Bizcamp Limerick is back on!

That's right! Bizcamp Limerick is back on at the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick on the 8th May, 2010. Visit Bizcamp.ie to register to attend and/or talk. Last year's Bizcamp Limerick was an outstanding success and its great to have a follow up event! We also have a LinkedIn group and twitter account @bizcamp - so please stay in touch.

Visitor Optimisation : Tracking Telephone Calls in Google Analytics

Google Analytics has become one of the most widely used tracking tools for web developers, owners and SEO's. And for good reason - it's easy to integrate, its easy to use and understand and it's always evolving. Previous server-side applications like AWStats have suffered from a lack of development and an inability to correlate visitors and action. This is where Google has excelled and this is why they've dominated the Web Visitor Statistics market - better User Experience.

But one form of conversion tracking has been notoriously elusive - Telephone calls. Web developers around the world are building calls to action on every page - most well designed websites don't make the user click through a minefield of pages to get to a companies contact information (so do intentionally, where they prefer users to create an account and help themselves). And tracking the telephone call conversions has been a huge issue for many SEO's and online mareketeers - with many choosing to avoid it.

Google have suggested a couple of ways to track this on their Analytics Blog - one of them is to use unique telephone numbers (for AdWords, Organic leads etc). However, I think the proposed solutions add cost and possibly raise more questions/issues than they answer:

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  What if you get two phone calls from visitors on your site at the same time?
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  What if the user saves the number and calls back later, when their session is closed?

This has been bugging me (and countless other webmasters no doubt) for years. What we need is a simple, cost-effective and in-session solution. And here at Primary Position, we think we've found it! A conversion tracking system that tracks enquiries inline and keeps the conversion in session, to make it easier to follow where an enquiry was made from.

This procedure is quite simple, but its implementation should be quite powerful, so we've decided to give it away for free. For the next couple of weeks we'll be demonstrating the concept and how it works with a select group of web designers. There'll be no fee or licence costs or anything at all - it will be freely available to the general public during April 2010.

We'll also be listing blog posts about the concept - so please let us know if you review it.

Google Snippets - Geo Location and Country Location

One of the many reasons Google Search became so dominant was that it was the first to offer localised searching by default. Yahoo, for example, has always been particularly bad - especially in Ireland. PrimaryPosition.co.uk (as do several other .co.uk ccTLD's) ranks for SEO in "Pages from Ireland only" in a search for SEO! Click here to see that search.

Google is now displaying the country it thinks a site is best fitted too. Geo-Targeting, or associating a website with a country (or more), is a really simple concept. The US-centric nature of the world's biggest search engines for the last 20 years (dominated by Google for the past 8 or 9) has meant that .COM's are often seen as global and previously (before 2004/5) sites ranked regardless of location - which suited most US surfers just fine. Top Level Domains (TLD's : .COM, .NET, .ORG etC) can be assigned to any country and sometimes span more than one. This has often caused a lot of confusion, with many first time webstore owners (and some others) belieing that .COM's (in particular) are global and show up equally everywhere (which really isn't the case)

Having a domain attached to a country makes sense. If you were searching for a plumber, coffee shop, accountant, cinema, online store, having results from other countries doesn't make a lot of sense. Google went further with their Local Business Listings but the new snippet - showing the country or Geo-Target is an interesting development - and one I hope will clear up that misunderstanding.

Having localised sites for your clients ultimately gives the surfer what they want (maybe not the website owner but hey, Google's customer is the user) - so this might be interesting for a lot of people to see.

SEO News - Newspapers jump on the blackhat bandwagon

I've noticed recently that newspapers are popping up intermittently for searches related to SEO. It started with an article in a UK newspaper. News and UK sites often appear in Irish searches - more so in Yahoo! where UK sites (with .co.uk Domain names/ccTLD's) often outrank Irish sites even in "Pages from Ireland" only searches.

I noticed the first article appearing late in 2009. The newspaper (I think it was the Guardian) lamented that its journalists had somehow sacrificed their writing in favour of adopting SEO techniques. Rather, that they were trying to use popular search words and other "SEO" techniques to get more traffic - as traffic was thought to be the equivalent of readership. Which its not really. Readership is a subset of traffc, as we really know.

Today I balk at the snippet above - the Belfast Telegraph have created a post with words quite unrelated to their article. It could have been called "Blackhat online Marketing Techniques" - but instead they went for big hitter search phrases.

I quite agree with the debate around spam and online marketing. Its getting very big. We get hundreds of requests every month from (mostly) Asian based link-building sweatshops with assembly line style link bulding in 0 authority link farms. These shops turn out tens of thousands of rubbish back links. If you're a blogger or a website owner, this is probably where you're getting all those junk e-mails and rubbish posts on your blog. One dodgy Irish SEO even extolled their virtues recently on the Irish Web Master Forum, but thankfully the rest of the Irish web industry wasn't impressed.

Sound good - tens of thousands of inward links to your site? Don't be fooled - a page with 100 outbound links on a "farm" of 100,000 pages with millions more isn't going to impress users or Google. People who buy these links are probably guilty of adding to the growing web of spam building up. More on this in the next post.

Google Analytics - Faster new Asynchronous Analytics Tracking

Google have announced a new Asynchronous Tracking script for Analytics. The new snippet decreases a webpage's loading time over the previous urchin/script as it is inserted higher up the page source thus not slowing down the page load on the client side (rendering). This is a nice feature as the Google Analytics code can add significantly to the time between page download (request) and the time it takes for the user to see the page (rendered).


New Script example:

<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
(document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(ga);
})();

</script>

Read more here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html

New websites & Projects

Congratulations to Tynan & Co, the 100 year old firm of Limerick Solicitors, who have just launched their new website. Tynan & Co. have just entered the digital age with their first ever web presence - and we're delighted to be working on their SEO and Web Marketing programme.

We've also started the launch of the first website for the new Connect Limerick website. Connect Limerick are a business networking group in Limerick and are seeking to promote and encourage business networking in the Mid West. Primary Position is delighted to be a sponsor and member of the group and website.