Wrapping Up

This will be my final post for ISys 590R. I wanted to share some of my thoughts and some suggestions for future web analytics classes. I would have liked to see more Search Engine Optimization(SEO) in the class. I think it would have been very beneficial for all of the students to start their own website at the very beginning of class. Using WordTracker they could find keyword phrases that people are searching for and how many sites are competing for those phrases. The search engines usually index you within about 4-8 weeks. The students could then use google analytics to track the traffic on their website and try out different techniques to drive traffic to different landing pages. The students could also use adwords to drive traffic to their website. Whoever has the most traffic to their website by the end of the semester receives an automatic A! Well, maybe not that last part. I think these suggestions would make the class better as a whole. I've learned a lot this semester. Thanks Dr. Liddle and Dr. Rogers!

Google is at it again!

Recently, I heard about two new Google products that I believe will have a big effect on website marketing.

• Google Web Optimizer
• Google Radio Ads

First, we'll start with the google web optimizer. This program lets you create two or more similar landing pages, and then tell Google a percentage of your traffic you want to send to each page. All of this traffic would be coming from your pay-per-clicks. Google then runs these tests until the results become statistically significant and displays all the information in simple reports to tell you the effectiveness of each landing page. All you need to do is create the similar pages and embed a little bit of javascript code on the page. I haven't tried it yet, but knowing Google, I'm sure it is very easy. This would be very easy to implement on Choiceskills.com, even faster than Site Catalyst.

Second, I recently received an email from Google, giving me $400 towards my Google radio ads account. How cool would it be to do a radio spot for portableheavydutyaircleaners.com? Something that would have never been in reach for small, small businesses, is now available to all.

Go Google!

Character Education Landing Page

Here is the ChoiceSkills.com character education landing page.

Character Education Landing Page

As you can see, it's still a work in progress, but most of the information is there. I put it in all the meta tags and all the links in the main body are H1 tags, changed with CSS, to look like normal links. The links at the bottom are all good keywords that can be linked to various pages in the website.

Choice Skills Banner

We've recently been working on improving a website in my web analytics class. We each made up mock banners that could go up on www.choiceskills.com. Here is my entry, though it wasn't as good as some of the other entries. This site is selling education materials for teaching people through character-based learning. If you know any teachers, pass them along to this website.

Site Catalyst Implementation Guide

I finished reading the Site Catalyst Implementation Guide this morning. I wish I would have read it before the competition, as it included of lot things that would have been helpful in understanding Costume Craze's implementation. I especially liked the section on using Site Catalyst with AJAX code. With so much information to process, I think it will take awhile, including multiple readings of the document, before it sinks in.

eBusiness Wikipedia

Yesterday I contributed to my a wikipedia for the first time ever, the eBusiness Center Wiki. The pages that I contributed were:

• Web Portals
• Online Communities
• Online Auctions
  

It takes a lot of time to publish a relatively small amount of data. Don't wait until the deadline to finish your research.

Web Services

Since my family also reads all of the posts for my class, I though I would start off with the definition of web services. A service provided by a website that can be accessed by anyone as long as they know how use the proper protocols to obtain the service. I was excited when we started talking about them in class, because my friend Nate Skousen and I were starting to develop a website that used Google's web service, Google Maps. The website address is www.ldstemplemaps.com. We want to make it the first stop for people trying to obtain information about LDS temples and we want to eventually expand to LDS places. It took us about two hours total to setup everything up. Web services are changing the web. It's so easy to do something like this with anything. I was thinking it would be a lot of fun for a family website. People could add anything they wanted to the map, simply by putting in a name, picture and address. You could create a personal Anderton family map with our own memory places. Hope that wasn't too technical family!

Web Analytics and YouTube

Here is a list of some of my favorite web analytics websites:

• Google Analytics
• Google Trends

I love Google. I'm hoping for a google fantasy football website. I think if anybody can do it well, Google can. The articles that we read for class were insightful. It's an extremely efficient way to drive tons of traffic to your website. All you have to do is to get people to like your video. It made me think of another way of marketing your website. My grandma loves to forward messages to all her friends and family. If you have a cool website that you want to get out there, a few well-connected forwards and you could be reaching thousands of individuals, obviously based upon the excellence of your website. If your website isn't cool, no one is going to want to forward it.

Expectations for the Course

I used to work at a search-engine optimization company, so I think I have the SEO down pretty well. Now onto the web analytics! My brother-in-law and I have a website, www.portableheavydutyaircleaners.com. Web analytics will be highly useful for us because we have no idea where we're getting our traffic from and where they are going. I expect to be able to increase our conversion rate over this semester and have lots of fun in the Omniture Web Analytics Competition.