One of the services we offer for our web design or web development customers is Google Analytics statistics.  Google has a great web statistics program that you can view to get all the information you could ever want about your website and even more.

Here is some of the information you can get using Google Analytics

• Visits during any time period
• Web browser information
• Search engine information
• User operating systems
• User screen resolution size

If you sell products online you can track your sales, conversions and leads.  If you would like more information on getting Google Analytics statistics on your website please contact us.

Screen Resolutions

Search Engine Source

Operating Systems

Screen Resolutions

Users browsers

SEOmoz has a video up discussing PageRank, what it is and how it works.  PageRank is the number that Google assigns the pages on your web site.  Since Google doesn’t release definite information about PageRank and how it works, there are a lot of theories.  We know a majority of your PageRank scores comes from backlinks (links to your web pages).  There are tons of other factors that calculate your pagerank and hopefully this video will clear at least some things up.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-What’s PageRank Got to do With It? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Bschool.com has released an article titled “50 web tools to keep tabs on your competitors.”  There is actually a lot of good information in there.  One of them is Google Alerts.  We previously discussed Google Alerts for monitoring your own company.  Well you can use Google Alerts to monitor any keywords, including ones that might include your competitors name or the type of business you are in.

Check out the whole list here

Google has a lot of features and cool tools that a lot of people don’t know about.  One of them is Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is used to notify you of a string of text that it finds on web pages.  This can be particularly useful if you want to know what people are saying about your company.  Google Alerts will only find newly add pages however, if you want to find anything older then you can just use Google for that.

You can enter your companies name as an alert.  They have many different types of alerts, I usually choose Comprehensive.

A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.

A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.

A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.

A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.

A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

Then you can choose how often you want to receive the alert.  You can choose from once a day, as it happens or once a week.

Remember though, usually anytime you add a new page to your website, it will show up as a Google Alert.  This is because Google sees your company name on your website.  This can be good for a lot of reasons, it shows you how fast Google is indexing your site.

You can sign up for Google Alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts/

Over the weekend Google announced they are making a new web browser named Google Chrome.  They want to innovate the web and add value to the users with this new browser.  The beta of the browser is supposed to be out today but as of this writing it is not available.

Some of the interesting features are:

• Tabs on top of the address bar, instead of below.  This basically will make every tab their own browser.  So if one tab causes a crash, only that tab will crash, not the whole browser.
• Google will constantly be updating the browser with blacklisted sites.  These are sites that might contain malware of viruses.

There are quite a few other features they initally talk about but it mainly has to do with the programming of the browser and how it is ran.

April 29 - May 1, 2008

My week at Interop was a productive and frustrating experience.  I chose to attend the Interop conference in Las Vegas this year simply because I wanted to find out about new technologies being introduced and how they were going to be able to help the SMB’s (Small-Medium Business).  The event was held at Mandalay Bay hotel and casino this year and for those of you that have been to Mandalay Bay you know what a beautiful hotel it is.  The exhibitors, over 500 of them, were located in the largest room and reminded me of the spring Home Show that is held annually in Americas Center and The Jones Dome.  One vendor after another with small to large booths setup with the purpose of influencing you to take a look at their product line.  This year the consistent theme was 10GB networking and Green Computing.

Most of the vendors were giving away the normal stuff like t-shirts, koozies, pens & bouncing balls, all with their logo of course, and some of them were giving away a chance at an ipod touch, a wii and a few Best Buy gift cards.  On Wednesday I found myself in the lead for a wii at the Citrix booth until late in the day when I was finally removed from the leader board by what turned out to be a whole bunch of people, and I came home empty handed,except for all the t-shirts, koozies, pens & bouncing balls and stacks of literature.

Doug Kropp racing mini cars at the Citrix
booth trying to win a Wii.

It was good event and all in all we learned enough to make the trip worth the effort.  Green Computing is a hot buzz word throughout the industry and we are working on ways to introduce the concept to our clients.  Here are pictures that we snapped of some more booths.

Netgear was one of the vendors that showcased a product line that
a small business could actually utilize.  Their smart switches are reasonably priced and perform a multitude of functions that give you more control over your
network environment.

Google was here promoting on of their products, I’m just not sure
which one.  Since it wasn’t Android I didn’t really care too much.

A wireless switch, interesting concept.

Microsoft talking about Interoperability.