won’t get the results you want if you try to make changes (such as site bindings) via IIS.

One of my personal rules when it comes to IIS is to leave the default website alone.  Personally, I always create new websites in IIS and use host headers to access those sites – so everything is accessible on port 80 (assuming http) and users don’t have to remember weird port numbers, etc.  Additionally, using host headers gives you the freedom to move websites to different web servers without affecting the end-user experience.  Just update your DNS record for the host header value to point to the new server and voila! – users are accessing the same site via the same URL and have no idea it has been moved to a different physical box.  And this is true of all web applications I use – DotNetNuke, Community Server, etc. 

The only exception to my rule of putting each web application in their own IIS web site is when we need multiple apps all on the same server accessible via SSL.  Since SSL traffic is encrypted, IIS is unable to inspect the host headers, meaning it can only direct SSL requests to the correct site based on the IP / port combination.  So, to have multiple web apps on a single box accessible via SSL, we either need to have multiple sites all on one IP listening on different ports (443, 444, etc.), or multiple IPs on the box so each site can listen on 443 on a separate IP, OR configure the different web applications as virtual directories under one IIS site that is listening on 443 for the one / all IP addresses.  Depending on the number of applications you need accessible via SSL, it can makes more sense to configure those apps as virtual directories under a single site, so you reduce your administrative overhead by not having to administer multiple IP addresses / ports / SSL certificates.   But even then, I create a new site in IIS to put everything under instead of using the default site.  Yeah, I know – I’m weird like that 

Of course – there is always more than one way to skin a cat, so there is a completely different method we could have taken to fix Dana’s issue as well.

Let’s say there was a business need for Dana’s web applications (that were all virtual directories under the default site) to be accessible as virtual directories under his SharePoint site.   This approach was actually recommended to Dana by other individuals telling him to add an Application Exclusion to the SharePoint site.  Dana couldn’t find out how to do this – but there is good reason why:  Application Exclusions don’t exist in SharePoint 3.0.

Here’s the deal:  SharePoint 2.0 and 3.0 have considerable distinctions in their architecture.  For example, when you extended SharePoint 2.0 to a website in IIS, SharePoint assumed that the entire IIS site would be devoted to the SharePoint application.  As a result, if you wanted to have non-SharePoint virtual directories under the IIS site, you had to tell SharePoint 2.0 to exclude those virtual directories from its management, allowing the web applications in those virtual directories to work as intended. 

SharePoint 3.0 uses a different approach.  Instead of assuming the entire IIS site is devoted to the SharePoint web application, you have to explicitly tell SharePoint what paths in the IIS site are managed by SharePoint.  When we create a new SharePoint Web Application, SharePoint assumes that it will manage the root path as well as everything below the /sites/ path.  (Hint: when you create a new web application and are on the Create Site Collection page, this is why you have the to options for the URL:  http://hostheader/  or http://hostheader/sites/ )

What this means is that SharePoint 3.0 plays very nicely with other web applications in the same IIS site.  So in Dana’s case, when he first installed SharePoint 3.0 and it created a new IIS site that replaced his original default website, he could have simply recreated the virtual directories for each of his web based LOB apps under the IIS site SharePoint created as long as none of them used the sites name, since that was defined as a Managed Path for the SharePoint web application.  And even then, if he wanted to use the sites path for a non-SharePoint application instead, he could have removed the sites path from SharePoint management.

You can administer SharePoint’s managed paths from SharePoint Central Administration.  Simply navigate to the Application Management tab and click the link for Define Managed Paths.  When you add a managed path, you specify what type of inclusion it will be.  There are two types of inclusions – an explicit inclusion and a wildcard inclusion.  An explicit inclusion means that SharePoint will manage just that path, where as a wildcard inclusion tells SharePoint that every path under the wildcard inclusion path should be managed.  This is particularly useful if you are enabling self-site creation for users, so they could effectively create their own site collections (top-level SharePoint site) under a common directory (e.g /sites/). 

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How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding
How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding
Information Outlook

Summary

This is the second of three articles. Part 1 appeared in the August issue of Information Outlook.

Search engine optimization and marketing covers a wide range of activities, many of which are similar to what a reference librarian, systems librarian, or market researcher does. Although the focus is the World Wide Web, many of the tools that are used have broader applications for special librarians.

Internal corporate processes. Web analytics tools measure and analyze corporate sales, customer preferences and problems, viable products and channels, and other issues that may provide answers for questions received by special librarians.

Competitive intelligence/market research. Keyword research, Web site saturation and popularity tools can provide information on a company's competitors: how they are marketing on the Internet, what they are spending on online marketing campaigns, how they are pricing their products.

Legal issues. Who Is tools can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues. Link Popularity tools can show who is deep-linking to your site. Log files, in conjunction with Who Is tools, can tell you who may be committing click fraud on your paid placement campaigns or spamming your e-mail servers.

Back end knowledge of how Web sites work. These tools can show you what may be keeping search engines from indexing your site and can highlight customer service issues.

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SECOND OF THREE ARTICLES

Web site saturation and popularity tools show how much presence a Web site has on search engines through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on each search engine (saturation) and how many times the site is linked to by other sites (popularity).

If your company wants to generate leads from Web site traffic, you need to understand your organization's Web presence, particularly in relation to that of your competitors. Generally, the more Web presence you have, the easier it is for people to find your site; that is, if those pages contain the keywords people are looking for and if they rank high enough in search engine rankings for people to see them. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Pay attention to this so you can learn the number of sites that are linking to yours, which is very important. Knowing where your site stands in these two areas can give you a good idea of what you need to do to improve your Web presence.

Many tools measure various aspects of saturation and link popularity. My favorites are Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.

Link Popularity + (http://www.uptimebot.com) shows much more than its name implies. It measures the number of back-links (incoming external links to your site); linked domains (all pages that link to any page in your domain, including internal pages); pages of your site that are indexed; and pages that contain your URL in the Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Hotbot, MSN, Teoma, Lycos, AOL, and Alexa search databases. (See Figure 1.)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Once you register (it's free), you can also see overall Google page rank, the number of pages you have at each Google page rank, and whether your site is listed in the DMOZ Open Directory, one of the major search directories. Page rank is one indicator of a page's popularity and authority. Registration lets you do mass reviews of up to 16 domains and have the results e-mailed to you. (See Figure 2.)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

This has become one of my favorite tools, because it provides one of the most comprehensive snapshots of Web presence as far as the number of search engines it covers and the type of information it shows. The one area it doesn't cover is competitor comparisons. When I need to do a competitor comparison, I use the Top 10 Google Analysis and Marketleap tools.

Top 10 Google Analysis (www.Webuildpages.com/tools/internet-marketing-google.htm) provides the top 10 search results for a keyword on Google, along with the ranking of the base URL. This makes it a great competitive intelligence tool. (See Figure 3.)

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The results also show the number of pages indexed by Google and Yahoo; the number of backlinks for the reference URL and for the domain as a whole from Yahoo, Google PageRank, Yahoo Web Rank, and AllInAnchor (query words in anchor text of links pointing to the site); body keyword density (ratio of keywords to total words); and link keyword density (ratio of keywords in links to all links).

This tool is a good indicator of the overall standings of your competition on the two major search engines and provides information about what gives them their rankings (keyword density, number of links to the site, number of links with keywords to the site, number of pages indexed, and page ranks). By analyzing the key characteristics of the top 10 sites for a keyword, you can get a good idea of what it takes for the term to rank well. (See Figure 4.)

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

To use this tool, you need to have a Google API code, available free from Google (www.google.com/apis). The API code lets you run a limited number of specialized searches on Google.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Marketleap offers a suite of free SEM tools, including the Search Engine Saturation Validator, the Link Popularity Analysis, and the Keyword Verification Tool. (See Figure 5.)

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

The Search Engine Saturation Validator (www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm) shows the number of pages that several top search engines have in their databases for your Web site and the sites of up to five competitors. The search engines covered are AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google/AOL, Hotbot, MSN, and Yahoo. I use this tool primarily to see how the site I'm optimizing compares with specific competitors on the number of pages indexed by the search engines. In general, the more pages a site has indexed, the greater the opportunity to be found by searchers. (See Figure 6.)

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

What I like most about the Link Popularity Analysis (www.marketleap.com/publinkpop) is its ability to choose competitors with whom to compare link popularity, along with the ability to see the link popularity for 25 other Web sites in a company's industry category. If your company's industry isn't included, you can choose General, which shows the link popularity for 25 companies across a number of industries. What you get back is how your site compares with others in your industry on link popularity on the AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google/AOL, Hotbot, MSN, and Yahoo search engines. (See Figure 7.)

The tool shows your presence on the Web in terms of number of pages in each search engine's index that contain a link to your site, including your own Web site. Another valuable component of this tool is that it gives you an idea of whether your link numbers make your company a major player on the Web:

* Limited presence: 0-1,000 references.

* Average presence: 1,001-5,000 references.

* Above-average presence: 5,001-20,000 references.

* Contender: 20,001-100,000 references.

* Player: 100,001-500,000 references.

* 900-pound gorilla: 500,000+ references. (See Figure 8.)

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Needless to say, there are very few 900-pound gorillas. In some niche industries, there may not be any sites that come close to having this many total "references" across all the major search engines. (Note: "Total" data are inflated, because they include the total of all links for the six search engines, which means many duplicates. Nevertheless, the total is a good relative indicator of what it takes to be a top site.) The General Industry category lists 14 gorilla sites; the top five are listed in Figure 9.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

By looking at the sites linking to your site, you can get an idea of the volume and quality of pages linking to you and who may be referring traffic to you. Once you know who is linking to you and the part of your site they are linking to, you can examine the areas of your site that are performing well and those that aren't. By checking out competitors who are outperforming your site, you can see who is linking to them and figure out what you need to do to improve your visibility. (See Figure 10.)

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Marketleap's Keyword Verification Tool (www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm) provides a quick way to see if your site ranks in the top 30 keywords through keyword verification. Many studies have shown that the vast majority of people don't look beyond the first 30 search results. You may have numerous pages indexed with plenty of links pointing to your site, but if you're not ranked in the top 30 on keywords that people use to search for your products and services, you're not visible. The Keyword Verification Tool covers AlltheWeb, AltaVista, AOL, Google/AOL, Lycos Pro, Hotbot, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo. (See Figure 11.)

Thumbshots (http://ranking.thumbshots.com) lets you compare the top 100 results for a term on two different search engines or compare two different terms on the same search engine. You can highlight a particular site to see where the site ranks on both search engines. (See Figure 12.)

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

The output is visual, with lines connecting pages that rank in the top 100 on both search engines or keywords. Pages from your site are in red, and those of other sites that have pages on both sides are in blue. Hover your mouse over any of the hundred circles and see the URL, rank, and, if available, a thumbnail image of the page. The text output includes the number of overlapping links and number of unique links. (See Figure 13.)

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

The comparisons also show how little duplication there is on the Web--there are usually very few connecting lines between search engines. In a search on "retail displays," only 15 pages ranked in the top 100 on both Google and Yahoo.

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

I like this tool because it shows you where your site is ranked along a 100-dot line for a phrase on two search engines or how it ranks for two different phrases on one search engine. I use it more for seeing how two different terms rank on the same search engine than for search engine comparison, as there are other tools to do that. I've used it most often for demonstrating to clients the success of using one phrase over another in their site's content. (See Figure 14.)

Link Desirability

The next two tools are designed to help you determine the "desirability" of having another site link to yours. Not all links are created equal--some can even hurt your search engine rankings. Generally, a popular site that contains a few relevant links will be a better site to seek a link from than a "link farm" site that is nothing more than a collection of links. Although Google's PageRank is considered to be an important indicator of the link popularity of a site, I don't give it much weight when I'm looking for a site from which to request a link. Instead, I look at whether the site is a good fit for the one I'm marketing, and whether a link on that site would benefit both sites. (See Figure 15.)

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

One tool, Link Appeal by Webmaster Toolkit (www.Webmaster-toolkit.com/link-appeal.shtml), calculates the desirability rating of a link on the URL you specify. The calculation includes factors such as page rank, number of outbound links, and overall percentage of links to HTML. It is intended as a guideline for evaluating whether you should ask for a link on a certain page or not. (See Figure 16.)

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

The Class C Checker (www.Webmaster-toolkit.com/class-c-checker.shtml) allows you to check whether two domains are hosted on the same Class C IP range. Links from sites that are not on the same range as your site are thought to give more weight. (See Figure 17.)

[FIGURE 18 OMITTED]

Search engines don't like duplication in search results, so having a different IP address can help separate sites that are located on the same servers and may share databases or programming elements. Because EBSCO hosts many sites, I use Class C Checker more for the latter purpose than for link popularity. (See Figure 18.)

[FIGURE 19 OMITTED]

Other Ranking Tools

While the following tools aren't strictly SEM tools, I find them very valuable in my work.

The main Google search engine doesn't number results, which can make it difficult to figure out where you rank on a particular term. But Google Results (www.google.com/ie?q=&num=100&hl=en) gives numbered results. A disadvantage is that it only shows title and URL information, so identifying your site among the results can be difficult (unless your site name is in the title). I generally do a search on the main Google search engine and use the browser's Find option to see if my site's URL is in the top 30 or 100 results. If it is, I make a note of the title, then go to Google Results and redo the search. I check to see my site's numbered ranking. This is a lot easier than trying to physically count search results on a screen. (See Figures 19 and 20.)

Google Dance (www.google-dance-tool.com) has two uses. The first shows how you rank on the various Google servers; the second presents numbered results. I use this tool primarily for numbered results, unless I've discovered that I'm getting vastly different rankings when I search on a term within a short period of time. (See Figure 21.)

[FIGURE 20 OMITTED]

Froogle (www.froogle.com) is Google's shopping search engine. It allows companies to add their products to the site free of charge. I use Froogle in two ways: to expand a site's listings on the Internet and to illustrate price comparisons. Because Froogle is free, it is the simplest way for an e-commerce company to get all its products listed online. And because Froogle results sometimes appear at the top of Google results, it's a good way to get a site to show high in rankings if it doesn't do so organically. Currently, Google is generally not allowing new sites into top-ranked positions for at least six months after launch. (See Figure 22.)

[FIGURE 21 OMITTED]

Froogle is valuable in price comparisons because it helps me understand where my clients' pricing is compared with that of their competitors. You can do price comparisons on the other shopping search engines, but the only Web sites you find on those are companies that pay to be on them. All our e-commerce clients who meet the requirements for Froogle are added to it when ESWS redesigns a Web site. (See Figure 23.)

[FIGURE 22 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 23 OMITTED]

Figure 9

Marketleap Top 5 Most-Linked-To Web Sites

Most-Linked-To Web Sites Number of Links

Yahoo.com 51,624,212
Mp3.com 26,652,540
Amazon.com 24,213,964
Microsoft.com 18,340,881
CNN.com 10,777,438
RELATED ARTICLE: How to use keyword saturation and popularity tools

1. Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Search Engine Saturation and Link Popularity can help you identify some of your online competitors and determine how you compare in the terms you use to describe your products and services.

2. If you get a question about why your company Web site isn't performing as well as a competitor's site in search engine rankings, the Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Search Engine Saturation tools can illustrate why--or show why your site is doing well.

3. Librarians often spend a lot of time explaining to people why it is important to use more than one search engine in doing research. Thumbshot is a good tool to graphically show the lack of duplication in search results.

4. The Google Dance tool is good to know about if two searches for the same phrase return different results. Use it to see if Google is in the midst of updating its index.

5. Use Google Results or Google Dance for a concise list of numbered search results.

6. Froogle and the other shopping search engines are an easy and effective way to find out what your competitors are charging for your type of product and how your pricing compares. Because Froogle is a free service, it has a broader range of companies to compare with. However, Froogle also has a smaller percentage of visitors, so it may not be representative of all shopping visitors.
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I've written many times about the intense dependency of social media on your SEO strategy. Since I probably sound like a broken record, I’ll let some other folks (very solid experts) say it for your benefit and better than I ever could.

The following articles were each published in the last few weeks and include commentary by Fast Company and other SEO experts. While optimizing specific product pages might have passed for a good SEO strategy three years ago, this is no longer the case. VC’s, CEO’s, CMO’s, IT groups and especially your prospects know this already.

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Transcript of Podcast with Eric Peterson

The following is a written transcript of the September 4, 2007 podcast between Eric Enge and Eric Peterson: Eric Enge: Hello listeners, I am Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Eric Peterson, the CEO of Web Analytics Demystified, and we plan to talk about what organizations need to do to be successful in web analytics. You can see the Web Analytics Demystified website at www.webanalyticsdemystified.com. Hello, Eric

Eric Peterson: Hello, Eric. How are you today?

Eric Enge: I am doing great, how are you doing?

Eric Peterson: Excellent, thanks very much.

Eric Enge: Hey, it looks to me like things are going well for Web Analytics Demystified at least as an external observer. Can you talk about how things are going?

Eric Peterson: Yes, things have been going really, really well. I am tremendously excited about having my own company, about being able to pick and choose my own clients, and can really start to do some of things for the web analytics community that I've wanted to do for years. And, I have just been either time limited or limited by what my employers really wanted me to do and where they wanted me to focus. So, at just about 100 days into it now, the decision to leave Visual Sciences and start Web Analytics Demystified Incorporated has been just great. So, thanks for asking.

Eric Enge: Sure, I noticed since you mentioned the thing that you wanted to be able to do serve community that you didn't do before. One of those things was that free analytic survey that you put out there not too long ago.

Eric Peterson: Yes, and I am about to do a second round of that. I plan on doing those surveys twice a year, one time looking more at attitudes, which was the March survey. And then, in September we are going to look more at tool usage. That's the kind of thing that none of my previous employers, certainly not Jupiter Research, would have said go ahead, spend your own money, conduct research, do the analysis, write this up, get it edited and put it out there for free. Nobody would have ever given me the ability to do something like that, but I have always wanted to do that. At Jupiter Research, I wanted to focus more on web analytics and more of the kinds of problems that people at ground level, like real practitioners, have. But, I had a research program, and not to say anything bad about Jupiter Research, because it was a good research program, but, I can now make those decisions, let's focus on this; let's look at that. And, it's very, very satisfying as I am sure you know at Stone Temple.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. One of the things I saw in that survey is that you came to the conclusion that people who use the free web analytics tool are less likely to dive in and get the deeper value out of the analytics experience. Is that a fair assessment?

Eric Peterson: I have a second piece of free research I put out titled the problem with free analytics.

Eric Enge: Yes.

Eric Peterson: The data suggested that companies who primarily using free web analytics solutions were not really taking advantage of the technology the way they could. More adhoc usage of analytics as opposed to regular programming, a regular program for conducting analysis, employees to manage that or a process streaming approach, certainly companies deploying free solutions were less likely to be paying people to manage those solutions. So, some of the really important things, right, you know this, I know this, Eisenberg and Sterne and Barbie and everybody knows this, that you have to dedicate people. You have to have somebody whose responsibility it is to do web analytics, and that just didn't shine through in the data. So, I speculated that this may result in a very substantial number of companies who are not really getting the benefit; that was the essence of that report.

Eric Enge: Right. And, it doesn't mean that somebody couldn't use a free analytics tool and get the benefit. It just suggests that there is a correlation between those who do use one and don't pursue that level of benefits.

Eric Peterson: Exactly, so not only does it not suggest that you can't be successful with free analytics tools, it doesn't say anything about the value of those free analytics tools. I think of Google Analytics as being the prototypical free tool, and I think Google Analytics is great. I use Google Analytics; I get a lot of value out of Google Analytics. Certainly there are things that I don't like about it, and I fill the gaps there with other web analytics tools. But, it's not about the technology itself, it's not about the tool, and not even really so much about the people.

It's how the people are using the tool, you have to be committed to doing this, you have to be committed, you have to have every intention of using web analytics tools whatever you have, to better understand your audience and better understand your online marketing efforts. It's really that simple. Some people didn't take it that way; some people said that I was bashing free tools. Some people actually said that I was bashing for free tools, but again it comes down to reading the documents and really thinking about what the data says, what the data can tell you about how people are using the tools today.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, I took it the same way that you've just expressed it, but yes you had to dig in a little bit to make sure that you were really reading the whole document. Well, let's dive in a little bit. One of the things I have seen you write about or do presentations on is, it seems like a lot of organizations dive into analytics, and then assume that a continual improvement process will be sufficient. But, I have seen that you made the argument that it's not sufficient, can you explain that?

Eric Peterson: The continual improvement process is sufficient if it is truly a process. What I have seen and I talked about this in San Francisco a little bit at the Emetrics Summit, and I have been talking about it since then. What I have seen is that there are still a fairly substantial number of companies that seem to nod their heads, they bow their heads yes, yes we get it when you talk about continual improvement, but they haven't gone so far as to implement the actual process part of the continual improvement process. One of the most important things to continual improvement is having a testing platform; right is that AB testing or controlled experimentation or multivariate analysis, whatever you want.

Just having the ability to run parallel tests is fundamental to continual improvement done right. And, there are still a lot of companies that haven't deployed those kinds of technologies, maybe they are doing things in serial, but maybe not. I think a lot of times web analytics stops for companies when the reports have been generated, and they don't take it far enough. They don't get to analysis, they don't take analysis to multivariate testing; they don't do the processes behind web analytics. And so, I think that maybe there is not a limitation in understanding, but there is a limitation in use.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what about the management process used that are necessary to take this a step further?

Eric Peterson: Well, the management process used, and I wrote about this fairly extensively in a white paper, again a free white paper that I provide at webanalyticsdemystified.com, talking about the role that management needs to play. It's real common and certainly at Jupiter Research I experienced this and also at Visual Sciences, it's real common to go in to a situation where a company has spent significantly on web analytics tools technology, but don't have a named, assigned senior owner. Right, a Senior Vice President or a Vice President or an EVP or somebody whose responsibility includes web analytics, who includes making web analytics actually successful in the organization and deriving positive return on investment from Omniture or WebTrends or Corematrics or Visual Sciences or whatever they have got, and their people. There are series of management processes that often get forgotten and it's unfortunate, because where you end up is with well-intentioned, well-meaning, right people actually doing web analytics, but nobody is taking advantage of their analysis. Nobody is actually taking it to continual improvement, and taking it to the next logical step of let's do something with this data.

Eric Enge: All reports and no action?

Eric Peterson: Very common, very common: all reports and no action. It's actually, I don't if you attended the Web Analytics Association Webcast that I did last week, but I have just started talking about something called RAMP. I have always been looking for what is the most memorable; what is the most simple way to communicate, how to be successful with web analytics? And, I think it is this, ramp is resources, which is technology and people, ramp is analysis, ramp is multivariate testing, and ramp is process. You take first letter of all those, you get a clever little acronym, because everybody wants a ramp that goes up and to the right.

But, it's all of this, and it's management buying into the RAMP, and it's IT buying into RAMP, and it's analytics and it's everybody saying we can use web analytics and website optimization ecosystem of technologies to be very successful in the online channel as long as we are committed and as long as we have a roadmap, as long as we understand what we are going to do, when we are going to do it, and why we are going to do it. But, the evidence of that, the ability to be successful is everywhere, you know that, it's your clients, it's my clients. It's Jim Sterne's clients, and Semphonic's clients, it's all the vendors' case studies. The evidence for being successful with analytics is absolutely overwhelming, so it's not the technology, and it's not the people that are holding everyone back. It's really I think about the process and about being well-intentioned, and really trying to make this stuff work.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you can think of it as creating a data driven culture?

Eric Peterson: Creating a data driven culture or creating a data driven culture within a larger culture. Talking to Tom Davenport a little while ago and asking him if companies are not data driven from the top-down; are they just doomed, are they not going to be able to compete on analytics? And, what we eventually came to is you can't compete on analytics, but you can compete on web analytics at the microscopic level. So, one department, one group in the organization, will you be more successful if the whole organization is data driven? Probably yes, but it doesn't mean that if you are not data driven from the top-down, you can't be successful with web analytics. It just means you might have to work a little bit harder to not be led by the data, but to use the data to your advantage.

Eric Enge: Right. It's interesting to think about if you are dealing with the person who is currently not particularly sophisticated, and that's probably the wrong word. But, just not knowledgeable in the area of analytics at this point, and they are getting into the RAMP, and thinking about it for the first time. They are looking at a real investment, there is the buying of the tool; there is building up the organization with all the people. It's the cultural thing as it needs to happen and as Avinash Kaushik, famously said that the tool should be 10% of your cost, and the people 90%, and whether you agree with those numbers or not, you are really looking at taking a big step. It's fascinating to me, because you and I are both seeing what the returns are when you do that successfully, but how do you go about educating someone who doesn't have the knowledge and background as to what they can hope to get in return for their investment?

Eric Peterson: That's an excellent question, it's an excellent question. It's something I have been talking about a lot more lately. It really is how you get to it. Web analytics is hard, right. But, I don't know, we should probably have discussed this before we started recording the call, because I don't know how you feel about this. But, I think the web analytics is hard, right. I have a presentation where I go through 20 different examples from the vendors and from authors and even stuff that I have written and stuff that Avinash has written, and stuff that Google; a bunch of stuff from Google that says web analytics is easy, web analytics is easy, Google Analytics makes web analytics easy.

I don't think that's right, I think web analytics is hard, and I think the assumption that web analytics is easy or it is supposed to be easy is actually hurting our industry. Its hurting individual practitioner's ability to communicate to the large organization what has to be done to take advantage of web analytics. When you walk in the door and you say this is easy, we are all going to get it. Then when inevitably people struggle with definitions, when they struggle with data inaccuracies, when they hear about cookie deletion; when they see these new archaic terms, when they look at these interfaces, they think to themselves well this supposed to be easy, but this isn't easy for me.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Peterson: I think the recognition that web analytics is hard, and it's something that requires an investment of time and energy and resource is how you get organizations to buying into it. You put together processes, how are we going to educate managements in the organization about what you can and cannot do with web analytics. How are we are going to educate senior managers about the terms, the definitions that they need to know to take advantage of the reports that they are getting, and more importantly to take advantage of the analysis that they should be getting? If so it's easy, and it's going to be a slam dunk for you. I don't think you are going to give it the attention that it deserves. Again, this goes back to the free versus fee conversation we had moments ago. If web analytics is easy, I don't really need to spend Avinash's $90, right it's easy. So, we will just all be able to pick it up, right?

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Peterson: It's not easy.

Eric Enge: Yes, I agree completely. I mean it's like I could spend a dollar, and maybe I will get $2 back, or I can spend $10 and I am going to get $50 back. Well, getting yourself to spend the $10 might be harder to do or take little more thought upfront, but I really think the web analytics situation is like that. The ROI grows as the expense grows assuming of course that the expense is being spent in a smart way, but I think the ROI grows as you ramp up the effort.

Eric Peterson: Yeah, I agree. But, it's about getting people to ramp up the effort and having the right expectations.

Eric Enge: Alright, did you mean to use your acronym there by the way?

Eric Peterson: That's what I want, RAMP, right let's RAMP it up. It is an important thing; I got some comments back from the WA Webcast which I will be making freely available through webanalyticsdemystified.com. I think towards the end of next week, thanks to the good graces of the folks of the WAA. One of the comments I got back was I saw this in the Yahoo group that Peterson wasn't talking about anything groundbreaking or revolutionary with RAMP. And, I am not, we all know this.

The problem is we are very insolated little circle of individuals, the web analytics blogers, the people that go to Emetrics, and we need ways to take web analytics out to the masses, to everyone in the organization and people outside the organization. So, RAMP is one way to do that, right it's not to simplify it so far that it makes it useless, but to communicate it more effectively. And, multivariate testing, right you don't get to continual improvement done well until you get good at multivariate or AB testing, I mean this is just the reality of it. So, feel free to talk about RAMP all you want.

Eric Enge: Sure. So, another thing I noticed is that you are really into detailed diagramming of every part of the process, and maybe you can talk about why you feel that's so important?

Eric Peterson: Yeah. I don't know that I am a huge proponent of pedantic diagramming of everything. I don't know that I am that big a proponent of getting up the pens and papers or SmartDraw or Vizio or whatever in diagramming everything. But, I am trying to convey with this point that there has to be more attention paid to the detail, because people say we have web analytics integrated into all of our campaigns and page deployment processes, web analytics is the strategy part of our business. And then, I say okay well, so that means that you never forget to tag a campaign and you never forget to tag a new page and you haven't deployed Web 2.0 Applications, such as Ajax or Flash, or a podcast, or an RSS feed, that every time you deploy something new there is always analytics baked into that, right. I say that to companies and I get this funny look back, and then somebody in the back then goes no, actually we forget to tag campaigns all the time, and we just launched a brand new Ajax application and it doesn't have any tracking in it at all.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Peterson: And, I say it's because it's not part of the process. You have not diagrammed web analytics into the process; you have not considered the importance of web analytics. And, so then it comes in at the 11th hour, and then you fall behind, you get busy and it just drops out. I mean how frequently does web analytics drop out of sight or campaign or content deployment process, it is still very common. So, this diagramming is simply an exercise, this is something that I go out and do with Web Analytics Demystified clients.

We sit down and we say let's talk about how you deploy a new campaign, let's draw out all the steps and look at where measurement should be, and let's talk about whether or not it's there or not. Simply the act of creating those maps, of creating those checklists gets people to think more carefully about the value of measurement and how measurement has to be in there. So it's, I mean it's not an end, it's a means to an end. This diagramming is something that, you do a couple of diagrams you get the gist of it, you say yeah, yeah, we have to remember to do web analytics, we have to remember to insert measurements into these processes. So, it's not something you have to do forever, you don't need big binders, process binders for your web analytics integration, it's everything else you do. But you just, you have to think about it that way and I found that to be the best tool for getting my clients and my customers and my friends to think about it.

Eric Enge: Right. What I find is in terms of, if somebody rolls out a new section of a site or like you say an Ajax application or something like that, what happens in a lot of companies, is that somebody goes and tries to pull the data, and that's when they find out the analytics is missing.

Eric Peterson: Data is not there, I mean I just stop counting the number of times in sort of the explosion of Web 2.0, which I think is great. I mean I think Ajax and all of this stuff is fascinating, I love my iPhone. I spend more time then is absolutely necessary on the FaceBook application on iPhone, I am really into Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies, but they need to be measured, right. It's not responsible to create these measurement black holes, and I just stopped counting the number of times I would sit down with companies and say hey, this is a great Ajax application, this is really engaging. How do you measure visitor engagement with this? And, they go well, we are not really measuring that much, and I go well, at least you are measuring like the conversion rate, i.e., the people are using this application to complete the critical conversion process, right? Then they go no, we are going to hope to back that in and like the third version of it or something like that. And then, I am just sitting there staring at them. I am like okay, I am the guy who wrote 3 books on analytics, are you just admitting to me that you spent $200,000 building this cool Ajax application, and it's got no measurement in it. I mean it's so uncomfortable conversation there for a couple of seconds, and then we move on.

We start to talk about how do you measure Web 2.0, how do you bake the tagging or the click tracking or whatever you need into it while it's being developed, and test that that works and think about, what do we want to know? You don't need to know everything, you don't need to know every drag and drop and zoom and click and all of that stuff, but you need to know some of it. How do you know what you need to know in advance? And so, in some ways Web Analytics 2.0, which is the subject of my longer talk at Emetrics in Washington this year, Web Analytics 2.0 is a lot like Web Analytics 1.0 was, years ago. We are going to have to relearn a lot of these things, only more money is being spent and more peoples' necks are on the line now.

Eric Enge: Yeah, ultimately you expect that the tracking mechanisms will follow the way that people make money on the application in some fashion. So, that's the thing that absolutely must be measured, right?

Eric Peterson: Yeah. No, I agree. The funny thing is people ask me, the Wall Street guys specifically will ask me who else is out there, like who is going to just do a great job of measuring Web 2.0 stuff, like Ajax. So I just, don't think it's somebody from left field, I think that the Website Optimization ecosystem of technology is right. This is Web Analytics Technologies, Customer Experience Management Technologies, Voice of Customer Measurement Technologies, the forsee Results and Tealeaf's of the world. I think the stuff we need is already out there, it's just about using it the right way. I think it's just about understanding how the technology should be used, what you hope to measure and how you hope to use that data. I think it's really that simple, it's just it's not playing out that way.

Eric Enge: Indeed. So, can you summarize for us then what are the keys to success in Web Analytics today?

Eric Peterson: Yeah, sure. First key to success is to recognize that web analytics is hard, right. It is hard; it is something you are going have to work out. You are going to need people, you are going to need resources; you are going to need time and money. Web analytics is not easy, and when people tell you that web analytics is easy you should question their motivation, are they trying to sell you something? Are they trying to sell you on something, do they want you to buy a book or read a blog or something like that? Web analytics is hard; the second thing is RAMP; resources, analysis, multivariate testing and process. You've got to have all four of these things and you got to have, you got to understand how all four of those outputs or inputs work together to drive your businesses success. Resources' is technology and people, analysis is the desired output, reports are just reports, right. Reports are only good if you know what they are telling you, but analysis and recommendations is the desired output from Web Analytics projects. Multivariate testing we've talked about a fair amount, process we've talked about a fair amount. You have to consider all four of these things to build a ramp that will ultimately increase the success of your online business.

Eric Enge: Well great, thanks for taking the time to talk to us Eric.

Eric Peterson: Absolutely. Thanks for asking me Eric. I wish you all the best at Stone Temple and I got to say man, I am really, really enjoying the podcast and the interviews that you've been conducting up there, just great stuff this global interview. You've really managed to grab onto an idea and talk to some really great people, and then cover some great information. So, I want to just say I very much appreciate that.

Eric Enge: Well, then thank you and I am pleased to have you in the list of those people I've been able to talk to.

Eric Peterson: Excellent.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

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