Here’s why:

• Bounce rate is believed to be a factor used in determining your Google search rankings.  This is a measure of the percentage of visitors the leave your site after only viewing the initial first page.  It would be silly and very unfair for Google to penalize sites that don’t use Analytics, however, for sites that do use Analytics, Google can easily access your bounce rate.  Without Analytics, I can’t think of an easy way Google engineers could figure this out, unless they’re using data from the Chrome browser, in which case we’re all fucked.  I know some people will say “well, just create quality websites with unique content that engage your visitors, and your bounce rate will go down”.  I’ve said the same thing myself.  It’s good advice.  But I still don’t want Google having such easy access to data that they’ll use in determining my rankings.
• Lately, Google has been on a real witch hunt for private blog networks and other SEO services.  There’s been reports by many companies about their domains being deindexed by Google, which essentially destroys their business.  Being in the SEO biz, I don’t want to share any data with Google if they’re coming after people like me.
• I’m worried about the whole footprint issue, with all my sites using Analytics, I’m assuming that somehow this makes it easy for Google to calculate similarities in traffic between my sites and negatively impact my rankings.  I also think Bing/Yahoo can notice this footprint.  Maybe this is over-the-top paranoid, but it worries me nonetheless.

Here’s a few of the alternative web analytics tools/services that I’ve been evaluating:

StatCounter

• They host your data and you just have to add a bit of javascript code to your site.  So, no FTPing or creating databases to get StatCounter to work.
• Their Free account seems decent, suitable for sites that you don’t care about Goals or Actions or anything super comprehensive

Clicky

• Another popular hosted service.
• They specialize in real-time data and have a tool that allows you to popup a chat window with visitors
• Their Free account doesn’t seem very good, so there’s a fair bit of pressure to upgrade to a Paid account.

Piwik

•  Probably the most popular open-source, self-hosted solution.  This means you need to download the software, unzip it, FTP it to your server, create a MySQL database, then go through the installation process.  It’s a PITA initially but…
• The functionality is much better than StatCounter, at least from what I’ve seen
• I’ve been running Piwik on a few sites for over a year, the only problem being some larger reports have trouble loading due to PHP memory issues.  This could be resolved by moving away from shared hosting to something with more horsepower like a VPS or dedicated server.

Open Web Analytics

• Another self-hosted app, so you’re running it on your own server.
• Clean and comprehensive interface.
• It looks like Piwik is the more popular self-hosted tool, but OWA has an impressive list of features.
• Comparison to Google Analytics:  http://www.openwebanalytics.com/?page_id=158

What about you?  Have you left Google Analytics for similar reasons?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

• Get Twitter followers
• Get Facebook likes
• Get MySpace followers
• Get StumbleUpon followers
• Get Digg followers
• Get visitors to ANY website

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/correlation-data-for-seo-and-social-media-analysis-part-2-whiteboard-friday

One of the things we did when we saw no-follow links having a really high correlation was we went, well that’s just weird. Maybe what’s going on here is that no-follow links and followed links have a high correlation with each other, and in fact, they do. If you have lots of no-follow links, you tend to also have lots of followed links. So, that makes sense. All right maybe that’s all that’s causing it. But then there’s this one weird, weird data point – well, there’s several weird ones – but there’s this one weird data point around the percentage of followed links having a negative correlation, kind of a strong negative correlation with rankings, which sounds weird, but it suggests that websites and web pages that don’t have any no-follow links aren’t performing as well as those who have at least some or some reasonable percentage of them.

This paragraph caught my attention enormously, mostly because I’ve always been of the opinion that natural backlinking from a variety of sources is the best way to do off-page SEO.  I’ve always thought that a healthy mixture of noFollow and doFollow links were important, otherwise it’s pretty frickin’ easy for search engines to notice that you’re trying to “game” your rankings.  This is also why my automated social media service, SocialAdr uses a mixture of noFollow and doFollow social media sites.

Aaron @ SEOmoz sums it up well when he adds:

What I think that’s happening is that people who do natural things, normal websites, this is not normal. It is not normal to have a website that only has followed links. It’s almost like, man, you must be doing something funny because normal websites earn links from no-follows. They get linked to on Wikipedia, which is no-follow. They have blog comments that people leave and point to them. Those are no-follow. They have social media profiles. Almost all of those are no-follow. People tweet about them. Those are no-follow. There are all of these no-follow links that exist from sort of good places on the Web where you would naturally be mentioned if you’re a good website.

Thoughts?

Linklicious

Instead of wasting hours building RSS feeds and pinging the feeds hoping for crawls, Linklicious eliminates all of the guesswork by providing a guaranteed 100% crawl rate.   It comes with a WordPress plugin so every post is added to an RSS feed, auto-shortened, pinged, and tracked so you can see exactly when your links were spidered.

Linklicious is quite affordable too:  they have a free account and the most feature-packed paid account is only $54/mo.

Here’s a chart that shows the improved crawl late with and without using Linklicious:

Link Pushing

I was looking for a completely automated, hands-off service that combined multiple backlinking techniques.   So I headed over to the Warrior Forum and a quick search brought me to this WSO.

Here’s what the “Link Pushing” service offers:

1. User enters their information; a 2 minute process.
2. System grabs an article from a random article directory.
3. System spins the article using The Best Spinner.
4. System submits the articles to Web 2.0 Properties and Auto-Approve Article directories backlinking to the money site.
5. System then submits to various Doc share sites splitting the backlinks randomly to the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve articles.
6. System then submits to microblog sites with links randomly split between the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve Article sites.
7. System then submits spun articles to non-auto approval article sites with backlinks to the Web 2.0s and the auto approved article sites.

I had a couple questions before signing up and was super impressed with how quickly and professionally Greg (one of the owners) responded to me.  Although this service is in its infancy, so far I really like how easy it is to use and it seems like these dudes have some great features planned in the next release.  I don’t have enough data on its effectiveness to improve SERPs yet but I’ll post an update when I do.

Why?  I have no frickin’ idea, but it’s a bit ridiculous.  This means that if you have Skype installed on your laptop, desktop, and cell phone, there’s 3 different versions of your conversations stored…one on each device…that you can only access locally.  If your laptop is stolen, there goes all those conversations, never to be seen again.  And if you decide to reformat your computer, reinstall the O/S and Skype, good luck retrieving your conversations, even if you backed up the encrypted files.  There’s not even a tool available to unencrypt the files.

Hopefully you’re familiar with Gmail and its kickass archiving, labeling, searching, and cloud-access functionality.

Well, the good news is I’ve found a Skype plugin that will save all your Skype conversations (both text and voice) to your Gmail account.  This means you’ll never lose anything, you can access your history from any computer, anywhere in the world, and everything is super easy to search.

How much will this cost ya?  Well a couple months ago I paid $24.99 (one-time fee), but for the next 5 days it’s available for only $14.99.  Heckuva deal if ya ask me!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like/

One of the great things about Facebook Pages is that they can become viral.  It may take you a month to get to 100 “fans” (I guess they’re now considered “people that like your Page”), but you could easily reach 1000 in the next week and 100,000 a week after that.  This is due to the Facebook engine that automagically suggests Pages to your friends, and your friends’ friends, and so on and so forth.  And of course it helps that many Facebook users are addicted and will click “Like” to anything they see.

Well, the Like plugin helps to make your WordPress posts and pages viral too!

See the buttons at the top and bottom of this post?  Those are from Like.

One super cool feature is that it works with the new Facebook Open Graph API which makes it very easy for developers to integrate Facebook applications into websites.   I suppose this is furthering Facebook’s goal to take over the world…but you could at least join them for the ride and get more visitors on the way!

Here’s what the plugin settings look like:

As you can see, it also hooks up to a Facebook application, although I haven’t tested this myself yet.

So what are ya waiting for?  Download and install this wicked plugin and join the viral train.

So, just when you thought you were already overwhelmed with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, along comes yet another social networking/sharing service.

Google Buzz has joined the party.

There’s already lots of rants floating around about why it’s awesome or why it’s great, but I’m going to talk specifically about what should be improved with it.  To be perfectly honest though, I do like the idea of having a social networking tool integrated into Gmail, since I already use it for all my email as well as chat.  Plus, the Gmail search feature is wicked-cool and will undoubtedly be useful with Buzz.

Confusing Privacy Features

Most people want to be able to manually approve each follower, rather than having them auto-follow.  However, they don’t realize that Google Buzz is integrated with your public Google Profile.  So this means whatever you post in Buzz as “public” can be viewed by ANYONE on the internet via your Google Profile page.  Therefore it doesn’t matter if people have chosen to follow you or not.  If you are concerned about the privacy of a post, simply choose “Private” and optionally post to a “group” of Gmail contacts.

No Way To Tell Which Post is New

It’s nice that there’s an indication near the Buzz logo in your Gmail menu of how many new Buzz posts there are, however once you get into Buzz there’s no way to know which posts are the new ones.  So you’re stuck reading through a lot of what you’ve already read.  Definitely a time-waster.

No Tags / Keywords / Categories

These would be very handy to help search and organize our Buzz’s.

Can’t Include an Image in a Comment

When you create your own post there’s a useful link to insert a photo from your computer.  However, this isn’t possible when commenting on your friend’s posts.  There’s been a few times I wanted to include a pic in my comment but wasn’t able to.

Re-Buzz?

Similar to a Twitter Re-Tweet, it would be cool to be able to send a Buzz from one of your contacts along to your other contacts.

That’s about it for now.  Does anyone have other ideas?

Apparently in late December 2009 Google heard the complaints and finally created a Lab feature that allows us to set a Default Font.  Woot!
 

Here’s some instructions:

1. Click the green lab beaker in the top right (or go here https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#settings/labs)
2. Scroll down about 2/3 until you find Default Text Styling (or CTRL-F to search for it)
   
3. Click Enable
4. Scroll up to the top
5. Click Save Changes
6. Click the General Settings tab at the top (or go here https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#settings)
7. Set your Default text style about half-way down
8. Click Save Changes at the bottom

Now marvel at how with this time-saving hack Gmail became even more awesome

SocialMarker is a free tool that I use fairly often.  It makes it a heck of a lot easier to submit my sites to social bookmarking services, than if I was to do it manually.

After my negative review of SocialBot yesterday I figured I should discuss what I do find useful for social bookmarking.

So why do I use SocialMarker?

• It helps me get traffic.
• It helps me get a lot of backlinks, some from high PR sites.
• It works with many of the popular social bookmarking services…51 in total!
• It’s free!

Now let me explain how it all works:

1. First I load up whatever page I want to submit in FireFox.  I’ll use im-fun.com as an example.
2. I have a “SocialMarker” bookmark in my Bookmarks Toolbar.  The SocialMarker site explains how to get this setup.
3. I click the “SocialMarker” bookmark.
4. Another tab appears with SocialMarker loaded and the Title and URL of my page auto-populated.
5. I manually enter text (a description of the page) and appropriate tags.
6. I select the social bookmarking services that I want to submit to (I usually choose the “Dofollow” and “Best” ones, not all of them).
7. I click “Submit”
8. SocialMarker loads up a frame that opens up pages for each service, with buttons at the top to navigate between services
   • 
9. I then go from service to service, logging in (often I’m already logged in from a prior session), and submitting my page by dragging and dropping each field from the helpful bar at the bottom of the screen.  Often SocialMarker is smart enough to populate these fields without me having to do anything.
   • 

So, although there’s still some manual effort involved, SocialMarker does make it easer to submit sites to social bookmarking services.  And it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s FREE.  I’ll keep using it until I find something better or win the lottery and can finally afford to spend more money on internet marketing tools.

One last thing I should mention – I also use the Tag Format Converter tool (or the downloadable spreadsheet) that I wrote.  There’s 5 different tag formats that social bookmarking services require; you can’t just use the default comma-separated format for each service.  Yes, it sucks ass.  Hopefully one day those social bookmarking bigwigs will decide on a standard format.  But that’s just wishful thinking

Well, at least the best one that I’ve found so far…haha.

Why?

Let me list the reasons…

• It’s FREE
• It’s got a name generator > Creates pronounceable names using language rules and parameters
• It’s got themes >Combines your keywords with preset wordlists
• It’s got a spinner > Combines various methods of search
• It’s got a dictionary > Looks for word relations in semantic databases; combines them with your suffixes or prefixes
• It’s got a randomizer > Looks for word relations in semantic databases and rearranges the word parts to come up with new names
• It’s got a blender > Uses your Favorites or Custom Theme to create random permutations
  
• It’s can handle bulk phrases > Enter up to 100 keywords or phrases on separate lines

Some of the stuff it does is insane!  There’s no way I could come up with even 10% of the domain names it generates by myself.

Anyways, I’m a big fan.  You should cheggit out…