Data Center Hub

Here are a few more of the tools I use for web site intelligence. I could write an article on each, but that would take away the fun of your discovery of the tools and their ultimate use in your hands- they’re not all hammers- and best of all, you won’t smash your fingers with any of these internet marketing research tools.

Quantcast can help you determine popularity of a site, demographics of visitors, and also tip you to what other sites visitors of your target site also visit. It can also help you as a site owner to learn your reach better. You may be disappointed to find what your reach really is- but that does not mean you don’t have an effective site. You can still have small reach while dominating for your chosen keywords. www.quantcast.com

Here is a favorite of mine. It is rather tedious to download the root zone files from each registry and run them through a database. If you really want to know what your competition is doing, a subscription to www.domaintools.com and their name server spy feature can help you find out. You can get an alert each time your competitor registers a new domain to their name server, or filter on the email address they use for domains. This is all publicly available data- no espionage going on here, just good old hard research not easily accessed unless you dig through 30 GB of data daily. There are also dozens of other tools on this site; many are free. The name suggestion tool is helpful in finding new related domains.

This one can help you improve your conversions. There have been studies showing eye patterns on web pages typically form the letter “F”- I’ve seen it on my own pages. Try using the heat map and you’ll see. It is amazing how tiny tweaks can improve your conversion rates. One tip I learned- keep your action items “above the fold” as they (used) to say in the newspaper business. www.crazyegg.com

Naturally there are more tools I use- remember: “The first rule of success in business is: never tell everything you know. The second rule is:” If you’d like to learn more about improving the performance of your web sites, head over to avatava.com and contact me. I have been working at this web site stuff since 1994. And so you know; I am not affiliated with any of the above companies other than as a user of their services.

I’ll show you how you can start looking up domains on your local windows machine within a few minutes of downloading Cygwin.

I have a few associates who have a regular need to do whois queries. Many of them go to popular registrars’ websites to look up domains- they are amazed at how quickly I can get to the information they’re searching for. The websites take too much time in my opinion. Whois is a default command line utility in Unix-like OSes, but not on Windows. I’ll show you how to add it to your Win box without being too geeky.

1. Get Cygwin- www.cygwin.org – Cygwin is a suite of command line utilities for windows- without Cygwin I feel like a carpenter without anything but a hammer. Download and run the setup.exe
2. Accept all the defaults, choosing a mirror which seems to be near you. When you get to the “select packages” screen, maximize the box and expand the “Net” section, scroll down to “whois: GNU whois” and click the item in the “New” column- you should see the package version instead of “Skip”. Click “Next” and when the install is done, open a shell under Cygwin.
3. When in your shell, simply type: whois domain.com and press enter. You should see a response from the server in a few seconds.

Enjoy- you now have many more tools available to you- just like a power user!

Gmail is down with error 502

OK Guys, I got the dreaded 502 error on my Gmail account today- funny thing though, my Firefox app still kept delivering screen pops- so I knew all of Gmail was not down. I logged into a server that was 150 miles from my home location and what do you know? Gmail worked from there! So, it appears my home connection kept going out to a dead server. Solution? Simply run ipconfig /flushdns from a command prompt- worked for me! BTW, if you are running Vista, don’t forget to right click on the command prompt icon and choose “Run as Administrator” or you’ll get a message about elevated privileges required. Hope this helps. Later, Bill Laakkonen

I’ve been asked many times how I’ve achieved such good search engine optimization results. I have to admit, I have a secret tool I use- it’s called Web Position 4 Pro. You can use it to analyze, report, optimize, submit to search engines, and more. No, I’m not an affiliate- not getting paid to endorse the product. I find it useful and if you design a web site to make money- you should find it useful too.

The only downside I’ve found is the Wordtracker feature requires a separate subscription, as does the web page critic feature. In reality, this is good because the targets are always changing, and people can’t be expected to work for free. You can get a free trial version of the WebPosition Pro 4 here- nothing to lose, and I’ll bet you’ll learn something new about SEO.

This is a helpful article for the uninitiated regarding control over not only which pages appear in search results, but also shows some options you can use to control how they appear- read 6 ways to control how and what content appears in search engines

Have you recently installed Google Analytics to your site and found CartIt is broken?

If you visit a site which uses the CartIt shopping cart and has the Google analytics code (urchin.js or ga.js) installed you will get several cookies. One called __utmz breaks the ability of CartIt to read it’s own cookies because years ago, when Urchin first started using JavaScript cookies, the coder (or pointy headed boss) did not follow the standards (well, they were only suggestions and still are such). Standard cookies use the equals (=) sign as a delimiter so if the cookie contains multiple equals the application attempting to read the cookie mail fail if it was never intended to read this non-standard cookie.

RFC 2109 (the original Netscape proposal) lists a name=value pairing with “The VALUE is opaque to the user agent and may be anything the origin server chooses to send, possibly in a server-selected printable ASCII encoding”

So when Google is using characters which are also delimiters in cookie text, they should escape them using URL encoding such as “%3d” but they did not. The cookie is broken and has been for years, apparently there is no intention of correcting this as the newer analytics code (ga.js) creates the same broken cookie.

Unfortunately, when this __utmz cookie is set, it is set for *.domain.com, which is the same as what cartit sets. When your browser sends your broken __utmz cookie to your server, your shopping cart, cartit.cgi, creates a new shopper cookie and because it cannot match up the shopper (you) with a cart cookie, it makes a new cart cookie with your one item. So the result is only one item in the cart period until you remove the Google code, or “fix” the cart and then CLEAR all the cookies for the domain.
I have “fix” in quotes because the CartIt shopping cart is not really broken, cartit is a victim of Urchin/Google poor code. If the designers of cartit could have anticipated someone would:

1. Intentionally create software to create a cookie which appears to not URL encode field delimiters e. g. (=)

2. Intentionally install this broken software to create a cookie with invalid characters, thereby shooting you in the foot and breaking your ecommerce site

Why doesn’t google fix this? Well, there are many more people using Urchin than CartIt- and all you need to do to fix cartit is modify the cookie reading code on line 927 of cartitlib.cgi so it is straight-forward if you know PERL. This is not simply a cartit problem as there are doubtless many other programs which could be affected- anything on your server which reads cookies could choke on the __utmz broken cookie.

Here is an example of what the __utmz cookie contains

__utmz=247895813.1206552801.1.1.utmccn=(direct)|utmcsr=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); path=/; expires=Thu, 25 Sep 2008 05:33:20 GMT; domain=domain.com;

So it is fixable- but it’s an unfortunate fact poor code never seems to fade once implemented. In the end, you’ll likely have to pay someone to fix your (not really broken) cartit code. After all, the Google code is free- and it is worth having on most ecommerce sites- but you don’t need to change your site shopping cart as a result.

CommerceBuddy Version 3.0 for CartIt 8.0 was released in 2003 and while not designed for Vista, you should be able to make it run with a few tweaks. CommerceBuddy was designed using Delphi tools, when it runs it creates a small file called PDOXUSRS.NET at c:\. Because the new way of running programs with Vista is a user mode with limited permissions, you’ll need to run the program with Administrator privileges. If you do not run it this way, you’ll get an error of “Permission Denied” on creating the PDOXUSRS.NET file.

It is easy to fix this by simply browsing to the CommerceBuddy program under StartàAll Programs. Right click the CommerceBuddy Program, point to and select Properties. When the CommerceBuddy Properties box appears select the Compatibility tab and under Privileges, tick the box labeled “Run this program as Administrator” in order to allow you to run it. You will likely get a nag screen at each invocation and the program will now run.

Another issue on Vista is the use of .hlp help files. CommerceBuddy has no printed manual and therefore without the help you will have trouble learning how to properly set up CommerceBuddy. Microsoft has a KB article on this- KB917607 but unfortunately at the time of this writing it appears they have removed the link to the file download and simply have a terse statement “the Windows Help program has not had a major update for many releases and no longer meets Microsoft standards. Therefore, starting with the Windows Vista operating system release, the Windows Help program will not ship as a component of the Windows operating system. Also, third-party programs that include .hlp files are prohibited from redistributing the Windows Help program together with their products”

I found the download of the Windows Help Program (Winhelp32.exe) for Windows Vista 32 bit version thanks to Google. Once you install this update you should be able to use the help files in CommerceBuddy as well as any other legacy applications.

Of course, if you’re doing a new install of CartIt CommerceBuddy, you have to apply your license (under HelpàAbout), set your options and configurations, and finally publish the setting to CartIt on your server. CommerceBuddy is starting to show its age but the CartIt application (server side) itself is written in Perl and is still one of the most flexible (and eminently customizable) carts I’ve ever used. CartIt has features no other cart has- such as the ability to have products at a zero price, unlimited products with unlimited options, and much more. Also, being forms based means you design ecommerce around the site rather than forcing you to design your site around the shopping cart.

William Laakkonen, AVATAVA

One of the most important things to avoid in creating a dynamic web site is the use of session IDs in your URLs or pages with an ending of ?parameter. Here’s an example:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?PHPSESSION_ID=123456

PHP Session IDs may be suppressed in your .htaccess file using: php_flag session.use_trans_sid off

The reason to avoid using PHP variables and session IDs as well as URLs ending in question marks is due to the fact the URLs may be ignored by some web bots and search engine spiders. It’s best to avoid anything that even resembles a session ID. Here is a direct quote from Matt Cutts also known as Googleguy: “sites shouldn’t use “&id=” as a parameter if they want maximal Googlebot crawlage, for example. So many sites use “&id=” with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids URLs with that parameter,” See: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29720.htm for the full article.

Another thing to avoid is the use of variables in URLs. Here’s an example:

http://www.mysite.com/page.php?var1=a&var2=b&var3=somethingelse

Using even one variable in the URL can decrease your search engine results and multiple parameters likely make it even worse; per Googleguy: “The number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our MAIN index’ (IOW parameters = relegated to a supplemental listing)”.

Another thing to avoid is serving all your content from a single page or a set of pages. As far as a search engine is concerned it sees the same pages or sets of pages over and over again. This will likely relegate your web content to either the supplemental index or even out of the index altogether.

Example:

keys.php?SiteCounty=Lee

keys.php?SiteCounty=Martin

or

index.php?Category=Apples

index.php?Category=Pears

What should be used instead is a server side rewrite to create static page names and links such as:

Buy-Product-Name.html or Buy-Another-Product-Name.html

With the Apache web server you can use the Apache module mod_rewrite to do the rewrites. For Microsoft® Windows® IIS you must look for a third party module to do a rewrite of your URLs. On IIS there are several ISAPI modules for rewriting URLs, including one which requires no changing of your web pages at all. Most of the IIS modules are commercial but there is one free module available from Antonin Foller of Motobit.com.

Commercial ISAPI rewrite modules for IIS

• ISAPI_rewrite from Helicon (they also have a free “lite” version”)
• OpURL from Opcode
• IIS Rewrite from Qwerksoft
• IIS Mod-Rewrite from Micronovae

I’m sure you may find additional ISAPI rewrite modules for IIS, these are the ones I found available during June, 2007.

URL Rewriting schemes to avoid

You should avoid using underscores in file names or URLs. See: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

The Google Supplemental Index

If you find your site is guilty of doing all the things listed here earlier as ‘not-to-do’, your site is likely already in the Google supplemental index. How do you know you if your site’s pages are in the supplemental index? Go to google.com and type in the search form: site:your_site followed by *** -sjpked Example: site:www.domain.com *** -sjpked

Here are some other reasons your pages may not show up in the indexes or end up in the supplemental index:

• You have little or no unique content on pages
• Your pages have no or identical titles and descriptions
• Your site still has dynamically generated pages without static URLs (use mod_rewrite or similar to solve)
• You have used the same header, side navigation bars, and footers on all your pages
• Your site has many unlinked (orphaned) pages
• All links to your site are reciprocal rather than natural one way incoming links.

How do you check where you stand?

Checking where you stand and will depend on who you ask. The actual raw data of the number of visitors to your site is really not as relevant as is the quality of the visitors to your site. It really does not matter if you only have 100 visitors to your site each month if your goal is to have 10 sales and 10 out of the 100 visitors purchase your product. That would be much better than having one million visitors and no one purchasing your product. Use your web site statistics (log file analysis) as a guideline. People should be finding your site both as a result of a natural search, and additionally as a paid search result listing for you to have the highest conversion rates.

Some easy things to do for checking your site:

• Install and use the Google Toolbar to check your page rank.
• Visit http://www.Alexa.com/ to check your site rank and overview.
• Check your site listing at http://www.siteadvisor.com/ – you’re judged by the company you keep here.

What else to do?

Optimize the content on your pages once you have created static pages using mod_rewrite or a similar product. You can choose appropriate key words and key word phrases using wordtracker.com or goodkeywords.com. A handy tool for analyzing your existing web pages is WebPositionGold (you should note that the use of WebPositionGold on google.com in an automated fashion violates their terms of service).

One of the best ways to get a good idea of what the search engines see when they visit your web site is to view your web page in a text only web browser such as Lynx. You might be surprised how the semantic presentation differs from your visual layout. The search engines treat HTML semantically. As an example, a H1 tag takes precedence over a font-size tag. Keep this in mind when viewing your pages in the text browser and consider adjusting the HTML accordingly.

When designing a web site, you generally want to test your pages consistent appearance in any type of browser. In other words, your work of art should not look different depending on the color of eyeglass frames someone is viewing it through.

In general, designing using XHTML, CSS, and validating your design using the w3.org validator will get you very close to a consistent appearance among many browsers on various operating systems. Once you’ve done this part, the more difficult task is checking your site presentation on multiple platforms and web browsers.

In the past, the only way of checking your site for presentation in multiple browsers was to have workstations (or virtual machines) running each type of OS along with each web browser, at each screen resolution, with various plug-ins (such as Flash) which you desired to check against. As you can well imagine, this can be out of reach for the average small business or designer both on the basis of budget and time constraints.
One solution to this issue has been conceived and implemented thanks to Johann Rocholl. It is a free web service called BrowserShots and it allows you to submit your site for snapshots in many different browsers in only a few seconds. What happens then is the web site is visited via many computers running the selected OS, browser, screen resolution, and plug-ins which you selected. Depending on the length of the queue, you may have a wait of 30 minutes or so for the results, but it is worth the wait. Once you have your screen shots you will know what additional work you (or your web developer) need to complete. No technical aptitude is needed to use the site so I invite you to check the job your developer is doing by submitting the site for snapshots and looking at what the rest of the world sees when visiting your web site.

The entire service is volunteer and free so you may want to limit the frequency of submitting jobs to the queue to allow resources to be available for others. The service is in beta stage at the present so there may be issues form time to time. Hats off to Johann Rochall and his volunteers for a great and idea and service with BrowserShots.org

One of my favorite sites for quality free images is pixelio.de. I have posted some of my data center and other photos there under the profile AVATAVA. The photos are of the US Wireless Louisville, Kentucky and the Columbus Ohio Data centers. The Louisville Data Center is no longer in existence and the Ohio data center is no longer part of US Wireless.

The web site is in German only- even if you don’t speak German you should still be able to figure out the photos. Over the next few weeks I will upload more photos to the site under the key word rechenzentrum. All the photos are free for commercial and private use (copyright retained) as long as they are not used in association with illegal or immoral activities.