From the category archives:

Web Analytics

Website Tracking / Revolution in Search

by Barry Adams October 13, 2011

For Search News Central I wrote an article outlining several often-overlooked data tracking opportunities that can help website owners make more informed decisions about how to improve their site: Search News Central: Are You Tracking All That Happens on Your Website? Many people seem to think that just installing Google Analytics tracking code on every [...]

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IP Address Geotargeting / State of Search

by Barry Adams August 8, 2011

I wrote a host of short blog posts for State of Search over the past few weeks to cover for the site’s owner Bas van den Beld while he was on vacation. The most substantial of these blog posts is a case study on why geotargeting users based on IP address is a silly affair, [...]

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My Own URL Shortener: Set-Up and January Stats

by Barry Adams February 1, 2011

Late last year I decided to use my quiet time in the holiday season to set up my own URL shortener. I like bit.ly a lot, but the idea of having full control over my own URL shortener as well as a ‘personal brand’ short URL – along the lines of yoa.st – persuaded me [...]

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Google Data / SEO Search

by Barry Adams October 26, 2010

For Search News Central I’ve written a blog post about the trustworthiness of the data Google shares with us. In many of Google’s free tools, such as Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and even Adwords, the data we’re presented with isn’t always reliable. Search News Central: Can We Trust Google’s Data? As part of my work for [...]

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Improving Online Conversions free e-book

by Barry Adams September 8, 2010

If you’re doing any search engine advertising you should be tracking what your ROI is. In other words, you should be monitoring your PPC spend and your income from this spend – i.e. your conversions from PPC. If you’re using Google Adwords, you’re in luck: Google has an array of tools that allow you to [...]

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Facebook Takes Social Media Marketing Seriously

by Barry Adams March 31, 2010

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 30 March 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.) Last week I received a surprising email from Facebook entitled ‘Your Weekly Facebook Page Update’. It contained an overview of all the Facebook pages I am an admin of, with statistics on the number of [...]

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Search Engine Advertising: a Step By Step Guide – Part 3

by Barry Adams February 11, 2009

Part 1 – Choosing your keywords Part 2 – Writing good ads Part 3 – Create landing pages that convert In part 1 of this guide to search engine advertising we discussed how to choose the right keywords to advertise on. In part 2 we showed how to make effective ads. Now in the final [...]

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Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

by Barry Adams November 25, 2008

Search engines are the motors that drive traffic to your website. Getting your site ranked highly in search engines is an important factor of success. The discipline that focuses on this is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. In an effort to help beginning webmasters get underway with SEO Google has published a [...]

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Fix Your Broken Links

by Barry Adams October 21, 2008

Broken links on your website are bad. A broken link is a sign of a poorly maintained website. Having broken links on your site doesn’t instill trust in your potential customers. So you want to ensure your site doesn’t have any links that don’t work. As your website grows it gets harder to keep track [...]

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Keep Your Forms Short And Simple

by Barry Adams October 16, 2008

Privacy matters to internet users. People are aware of the dangers of giving out personal information, and everyone that has an email address understands the hazards and annoyances of spam. As a result users are less inclined to type a lot of information in a website’s form. Whether it’s a contact form or an orderform, [...]

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