Agriya

Open Source alternative for Google Analytics

sreevidya — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:38:52 +0000

Most webmasters now recognize that Analytics is one of the best free web stats programs available. However, with this data, you are telling Google everything they need to know about your website, including time spent on the site, page views, bounce rate…everything.

There has long been a wonder about whether Google tracks users who click on their organic search results. Do they track click through rates for different sites? Do they log when a user hits a backbutton? Do they use some area 51 hidden frame display technology to monitor the facial reaction of the user as they open up the site?

Well, they may do, but do they really need to do it when you are giving them all the information they need to assess your site via Google Analytics?

If this disturbs you that Google knows too much about your site then it may be time to check out Piwik.

Piwik has worked on this Google analytics proprietary technology and has come up with an open source alternative for that.

This Piwik open source product is developer friendly with access to the source files as well and claiming the advantages of it’s open source product as

Open API
Plug in architecture
Data abstraction layer
Customizable dashboard

For more details Check: Piwik: Open Source Google Analytics Alternative .

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Google & Yahoo To Swap Ads

ace — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:38:11 +0000

In what seems to be a shot across the bows of the dreadnought that is USS Microsoft, Google and Yahoo today announced a two week long ‘experiment’ of swapping ads with one another.

Effectively this means that Google can serve ads on Yahoo’s results page. The percentage is around 3% of all Yahoo searches will show Google ads.

Is this a calculated shot from the two internet monsters that they will not accept Microsoft’s pestering of Yahoo lying down?

Read the full story on BBC News

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Congratulations to Wordpress

ace — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:26:15 +0000

Just wanted to post a quick note of (admittedly belated) congratulations to the guys over at WordPress.org on releasing the latest 2.5 version of their software.

The newest version is another step forward to what is arguably the worlds best (not to mention favourite) blogging platform - beating other open source and commercial products alike.

The latest version has way too many new features to mention, so we won’t, we’ll let the guys over at wordpress do that here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/

My personal appreciation for WordPress started just over a year ago in January 2007 when I decided to switch my personal blog from Drupal to WP. The ease and simplicity was a step ahead of everything else I’ve used and I’m glad to say that after upgrading this blog they have continued that tradition.

But WordPress isn’t just a great blogging tool, over the years it has also evolved in to what could be considered quite a robust content management system, and infact we are modifying WP right now to power our network of sites - I’ll tell you right now, the programmers wanted to use Drupal, but I stuck to my guns and they conceded that WP would be able to do the job

If you are thinking of using or already use Wordpress for your blogging solution, I strongly suggest you check out this WordPress SEO Whitepaper which contains loads of tips, tricks and plugin suggestions to get the most out of your blog.

Finally, if you are in the market for some custom Wordpress templates or custom plugins, then shoot us a mail to info@agriya.com and tell us what you have on your mind. We love Wordpress at Agriya, and we’re keen to help you get the best out of it!

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Picking Hot Niches

ace — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:53:00 +0000

There’s a handy little tool provided by Google that seems to have been overlooked by many SEO’s and webmasters in general. The tool is called Google Trends and it allows you to find out the search trend of the keyword phrases you might want to be optimizing for.

Let me first start by saying Google Trends is not a keyword search volume tool. It shows you the general trend, and is relative only to that search phrase.

I have found it particularly useful when researching niches, for example, say you wanted to use Rayzz to start your own video sharing site in the niche of Base Jumping (hey, there’s a lot of crazy people out there), I can use Google Trends to find out if it’s a growing niche based on searches.

Based on the image above, we can see that the overall trend for base jumping seems to be up, great news if we were to start a new site on base jumping.

Some of the limitations of the tool is that it won’t report on every keyword if there is not enough data. So you can probably forget about using most of your long tail words in this tool.

What I find the tool useful for is to search for the higher level or more generic keywords and see what the overall trend is for the niche in general. If it’s a rising trend, then it’s a good sign it’s a growing industry.

Let’s say you were looking at Orbit Social Networking Software, you are wondering if social networking is a growing industry. We head over to Google Trends and do a search…

Awesome! The search has near exponential growth, social networking is definitely taking off. And look at the number of news reports, social networking is a hot topic right now, so it’s definitely time to hop on that band wagon

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