However: Looking back at my 2010 analytic stats I can see the increase in Internet Explorer 8 adoption amongst the general home user (my target demographic). What I do find interesting is that IE7 seems to have had a very small adoption rate. This may be in part due to the commercials Microsoft has released promoting the “Enhanced Security” features of IE8.

Below are two images showing the different browser distribution of my visitors and more importantly drastic trend to move away from Internet Explorer 6.

Sure I check my Google Analytic stats every now and again, but what value is this truly providing me? GA gives website owners a false sense of security IMHO. What we tend to forget is that GA tracks links on any given page. Sure it can give you a pretty overlay on a map, but what does this mean? What does this translate to? I’m really not sure to tell you the truth.

Recently I decided to concentrate less on driving new visitors to my site and focus on “Converting” the visitors I actually have. Google Analytics did help me identify my ‘poor’ conversion rate 34% to be exact.

So the quest began, I had no idea what visitors were truly clicking on? What was driving them away? What was causing them to not convert? Oh no what do I do? How do I find out? Help!!

Crazy Egg to the rescue, they offer four views which you can see described below:

Overlay – Learn more about each element on your page.
List – Learn more about each element on your page.
Heat Map – A picture of where people clicked on your site. This tells you what’s hot and what’s not.
Confetti – Dig a little deeper and find out where people click based upon the things like: Top 15 Referrers, Search Terms, Operating System, Browser, etc…

To get started with Crazy Egg you sign up for $9 which will allow you to track up to 10 pages and 10,000 visits. You’ll need to add a piece of JavaScript to the pages you want to track. The sign up process is simple and painless, adding the JavaScript is just as simple and the same code is reused across all pages you wish to track.

After installing the JavaScript and tracking for just a few days I was easily able to identify the “Problem” areas in my design and adjust accordingly. After making the changes my conversion rate has increased to 76.5% which is more than double.  It’s simply CRAZY! Or rather CRAZY SIMPLE!

In conclusion Crazy Egg is a must have tool to compliment Google Analytics and for the price you would be Crazy to pass it up.

What does this mean for Webmasters and SEO’s? It means that it is important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you will only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing).

You should check out the Bing Webmaster Center for all the latest info, tips and tools, including some significant updates to Bing’s webmaster tools.

This is a great milestone for Bing and Yahoo!, but is it a great thing for SERPs?

What do you think?

“Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be,” says Chitika research director Daniel Ruby. “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.”

The simple answer is no.

The actual question that should come to everyone’s mind is will this comprise my overall SEO efforts.

Search Engine Optimization is not magic; this topic is well documented. Many if not all of the SEO methods are shared across all the major search engines, with slight weighting differences amongst them. If you follow good SEO practice you will rank well on all SERPS.

There are however some interesting observations I have made. BING & Google both at first glance seem to weigh On Page SEO very similarly. However Off Page SEO seems to influence BING a little more. BING appears to give more trust to aged domains, along with target keywords anchor link positioning.

With that being said my personal opinion is that you should concentrate on good OVERALL SEO rather than worrying about a specific search engine. 

Remember content is king.

1. Make an .htpasswd file. The htpasswd command in Unix does this. You should put the password file outside of your web directory. So a command like “htpasswd -bc /home/dmistry/.htpasswd review donotenter” will create a new file using a username of review and a password of donotenter into the file /home/dmistry/.htpasswd . If you were to run the command “cat /home/dmistry/.htpasswd” you might see a line like “review:M1OdtjdGiDn1Y”.
2. Make an .htaccess file. In this case, the file would be located at /home/dmistry/www/.htaccess and it would look something like:

   AuthUserFile /home/dmistry/.htpasswd
   AuthName EnterPassword
   AuthType Basic
   <Limit GET POST>
   require valid-user
   </Limit>

1. “Meta Tags” – Should be included on all pages, remember though these tags no longer carry the same value they used to in the early search days. Today’s search engines have evolved and now have robust algorithms which take many factors into consideration. The days of “keyword stuffing” will no longer yield in better SERP. Google has gone as far as openly stating that they in fact do not even use the Meta Keyword tag to weigh in on their decision. That being said I strongly believe that all sites should leverage the use of <meta tags> appropriately.

2. “Friendly URL’s”- Make sure all pages on your site have a friendly URL. http://www.domain.com/about-us.html try and avoid long URL’s with many parameter passed. Most search engines can handle URI’s with up to 2 parameters but after that you run the risk that your pages may not get indexed.

3. “Sitemaps” – Create a sitemaps.xml and sitemap.html publish them to the search engines via their submission links. I like to create both pages some people say you only need one.

4. “Robots.txt” - Create a robots.txt file tell the search engine where your sitemap.xml file is located. Most search engines will respect the robots.txt file. BE SURE that you validate the file before publishing, a bad entry could potentially block the crawler from crawling your site all together.

5. “Unique Content”- I personally think this is the biggest of them all, have unique content for your visitors, if you have a site that is just repeating another site what is the incentivefor people to come visit you. Creating easy to read unique content will go very far, think about it, if you have a site that is interesting more people are likley to link to your site, the more “Relevant & Reliable” back links you get the better chance you will rank higher in SERP. I will cover this in more detail on my Top 5 Off Page SEO Tips

This begs the question, Is this a result of being “released” from the Google age delay filter?, or just the mere fact that Google has index additional pages and is slowly building and calulating our Page Rank.

We have made a few changes to the site, minified the Javascript and CSS which I will talk about a later time, compressed images and added a few more backlinks. Today is exactly 2 months from the day the domain was registered so I am happy with the way things are shaping up so far.

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

PHP Redirect

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?> 

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%> 

ASP .NET Redirect

<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com");
}
</script> 

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%> 

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/"); 

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/"
end 

Redirect Old domain to New domain

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

So how long does this filter apply? How long will the site be “Sand Boxed”? No one really knows the answer to this, but the speculation is that for new domain’s with similar content / material Google wants to keep the ”Age Delay Filter” for approximately 6-12 months. Is this fair? I am partial to both opinions it will help reduce spam sites ensuring the site/domain is something that is going to be around, but on the other hand legitimate sites will take a penalty for quite some time reducing the potential traffic.

Let’s see how long Google makes our site play in the “Sand Box”.

Stay Tuned…