Wow big week last week. Lots of work, plus our office had our Fifa 200x (I don't really know which one it is) tournament. I made it to quarter finals before being absolutely trounced.

Lots of good stuff this week, including brave words on blackhat, more page segmentation, massive numbers of twitter statistics, online advertising numbers, and an updated Better Google Analytics plug-in for Firefox 3.5.

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Direct Traffic - Top of the List

Direct visitors may be your most valuable. Keeping track of them makes sense. Advertisers, for example, may be more interested in your direct traffic than your paid traffic. And then there are the New Direct Visitors. That requires some expensive advertising or valuable word-of-mouth. If you are doing any off-line marketing, direct traffic KPIs rule (along with some fellow megalomaniacs).

So it makes sense to identify direct visits, to segment direct visitors and to track conversions within that segment.

Post #4, GA User Defined Variables (UDVs) Revisited described the Scenario "Improved Attribution" requiring that direct visitors status be recorded so as not to be overwritten by subsequent traffic sources. We delve more deeply here, distinguishing between direct and "external" visits and between direct visits and direct visitors. We also provide two code snippets below.

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Just a bit off the bottom, please

GWO just keeps getting better and better. About a year ago, Google introduced one of GWO's most useful features: the ability to prune losing combinations from experiments. The benefits were clear:

• Low-performing combinations no longer hurt overall conversion rates.
• Experiments could complete faster.

The only danger is that you must be cautious in using this feature. Once you prune a combination, you can't put it back in. So if you prune out of "panic" based on insufficient data, you might actually prune a potential winner. Deciding whether or not to prune is sometimes an agonizing decision.

Now, Google has taken the pruning functionality a step farther and removed the necessity of making agonizing decisions. With "auto-disabling", losing combinations are automatically removed from your experiment. You can even adjust how aggressively your experiments will be pruned:

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skymall.com, sellers of…
everything.

Last week I received an interesting book with a list of the Top 500 largest retail websites ranked by annual sales. It was very interesting to see how these huge on-line retailers use SEO to generate revenue, especially the brick and mortar store that uses the web as an extension of its standard business. Usually, owners of these companies don't focus on SEO as a revenue source and it's quite sad to see how these online retailers miss great opportunity to increase sales by using SEO.

Here is a good example: SkyMall Inc (www.skymall.com) is a direct marketer with about $75M in sales in 2007 and more than 450K unique visitors per month. Let's take a look at their SEO. Some quick research shows obvious problems.

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maybe we should call the Canadian pirate party "Barrette's privateers".

Canada Day, and The Fourth of July. Being a half American half Canadian that makes this a pretty big weekend. Or it would if I was at all patriotic. Oh well. At least the rest of the company was out celebrating.

This week we have some unique jpeg optimization techniques, advanced segmentation in GA, designing to social systems, and The Pirate Party of Canada!

Oh, and as one more reminder, send me your stories. You can tweet them to me at @ordinarychap, start a discussion at our facebook page or email me directly

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good form design requires well defined steps

I was reinstalling windows this weekend, and just as I was getting to my first restart I realized that Microsoft had completely and utterly failed at providing a good user experience during the installation process. You get about 40 minutes in, the computer restarts, and prompts you to enter some ancillary information, in a four step process. The first three steps are easy, you get them all done quickly (??), are ready to go and then... another 20-40 minutes of installation.

The problem is that Microsoft never let us know what we were getting into. They don't tell you the steps until you've already invested half an hour, then they provide a four part installation process, but the data needed and the time taken on each of those steps lead to false expectations for the last step.

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search better

Our American readers may not be aware of this, but today is Canada day (that's like our Independence Day, only 90 years later and with far fewer "bombs bursting in air" and what not). And as such our SEO team is whiling away their hours in the great out doors, instead of slaving fiendishly to the beat of the blog. As such, no SEO Mistakes post today (in retrospect I probably shouldn't have posted the revised schedule this week), instead we're presenting seven advanced search tips for July.

You may remember a long time ago I posted a list of ways to use smart bookmarks to achieve many of the same effects as the SEO toolbars out there. Today I'm looking at the same topic from the opposite side: instead of ways to improve your browser with bookmarks, I'm going to go over a few ways you can use search terms to find and do neat things.

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Updates to blog scheduling this week. Tuesday will remain Email/Copywriting/Etc., Wednesday is now home to our new SEO Mistakes section, Thursday Remains Usability (and some times Copywriting when Michael wants to), and Friday is now Brian Katz Advanced Analytics.

Great stuff this week, a great one from Avinash on Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, Content restrictions in Canada, alternates to nofollow now that nofollow doesnt work, and more.

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so much SEO knowledge,
so little SEO

Introduction

This is the first part of a new ongoing series on our blog: SEO missed opportunities. We've noticed that despite lots of information being out there, few web sites adhere to SEO best practices, and many are under-performing for valuable search terms. Oddly we find that this is especially common amidst large companies with strong real world business—the exact companies that you think would build strong web presences, given their high authority. Fortunately these companies provide fantastic real world examples of common mistakes. This week we're looking at a company favourite: Futureshop.ca.

The Opportunity

I live in Vancouver, Canada. One day I searched for a laptop mouse in google.ca - typed "buy laptop mouse" and selected option to show "pages from Canada". It surprised me that I did not see Futureshop.ca (BestBuy's brother here in Canada) in the first page of the results. Finally, after a quick look I found it on a sixth page. It is very unusual to see such poor search engine ranking performance for a big brand with powerful authority. I've done a couple of other searches and didn't find Futurseshop.ca anywhere close to the first page in Google.

We've looked at the Futureshop.ca website in the past to show some web usability problems.

Let's take a look at this website www.futureshop.ca in terms of SEO to find out any reasons for such bad performance in natural search results. After a quick review I put together a list of top 6 obvious problems.

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Oh come on... let me in!

Jakob Nielsen has officially come out against password masking, arguing that (in most cases at least) the usability issues it creates outweigh the overstated security issues.

Since passwords (especially when masked) are a personal pet peeve, my first reaction was "YES!" But after thinking about it a while, and discussing it with colleagues, there appear to be at least two problems with presenting passwords in clear type.

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