Give em something for free and get them hooked.

There are many companies out there though that will try and sell you a big mailing list and claim thats it optin and permission based etc which is usually rubbish.

If the list is so good then they would be using it themselves.

As someone who has a website I all too often concentrate on what I think is good from an seo perspective, not what is actually good for my business.

This article is good because it refocuses on what websites are for and how they should word for you, not just for the search engines.

Very good!

I am an ex management accountant and know a thing about how to “baffle people with bullshit” when it comes to numbers, however we all know that you only really need certain types of information to make decisions. (that’s why “executive summaries” exist)

Its the same with web stats.

I not only use web stats to gauge my traffic and the behaviour of my visitors but they play an important part in my advertising budget decisions because I will also look at where people are coming from.

For example, if I paid some money to have an ad on a portal and that portal was charging me a fortune each month to only refer a small amount of visitors, I would need to think about whether its worth paying money to that portal.

(If you are using adwords, this is why google offer free anayltics and great tracking software so they can justify the spend to you!)

Okay, sure, I would also need to decide if there was a special seo reason as to why I was advertising on the portal such as the PR or backlinks and relevance, but hey I could get all nerdy and scientific about it, but I wont.

Its really important not to get carried away “too much” with all the different statistics that are available.

A web sites success is really measured by the amount of unique visitors number because from the unique visitors you can roughly work out the conversion rates.

I have a couple of other sites and can, pretty much like clockwork know what my conversion rates are.

The stats that I receive are useful but a little overwhelming at times. In my line of work I can tell from a few headline numbers if something is worth investing in or not.

It is very useful to have a pointer to web stats and the ones that are the most relevant. I particularly like you suggestion on pages that are less interesting achieving more user times through pics and font etc. - and trying different methods out.

I will be saving this post.

Sorry for not replying sooner.

The first thing you have to do is to make sure that only authorised computers are on your network.

A really simple tool for home or business network to know if people are on your network is a nice little piece of software called “Network Magic”.

Its so good even Cisco stepped in and bought them! I like it because its simple to install and use. Basically its typical plug and play.

See http://www.purenetworks.com/

If you are an admin, one sure fire way to make sure that only authorised people are on your network is to use only MAC addresses, especially if you have wifi, because as you may or not know, wifi encryption is not safe at all.

Usually your router or firewall can be set to only permit certain mac addresses and anything else is rejected, again, you need to be an admin for that.

At any rate, if you have network magic installed as soon as someone connects to your network, a little pop up window informs you so you can quickly take action.

If you suspect that internal network users are in fact packet sniffing, its going to be a bit hard to tell because once the data has left your machine, and its crossing the network and you have authenticated machines on the network, packet sniffing, you wont know.

The only safest way is to ensure that your packets that you send across the network are encrypted.

For emails this means using PGP or similar and on web site surfing only using sites that use SSL.

If you use FTP, then you should use SecureFTP.

Really, if you don’t have admin privileges then you should be careful about what you send especially if you suspect someone sniffing your data.

You should treat your network as if it were the main internet (because well the internet is basically one giant network).

Hope that info helps a little.

Craig.

But which automated tools to use?

I had found http://www.seogenie.info
Seo Elite….

Which other’s?

Sincerely Clem

It would be good to also see the same thing for Yahoo, MSN and AOL!