My Tag Cloud of SEO in 2010

In 2010 I managed to write some posts which found an audience in Search Engines.
I've done a little Tag-Cloud using Wordl to see what Searches drove more traffic to my blog: it looks like the audience that found me was looking for information on tracking shares in Facebook using AddThis, ShareThis and AddToAny.

Related Post (August 2010): Use Wordl Tag-Cloud to Improve SEM/SEO Strategy 

My letter to the Three Kings

In Spain little (and not so little) children get their presents from the Three Wise Men on January 6^th and not from Santa or Saint Nicholas. In order to get their preferred gift, they need to write a letter, telling the Three Kings that they’ve been good last year and then they list their most wanted gifts.

Here’s my letter and request for gifts.

Queridos Reyes Magos // Dear Three Wise Men.

I think I’ve been a good on-line marketing and analytics boy this past year for the following reasons:

I’ve segmented, targeted and tested, reported and optimized. Reporting, analyzing, providing Insights and putting all this in improvements has been great this year. We did a couple of A/B tests, started to measuring the opinion of our visitors. We dug deep into the data and based our decisions on these data. I’ve also very much enjoyed the ‘urgency’ that comes with working for e-commerce sites.

Dear Wise Men, please give me this year the same challenges and tools to use data to improve customer satisfaction and revenue. Let’s improve and let’s convert!

I’ve been trying new tools this past year: Unica Netinsight (my own reporting tool: creating reports and defining variables), Google Analytics (always improving), WebCEO, 4Q (Voice of Customer, hurrah!), AddThis and ShareThis (great new analytics tools, both of them), MouseTrace (let’s keep an eye on them).

Dear Wise Men, please give me new tool, new ideas how to use them and new developments from the providers of the tools to test, to use and to help with improving. High on my list are Optimizer and Crazy Egg.

I’ve read books and blogs in 2010.

The best post was, without any doubt the Anchoring Effect from You Are Not So Smart. About how our mind uses anchors (like ‘original prize’) guide us to estimate prices or numbers. Greatly written, very well explained, mindblowing.

I’ve also enjoyed a couple of books, like the classic The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.

Also The Stranger’s Long Neck by Gerry McGovern was very interesting, making a defence of and presenting a method on improving Task Management.

Dear Kings, please give me new posts all-day, every-day to read and read and time to read it all. I mostly need time to read Web Analytics 2.0 and Cult of Analytics.

The past year I’ve also been a good boy, since I’ve written in my blog. I even got some kind of small audience, and even the search engines are giving me some traffic to some popular posts.

Please Wise Men, give me time and inspiration for this year to write interesting posts which are useful for my readers. I especially want time for a series of posts on Web Analytics and statistics. The idea is there, I just need the time. I might even want to squeeze a White Paper out of that idea.

I must say that I dedicated a lot of time to my passion, the Internet. Please Wise Men, don’t stop giving me more Internet, more to explore, more new stuff to start using like my foto-blog on tumbr. A good start for enjoying Internet in all it’s glory was the new job I found via twitter. I got that in advance, thank you Wise Men!

On a more personal note, I’ve been dedicated in using and updating the pretty cool Runkeeper to keep up with running and working out. Please Wise Men, let me keep using Runkeeper to get rid of those 5 kilos.

Please, Three Wise Men!! Pretty please??

A very quick look back on 2010.

1. The Internet is mine! We owns it!

2010 news year’s hangover had just gone away, and we already had to deal with the funniest moment of the year: the speech of the CEO of Telefonica, the biggest Internet Provider in Spain. Really sorry that it’s in Spanish, but it’s too funny to leave it out.

The argument of this CEO is that his company Telefonica, as Internet Provider, ‘owns’ the Internet and since they do everything (infrastructure, customer care, after-sales, billing,…) companies like Google (who just have algorithms and don’t do anything) should start paying fees to Telefonica (and AT&T) for the use of their networks. In February he assured that Internet companies would start paying such fees in 2010; since this didn’t happen, maybe it’s a sigh that he doesn’t really get it.

2. Science Investigates Usability
It was nice to see this summer (thanks to the great blog of TalleresSEO) that Scientific Investigation investigates the Internet and at Usability.

A study was published that gave a new look at the eye-tracking (where people look at on an internet page) of search result pages.

The study is pretty amazing, since it segments different search behaviour: it separates search results for people who search for information, search for navegation or search for transactional reasons. Of course, the behaviour is different for each segment (people who search for transactional reasons do look at the AdWords on the right hand side). Hurray for Segmentation!

The fact that science studies this is amazing: they’re the specialists in investigation, in methodology, in designing experiments, in doing statistical analysis. Such a pity then that there seems to be a mayor methodological error in this paper: Marcos & González-Caro conclude that people search for information or search to navigate, don’t look very much to the Paid Results, and they note that ‘this might be because in some cases of our experiment there weren’t any Paid Results‘… Now how can you conclude that somebody doesn’t look at something, if it’s not even there in many cases? It’s a bit too obvious that they don’t look, right? I’m not a scientist, but I would say that you have to contemplate 2 cases: How people behave when there are Paid Results and how people behave when there aren’t. Putting data together of people who hade a result page with paid results and others without them and then concluding that people don’t look at them, seems like a mistake to me.

You can download the whole study here. Sorry, again in Spanish, though with abstract in English.

3. Google Instant Launch

Methodological mistake or not, the results of the study discussed above were soon out of date, since Google decided to update the result pages. It Launched Google Instant: the Search results were automatically updating while you type, changing the way we use Google’s Search Engines. It came as a pretty big boom, but even the week later, it felt like something so natural, so useful and natural that it was instantly a Google classis. Later they launched Google Preview, with the same effect: like you can’t remember that it once wasn’t there.

The launch of Instant was also very Google and very beautiful: 2 doodle (modified logos of Google on the Search page) showed what Google was up to: it could change his page while you interacted with your mouse and with the Search Box. 

4. Second funniest moment of 2010

Hell yeah: why did anybody bother with developing web pages since 1997, when you see how perfectly this site is designed. 

http://www.hostaltokio.com/

5. Facebook gets real

Facebook has been a while with us, and for a lot of people it has just become a part of our lives, just like email has been for a long time: you have it, you use it, no big thing. We use FB to send messages, chat with friends and upload some pics. But Facebook might just become a real player in Internet in 2011, starting to use the power it has to innovate so many things. I realised that when I read this article from Blind Five Year Old on ‘Organic Search’ results in Facebook.

In short:

• Facebook has already an equal number of daily searches as Google. They’re mostly searches for friends or groups, but the potential is there.
• We use Facebook a lot, so using the search bar within Facebook might be easier then going to another page to search.
• Facebook has these ‘Like’ buttons on a lot of pages. These are very good indications of what you or your friends like, and gives FB a nice tool to index pages using these ‘Like’ buttons in a social way. If a lot of people like a page, it might be good result in searches.
• Facebook already puts search results of external sites for its searches, so it will be a case of developing and Google Search might have (at last) a real competitor.

It is often said that Google might not really understand Social, but Facebook might as well understand Search. And Google still gets a very large part of it’s income from search.

The whole article (pretty techy, actually):

http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/facebook-seo

Happy New Year!