you have to start with trust. then you hook 'em

I just returned from San Diego, where I participated in a 3-day course on advanced persuasion techniques. Led by Dr Eric Schaffer, Global CEO of Human Factors International, the seminar was called "PET" for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust. However, Dr Schaffer admits they call it PET only because it's a better acronym than TEPC: Trust, Emotion, Persuasion and Commitment.

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it’s important to return the correct server codes

Server status codes play a very important role in search engine optimization. These codes provide search engines with information about page status, and how pages should be treated by the search engine bots. Let’s take a look at the list of the most used codes related to SEO and review their influence on indexing process.

200 OK

The URL request was successful. In terms of SEO it means that the search engines could successfully access the URL. The page under this URL is visible to the search engines and could be indexed (if there no restriction--for example, blocking the page in robots.txt) without problems. This is the most common status code for the majority of pages on an average website.

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The following is a continuation of Facebook Privacy: Canadian Privacy Laws and How Facebook is Changing

The Report

The following are excerpts from the privacy commission's report detailing where the commission found Facebook in breach of Canadian Law

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I was going to write about email marketing today, particularly how to get many of the same features that you can find in ExactTargets "social sharing" with some spit and elbow grease, but then on Friday Facebook announced that it was going to implement the changes suggested by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner. Big news. However, while a lot of people are talking about the decision, few people are covering what is going to change.

In this post I hope to clarify for you all Canadian Personal Information Protection law (as it applies to Facebook), the concerns of the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Facebook's responses, and what that means not only for Canadian Facebook users, but for Facebook users world wide.

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Quiet week, but some good content. Sadly I'm a little too rushed this week to talk about it in detail, so you all will have to read it for yourselves.

We've got Google's new phrase based optimization, teens on twitter, and Canadian copyright craziness.

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compare apples to apples

We have a client whose IT department is stating that AWStats should be sufficient for their Web Analytics needs and questioning whether GA is really necessary

The problem arises, in part, out of the problem that the client has a large contingent in Germany and the IT department has questioned whether GA is in compliance with the "Bundesdatenschutzgesetz" (German Data Protection Law)?

The client is Widgets Inc.!

I am shocked that AWStats has even been compared with GA! AWStats itself does not make the comparison.

I responded along the following lines.

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the life of an
office hero is brutal

Unlike small and medium sized companies, in large corporations it's not as easy as walking down the hall to your developer to let them know that your going to need some URL re-writes, static landing pages and new content. In large organizations you're generally going to encounter a number of bureaucratic hurdles. At the end of all these obstacles there is one question that is going to need answering: is it worth the costs involved to make these changes? The following is an attempt to provide some friendly guidance to the marketing manager who sees the value in SEO but has got a battle to fight to get their boss on the same page.

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and the winner is… everyone's a winner!

So we've prepped our test question, organized our list into randomly sampled groups, made the big send, and waited a couple of weeks for the results.

Now is the moment of truth. The results.

And they tell us…

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New offices, more staff, big changes around VKI right now. What can I say? When the world turns left we go right.

Good week in the blogosphere too, with mobile web statistics, cross browser compatibility testing, and statistics on just how attached people are to Google.

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The developers of Google Website Optimizer have tried their hardest to make their product work in tandem with Google Analytics. Here at VKI, we have found that for the most part, they work great together. However, there are a few situations where GWO can interfere with GA or vice versa. Here is one such situation.

The Problem

There is a well-known problem when implementing an A-B test in Website Optimizer on a page that has Google Analytics installed. If you follow the instructions for installing the control script, and place it right at the top of the original page, you will lose referral information about how visitors got to the landing page. A detailed explanation of the problem and the solution can be found on Ophir Prusak's blog.

This solution fixes all the referral information except for when visitors come in by a campaign from a search engine (for example AdWords). In this case, one little piece of information is lost: the search terms a visitor typed in to the search engine when they saw your campaign.

Here's how it works:

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