One day before the highly touted Macworld 2008, Apple unveiled its newest promotional grabbing headline on it's website apple.com. From an article on Wired's Gadget blog late Monday:

"An Apple insider told Wired today that the company's new ultraportable, expected to be seen in public for the first time tomorrow, has an extremely thin profile and is shaped like a teardrop when closed — thicker at the top behind the screen, tapering at the bottom behind the keyboard. "It's unbelievably thin," said the source."

"There's Something in the Air" is a reference to the expected MacBook ultraportable laptop that's been rumored for months all over the Internet. The Wired article speculates that the "MacBook Air" will do away with wired technology altogether, opting instead for wireless connectivity via WiFi, 3G (through AT&T), bluetooth, or a combination of all three. We won't be at Macworld but will be watching online. to see what kind of goodies Steve and Co. bestow on the rest of us. Check out the original Wired.com blog entry.

Microsoft released it's adCenter Excel Plugin. Ok, so it's not really a true Microsoft product, but at this point who cares? This is the kind of functionality that search marketers have been waiting for - the ability to tie the wealth of data available in the search platform with the analysis and modeling capabilities of Excel. The Excel plugin ties in to the MS Keyword Services Platform. Originally developed by ad Sage, this plugin allows search marketers direct, integrated access to Microsoft's Keyword Services Platform - which is the holy grail for all things related to MS's keyword intelligence. Our first thoughts - VERY impressive. The ad-hoc querying ability encourages exploration (not to mention that the big buttons are easy to understand). It's pretty straightforward to drill down into deeper intel. Excel automatically puts differing dimensions of keyword research onto different tabs making it easy to organize your research. The only downside we can see at this point is that this data is coming from the Internet's #3 (or lower) ranked search engine. So this really only represents a fraction of the keyword intel that's available. Still - it's a huge step in the right direction, and kudos to Microsoft for being the leader. Google and Yahoo have the capabilities to do this, perhaps they'll follow suit?

Despite engineering a deal to create a new platform for online video analytics, WebTrends has fired their CEO. Last week's Omniture/Visual Sciences buyout probably had something to do with it, since WT was probably the only other analytics platform that had enough critical mass to be of interest to Omniture. Thanks to the gang at Instant Cognition for the link to the original post. WebTrends Replace CEO via [MSN MoneyCentral]

Hey Internet - are you in Minneapolis and a customer of ATT/Cingular? Our phones are showing a big, fat, "U" next to our signal bars. Has UMTS been turned on in Minneapolis? Word from our sources is that it was coming in late fall, and it looks like it might have arrived. Let us know if you've got a "U"!

Congratulations to all involved. Read the story.

There are many reasons to dread sales calls with vendors (not just analytics vendors). You never know if the person on the other end of the phone is going to be receptive and actually listen to what you're saying or if they'll skip that and go for the hard sell. Our experience with the folks at Visual Sciences, I'm pleased to say, has been nothing short of fantastic, and it all started with the first sales call. VS has done a tremendous job of requiring that their sales staff is primed and ready to go with the right answers and questions. To make the first call as productive as possible here are some things you'll want to gather beforehand:

• Average number of pageviews per month
• Average number of server calls (if you use Ajax> per month
• As much historical data on peaks and valleys in your traffic
• If you're planning a commerce component, average number of transactions per month
• If you want to track rich media, total number of media assets
• Average number (and type) of external marketing campaigns (email, PPC, banner, etc)
• If you have Flash and want to track Flash events, number of SWF's and some idea of what you'd like to track within the SWF's

This should give you and your rep enough information to begin to talk about how the software will work with your infrastructure, as well as set the stage for pricing discussions later on. Oh, and don't be surprised if they tell you that HBX might not be the right fit for your organization. That's not a bad thing. In fact, it's quite the opposite. How many vendors are purely driven by sales and nothing else? At the end of the day Visual Sciences is a sales driven organization, but that hasn't stopped them from realizing that it's in everyone's best interest to part ways if their offering doesn't fit the business objectives or budget. The "sales first, service later" approach did some major damage to the web analytics industry during the dot-com bubble years, but VS has recognized this and made sure that the fit is there before anything moves forward.

Over the past year there has been a lot to talk about in the analytics industry. WebTrends partnership with Maven, Google Analytics 2.0, and even Microsoft tossing its hat in the ring with Gatineau. But despite all the media coverage, platform upgrades, and consolidation, there are still very few online resources available that offer deeper insight into capabilities beyond pure feature sets. Sure - there's a lot of marketing information available from all the vendors, but as the feature sets of popular analytics tools become more and more ubiquitous across platforms, it becomes increasingly difficult to find any discernible differences between analytics packages. For this reason, when choosing a new analytics package or evaluating one that's in use, it's critical to examine the entire analytics engagement. From the first sales call to the first report run, we want to know about the things that marketing materials don't tell you. So, we'd like to present a series of articles that talk about the analytics engagement from start to finish - a sort of 360° evaluation of the entire analytics process. The focus for these articles will be on HBX, the enterprise-level analytics offering from Visual Sciences. The purpose of the 360° evaluation is neither to proclaim the virtues of or discredit the value of HBX. Though we frequently recommend HBX to some of our clients, we also recommend and use tools like Google Analytics or Deepmetrix for others. Instead, the goal is to break through the marketing hype and offer an objective valuation - from both a strategic and tactical perspective - of one of the more popular enterprise web analytics packages available today. We'll open the door to the nagging question of free vs. paid analytics. We'll explore the implementation process, and we'll even offer a few HowTo's to keep it from getting too boring. Thanks for reading - stay tuned…

The consensus in the search engine optimization community these days is that meta tags are dead, dead, dead. It is widely thought that most (if not all) search engines place little direct value in meta tags as a sole path to high rankings, and many webmasters and SEO practitioners often advocate not wasting time with meta tags as a part of a search engine optimization strategy. In the immortal words of Susan Powter - "Stop the insanity!!" Meta tags are not dead. In and of themselves, meta tags do not offer the bang for the buck they once did. But they are, and should continue to be, an integral part of every comprehensive search engine optimization strategy. Here are 5 reasons why: Reason #1: Standards, Standards, Standards Of the few things that can be considered "standards" in today's web, meta tags are one. The meta element is a ratified component of the HTML spec. It is not unique to Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Safari, Camino, or Internet Explorer. It exists and is recognized, irrespective of browser vendor, version, or platform. Standards like the meta tag are important because they represent fair play to any engine that's worth its weight. They don't give the engines problems - they don't cause trouble - they don't stand up and say 'Look at me!!' (remember Look at me!!?) Take the current battle over the 802.11N spec. How many different vendors have their own flavor of the N spec? Are any of these specs compatible with each other? Specifications - ratified specifications - are critical to search engine optimization because they reduce the likelihood that a custom element or tag can upset the natural (and critical) progression of a search engine spider through a site. Reason #2: Meta tags describe what's on a page Metadata is, simply, data describing other data. If part of optimization is trying to help a search engine understand what's on a web page or what a web site is about, why wouldn't we want to do everything we could to aid in that process? Meta tags are like ocean buoys. If you're a captain of a large ocean vessel and you spot a buoy 1000 yards out, you instantly know there's something important going on. Meta tags function in the same manner. They are there to provide a clear, concise description of what content is found on that page. If you didn't know anything else about a page or a website, a quick glance at meta tags should tell you everything you need to know. Meta tags help search engines understand what the page or site is about, and provide clarity and support to page content. Reason #3: Meta tags are integral to engaging potential customers Customer engagement? Were we talking about SEO and increasing site traffic? Increasing site traffic is great, but unless that traffic is qualified and engaged, it doesn't mean squat. If I'm interested in purchasing an item, I very well may be a potentially "qualified" customer. That is, I am exhibiting or may have exhibited all the necessary traits of someone who is likely to make a purchase or participate in some type of conversion event. We don't watch much traditional TV at our house, in part because we only have 1 functioning TV that's placed in a very awkward spot in our home, but also because 1080 HDTV's still aren't affordable enough. There are plenty of other household's that haven't purchased HDTV's yet for that same reason, and because of this we could be considered "qualified" potential customers because we're still on analog TV. But just because we're qualified does not mean that we're actually engaged in the buying process. We're not researching brands - we're not researching prices - we're not researching warranties. We're not doing any of this stuff because we have not yet made the decision to buy. This is why meta tags are so important to customer engagement. Google, in particular, uses meta tags as a component of their search results page. If you have a properly formed meta tag, Google will often display the meta description underneath the page title in its search engine results. This is the opportunity that all marketers dream of!! A chance to qualify and engage a potential customer at the same time. If they're searching for "blue widgets" and your meta description eloquently describes blue widgets, will they be more or less likely to click on your results listing than the listing having fragmented words and sentences broken apart by …? Reason #4: Meta tag content forces communications clarity Many times clients proclaim that they would like to be ranked #1 for hundreds of terms, many of which have absolutely nothing to do with their site, product, or service. When used as part of a search engine optimization strategy, meta tags - rather, the keywords and phrases used within meta tags - force clarity in what can otherwise be a very ambiguous and unorganized effort. Based on the principle of data describing other data, meta tag data provides a framework for content creators and editors from which to work. It provides focus and clarity for communications and copy teams by clearly defining what specific content should be about. It also provides structure for the information architecture folks, and can even help the development teams construct search friendly code and URLs. Reason #5: Meta tag content forces strategic optimization Using meta tags as a part of your search optimization strategy forces you to think about optimization in both a tactical and strategic manner. For as much as SEO focuses on achieving high rankings and driving traffic, it also focuses on building long-term value in the eyes of a search engine. Meta tags offer the kind of organizational structure within web content that is key to continually building lasting value. Good meta tags help clarify content structure and hierarchy. They can aid in link building efforts by focusing resources on the highest value opportunities. They can also reveal optimization excess or deficiencies across whole sites, content groups, or even single pages. Most of all, they set a precedence for how to deal with the maturation of your client's web presence by clearly illustrating order and structure (long-term optimization strategies) in lieu of short-term gains (just get me more traffic!!!) The Proof Remember - early on we said that meta tags should be part of every comprehensive search engine optimization strategy. Meta tags are just like every other search engine optimization tactic in the SEO practitioner's playbook. Achieving high rankings, driving qualified traffic, and engaging potential customers are not won by individual tactics alone. It's the collective effort of all the SEO tools that will produce results. Here's a sample of the results we achieved for one of our clients. This is over a period of 3 months:

• 159% increase in top 10 rankings across (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, Ask)
• Increased weekly organic search traffic by 11%
• Increased total organic keyword reach by 23%
• Doubled the number of inbound leads

Ranking, reach, and traffic numbers have all increased. And sales? We can't say how much, but we can say it's significant, and know that the sales teams are having a hard time keeping up. Too much business - that's a great problem to have. Who says meta tags are dead?

Often times search engine optimization specialists will spend a great deal of effort trying to research and choose the right keywords for their optimization strategies. After optimizing the keywords, code, content, and plethora of other on and off-site elements, the fun begins! The strategy is rolled out and ranking analysis takes over. Depending on how often/frequent the engines spider the site, chances are that the hard work has paid off and ranking improvements follow. Being the ever vigilant search marketer, we know that ranking high does not always equate to higher volumes of traffic. So, turning to the analytics tool of choice, it's evident that some of the newly acquired rankings are driving higher levels of traffic. At this point, the cycle begins again. Research, implement, measure. Or, as we like to call it - wash, rinse, repeat. After a few more wins (more high rankings, and increases in traffic) and several more wash, rinse, repeat cycles, you've made some gains, but the big breakthrough has yet to appear. What next? By this point most SEO-ers have already scoured their analytics logs looking for diamonds in the rough. But, too often is this hunt for the golden keyword focused on the actual words themselves. We're not suggesting that this is a flawed tactic. On the contrary - it's an excellent (and recommended) method of any sound organic search optimization strategy. But at the end of the day, this method is still an exercise in combing through mounds of data looking for a single piece of information. One of the tools we use to aid in this process here at Azul 7 is a type of keyword analysis that raises the view a little higher. Rather than simply focusing on unique words or phrases, we'll step out of the muck and analyze certain characteristics of those words. We'll then compare those characteristics against a plethora of key performance metrics for the site as a whole. The goal of this exercise is not necessarily find new words. Rather, it's to analyze certain characteristics of words and how they map to more behavioral-oriented datasets. The words people use in their search queries can tell you a lot about what their intent is and what they are likely to do on your site. Because this search language is the literal manifestation of how people behave, it's a wonderful method of helping to define a framework that can make your research more efficient and effective. We recently performed an analysis for one of our clients. We'd achieved 200%+ increases in rankings across brand and non-branded terms, and though our target increases in organic search traffic have been achieved, we wanted to take things up a notch to the next level. To begin, we downloaded the top 500 keywords used in Google searches from January 1 through September 1. Of course, this analysis will work on any size dataset, but the more data you have, the more likely you are to be unaffected by outlier data that can skew the numbers. Next, instead of combing through 500 individual keywords/phrases, we analyzed the makeup of those phrases by breaking them down into different sets. The first set was just figuring out the distribution of words used in search engine referral traffic. We broke the full set down by groupings: how many referral phrases contained 1 keyword, 2 keywords, 3 keywords, etc. Our results indicated that of the full set, 36% of referral traffic used 2 keywords, and 45% of referral traffic used 3 keywords. Keyword Analysis Tip #1: Do you ever find yourself debating whether to optimize for a 1 word, 2 word, or 3 word combination? Understanding the word count distribution can help narrow the focus! Now that we had the distribution down, it was time to go a little deeper. We gained a tremendous amount of insight from the first step, but we needed more. As part of our larger marketing strategy, we not only wanted to increase the number of leads this client was receiving from their site, but we also wanted to increase the quality of those leads. Thus, since we had established KPI's as a method of measuring overall quality of site traffic, the next step was to map that distribution against those KPI's. Initially we discovered that 45% of organic referral traffic came from 3 word combinations. When we began mapping the initial distribution against visits from that source, we anticipated that 3 word combinations would likely make up a similarly high percentage of visits. However, we discovered that while 3 word combos were responsible for 23% of referral visits, 2 word combos were actually responsible for 54% of visits. Keyword Analysis Tip #2: Mapping keyword distribution against at least one KPI will often reveal very interesting user tendencies. This just wouldn't do. We had 2 great pieces of data, but they were at odds with each other. It wasn't quite clear enough at this stage for us to say with a high level of certainty that 3 word combos were definitely the way to go. From our first KPI comparison, it was clear that 2 word combos were actually generating more visits. Since we had launched a completely new site with a considerably larger amount of content than the previous site, we'd identified early on that pageviews would be a key metric to observe as a measure of how much of the new content was being consumed. Our next step was to re-map the distribution against average pageviews to try and discern how the number of query terms impacted the amount of content viewed. Ironically, we found that 3 word combos had a nearly 11% higher average pageview levels than 2 word combos. On small sites this difference in pageview levels usually doesn't amount to much because the total pageviews aren't that high to begin with. However, on our client's site, the increased content had already demonstrated a significant increase in pageviews, so even a small difference of 11% could have a big impact. At first glance we were somewhat relieved to see that 3 word combos seemed to be performing better. However, we were still only looking at average pageviews. In order to be conclusive, we needed to know how many actual pageviews had been registered. When we computed the actual number of pageviews, we discovered that even though 3 word combos had average pageview levels 11% higher than 2 word combos, the actual number of pages viewed by 3 word combos was 50% less than their 2 word counterparts. Keyword Analysis Tip #3: Expect the unexpected, but verify it with hard facts. Throughout this exercise our goal was to gain additional insight into how we could make keyword research and ongoing optimization more effective. Finding exact words was key, but it's also important to understand the context in which those words are being used. Armed with this data, the challenge of selecting and optimizing for certain keywords becomes less of a crap shoot. When you understand the context you can make better informed decisions about which keywords to focus on, and which ones to leave on the shelf.

And….we're back! We recently rolled out a brand spanking new Azul 7 website - officially version 1. Feel free to take a quick peek, but don't get too attached. Version 2 will be coming before the end of the year….