Learn more about robots.txt

This is the video about how Google handles the robots.txt file. learn more about robots.txt. You can watch it if you want:

Chrome Browser Tested on Google Chrome OS

Here’s a close looking into knowing how the upcoming Google Chrome OS will behave, specifically how the Chrome browser will look like on Chrome OS. A Techcrunch reader was able to grab the code from the Chromium build folder, installed it and is now reporting some of his observations.

First thing that you’ll notice is a new logo in the upper left hand corner of the screen depicting a colorful circle with a white center. When you clicked on the logo, it gives you a window that says Google Short Links that requires a Google.com domain for it to be used correctly. It’s still remains a mystery though as to what this link actually contain although there is a disclaimer that reads – “Google is not affiliated with the contents of Google Short Links or its owners.” On the opposite side where this mysterious logo appears is a clock, a network status indicator and a battery level indicator. Right now, only the clock is functional. A drop down menu is also in the same side. If you are a Chrome browser user, this is similar its drop down menu, only this time a new option labeled “Chrome OS” is added. There is also an option for Touchpad settings, clear browsing data, import bookmarks and settings as well an option to switch to full-screen mode. Hoax or not? This image and coverage seems pretty solid. Can’t wait to get a Google Chrome Netbook next year.

September 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings by comScore

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Americans conducted 13.8 billion searches in September, down 1 percent from August (which had one additional day compared to September). Google Sites accounted for 9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.3 billion), Ask Network (541 million) and AOL LLC (416 million).

7 Offline Tactics To Drive Visitors To Your Website

Most of my business is web-based, but I use all and every marketing technique that can boost my sales. Offline and online together gives you a good mix of marketing processes to use if one or other slows down or stops completely. These are 7 offline ways I use to drive visitors to my website and they should be part of your marketing strategy too.

1) Classified Ads Out of date?

You would be surprised how effective small classified adverts in niche magazines are in driving people to a website. Because you only have a few words, treat it like a Google Ad. Keep the headline relevant, the text topical and end with a call to action to visit your website for more information. I also give a telephone number for people to call for more information.

Why? Because it gives me the opportunity to get a mailing address which I can use. I then send offline mailings and postcards to them at a later date and this has proved very successful.

2) Display Advert

A bigger statement, but also a lot more expensive. Usually a quarter, half or full page of the publication so you can make more use of your headline and body text to create interest and give them more reasons why they should visit your website.

Because of the increased cost, you need to think this carefully as it is not always justified. Remember to test all adverts that you run for responsiveness to the advert AND conversion to sales.

3) Flyer or Insert

This is so simple you must implement it immediately. With every physical order you send out to new customers include a flyer that advertises another of your products and / or website. Once those customers have bought from you they have confidence in you and now is the ideal time for them to buy from you again.

Flyers are also a cheap and effective way to reach new customers when you have a Joint Venture (JV) arrangement with another business. For instance, we have a Junior Soccer Site and so an ideal JV would be with a major sporting goods supplier. Every time they send out an order, we have a potential new customer reading our flyer, at very little cost to us.

4) A Full Direct Mail Pack

Direct mail is a specialised area and you need to treat it with caution as it's easy to lose money when you don't know what you are doing. With direct mail you must understand your lifetime customer value and have a good knowledge of your response and conversion metrics to be successful.

In the past I have experimented and tested including a web address on my order form to see if that had any effect on orders. The results were variefd because in one niche market it increased my normal conversion levels but in another it showed a fall.

I can't be certain why; but one theory is that by including a web address on your order form you are giving your customer the option to put your order to one side to 'deal with later online', but usually 'later' means they won't get round to it.

5) A Single Letter or Postcard

I successfully use this technique a lot with existing customers or customers who haven't bought from me in a while and need rejuvenating with a new offer.

Keep it simple with a personal, one page letter or postcard giving a small amount of information and a call to action directing your customer to a website.

6) Seminars

Once your business becomes successful you will probably be asked to speak at, or run, seminars and workshops on your niche topic and it is a great way to promote your product or service.

You must always, always, include a web address within your presentation to direct your audience for t more information about you or your products. I recommend you put up a special page for the event you are at and tell people they can download your presentation (or offer a special report) if they visit the site and leave their name and email address.

Also, get the most from your business card and make sure it has a call to action on it as well as your details. Offer it to those you meet during the event and give them a reason to contact you afterwards.

7) Books

Books are an excellent marketing tool and not as hard to write or produce as you might think. In the book you can place bounce back offers directing people to your websites for more information or free downloadable gifts and you can use the book to place adverts for your own products or services.

By selling it you can increase your profits, or just give it away as a bonus at seminars and generate more traffic to your website.

These 7 simple offline techniques will drive online sales. Don't make the mistake of thinking that an online business only means you do everything on the Internet.

Google Analytics New Features: Intelligence Engine, Custom Alerts & More

Google has just announced a number of new features for Google Analytics, including more powerful reporting capabilities, greater customization options and a new “intelligence engine” that Google says can help search marketers drive smarter data insights. Here’s a rundown of the new features, and why they’re important.

Analytics intelligence

Google Analytics new “intelligence engine” comes with default alerts that will show you interesting trends in the data: it surfaces insights. Exactly how the algorithm that does this works is not clear, but it certainly takes into consideration many variables, in a very Googly manner. This can be a great way to start your day looking for insights—a kind of a conversation initiator for web analysts.

As we can see in the screenshot, Google did not let us down when it comes to design and UI. The interface is very intuitive and lets the analyst move through new alerts quickly.

Some really interesting things you can do:

Define your alert sensitivity. This controls the number of automatic alerts that will be triggered to appear in the Intelligence report page. As Google explains, “a higher significance rating is assigned as the difference between the actual performance increases with the expected performance.”

Create advanced segments based on alerts. On the right column of each alert you will see a link to create a segment. This is highly useful, since through alerts you might discover high converting segments that should be tracked separately, so Google makes this segment only one click away.

Change grouping method. This is very handy if you prefer to look at the data grouped by metrics or by dimensions. It’s a very useful way to change the data arrangement.

Creating custom alerts

Creating alerts is a very effective way to track visitor segments that are specially interesting to you. Let’s say you run a banner campaign to bring people into the website. How can you decide when to stop the campaign? Now you can use alerts to have an email delivered to you once your campaign bounce rate increases by 10% compared to the same day in the previous week. This is valuable because the website visitors (where the banner is shown) might get used to it, meaning that you reached those users that were high probability prospects. The option to compare to the same day in the previous week is a very good addition since it accounts for weekly variability.

Other new features

In addition to the intelligence engine and the ability to create custom alerts, Google has also enhanced Google Analytics with the following new features, according to this Google Analytics blog post:

Expanded goals & site engagement goals. Two new goal types allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site. The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. Furthermore, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile.

Expanded mobile reporting. Google Analytics now tracks mobile applications built for iPhone and Android devices. Mobile app developers can understand how users engage with their mobile apps, such as what actions are taken within an app and what features are used. In addition, for customers with a mobile website, Google Analytics can now track traffic to mobile sites from all web-enabled devices whether or not the device runs JavaScript.

Advanced analysis features (incl. advanced table filtering). Google Analytics provides an arsenal of power tools you can use to perform in-depth, on the fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools. Using Secondary Dimensions, you can view multiple levels and combinations of data side by side instead of having to drill down into each level. You can then use the Pivoting feature to cross-tabulate two different metrics with two different dimensions.

Multiple custom variables. Custom Variables gives power-users the flexibility to customize Google Analytics tracking to collect the unique site data most important to their business. With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into trackable segments.

Despite all of these great new features, we will still be dependent on human beings to analyze and take action on the data. Even Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik has written about his 10/90 rule, which says that just 10% of web analytics relates to tools, while 90% of both cost and success has to do with humans who analyze data and make recommendations for change based on their insights.

Google Analytics Becomes More Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent

Google is rolling out some useful enhancements to its already useful and powerful Google Analytics tool. These new features give the Analytics tools more power, flexibility and intelligence.

Here are the highlights of the new features of Google Analytics:

* Addition of two new goal types for measuring user engagement and branding success that allows webmasters to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per visit. Up to 20 goals can now be defined.

* Improved tracking of mobile websites and mobile apps on mobile devices even if the device is running Javascript or not. This was made possible through the addition of a server side code snippet on mobile websites using Google Analytics

* Addition of Advanced Table Filtering feature for advance data analysis and for filtering rows in a table based on different metric conditions

* Creation of Custom Report with the option to select Unique Visitors as a measurement against any Google Analytics dimension

* Multiple custom variables, sharing segments and custom report templates for enterprise adaptation of Google Analytics. These tools provide customization options for enterprise Google Analytics usage

These are the highlights of the enhancements that were done to Google Analytics but the most interesting new feature is perhaps the Analytics Intelligence. This new feature provides automatic alerts when there are significant changes in the data patterns of site metrics and dimensions on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Analytics Intelligence will prompt you on the most significant indicator that you should pay attention to. This will give you more time on doing corrective action to the issues highlighted by Google Analytics.

Add Cool Features to Google Search with Google Bump

Google Bump is a n awesome Greasemonkey script worth giving a try. It adds some cool functionality to the Google web search:

Main features include Multisearch, Image & Video results with a Player, Wikipedia definitions and links, and some clutter cleanup by

Most Useful Features:

1. MultiSearch

Search 3 search engines simultaneously (available via the drop-down). Search results will open in new tabs. Available search engines include: Google, Digg, CNN, Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube, Ebay, etc:

2. In-Line Video and Image Search

The tool searches videos and images and displays relevant results in the sidebar (another way to make the most of Google search sidebar):

(You can view any video right within Google SERPs)

Tool configurations:

"General" tab:

* Open links in a new tab;

* Use MultiSearch;

* Resize the search button.

"Appearance" tab:

* Remove search suggestions;

* Remove Sidebar ads;

* Choose Layout.

"Other Searches" tab:

* Search Wikipedia;

* Search videos;

* Remove videos from search results:

Google, Too, Will Index Twitter Updates

Oh, that was fast. Google’s Marissa Mayer just announced that Google will also include Twitter’s public updates to Google’s searh results. So, that’s what the non-exclusive Twitter deal with Microsoft Bing meant.Exactly how Google will implement this search result integration is yet unknown. This is where Microsoft one upped Google. But it might actually work in favor of Google though. It’s like saying, go ahead test it first and see how it goes, when you’re done and user’s are done with you, that’s the time when we’re going to strike. Clever move.

It’s a good thing that Microsoft still have a back up ammunition – Facebook. Now this is where Google can’t compete.

Soon it will be a question of which stream of user-generated updates are more useful and which are not. It’s a battle between the two top social media tool and the two search engines were caught in-between.

And who might the winner be? I would prefer that you send the answer to me via Twitter DM than send it to my Facebook account.