Web Marketing Pro Blog

Users of Google Analytics (GA) should be familiar with how to create a cookie in a web browser (and a corresponding custom filter in GA) to exclude internal visitors from GA reports. If not, see this post.

When you use a special webpage to create the cookie, you can go look at your browser’s cookie files to make sure the cookie is actually there. If it’s not there, your GA filter is not going to work.

If you use Firefox, you can find cookie files in Tools > Options > Privacy > Cookies > View Cookies.

If you use IE6 — or IE7 on Windows XP — you can find cookie files under Internet Options > General > Temporary Internet Files > View Files.

But, if you are using IE7 on Windows Vista, cookies are not stored in the same place. The confusing part is that you can still open the familiar Temporary Internet Files folder — using Internet Options > General > Browsing history (click on the Settings button) > Temporary Internet Files and History Settings > Temporary Internet Files > View Files.

This opens the folder C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files. And you will find some cookie files there. But you will not find any of your GA filter cookies.

The cookies you are looking for will be in this directory:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies

Or, more likely, if you are running IE in protected mode on Windows Vista (which is the default), the cookies you want will be here:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\Low

Now you can open the cookie for the domain you are tracking to make sure it contains the custom text or “filter pattern” you specified.

Thanks to Ian Thomas at Lies, Damned Lies for his great post on this topic.

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Technorati offers a lot of tag-related gadgets. But what are they good for and how do you use them?

Take this tag thingy, for example. I would like my blogs to be associated with my name, Mark McLaren. Does this tag thingy help?

Tag helper (like Hamburger Helper) from Technorati
Any time I want to use “mclaren” as a tag, I should insert the code supplied by Technorati that produces the following in my web page:mclaren

Okay. I think I see what’s going on. The word “mclaren” is now a Technorati tag. How does this benefit me unless a page from my website shows up on the Technorati mclaren tag page? I see no real benefit. And all Technorati has to say about it is

See your posts here
To contribute to this page, include this code in your blog post:

Using a Technorati tag like this definitely helps Technorati, because, if everyone does so, it produces a ton of links pointing at the Technorati website. At least someone benefits.

WordPress.com has some good tag mojo goin’. I mean, they are doing something a bit simpler, and thus more useful.

They put tags that people have been using most on all WordPress.com blogs over the past few hours in a column down the right side of their home page. This gives you a snapshot of what people are blogging about. Click on one of those tags, “life” for example, and you get a page listing blogs talking about “life” — i.e. tagging their posts with the tag “life”. Also listed on the WordPress.com page are related tags, and a link to the “life” tag page on several other social networking sites that use a tagging system.

Finding blogs this way has nothing to do with using a search engine like Google. One of the best things tags are good for in this context is helping you find good information by narrowing the scope of what you are looking in. If WordPress.com is a community whose goals and ideals and knowledge-base you resonate with, then looking there using tags can be a whole lot more efficient and productive (or spontaneous and serendipitous, if that’s your bag, baby) than doing a search for “life” on Google.

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Pat McCarthy at ConversionRater.com recommended a powerful WordPress plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior to his readers the other day. This is a helpful plugin for a number of reasons: it highlights keywords in your blog posts while allowing you to keep your WordPress categories relatively limited and thus more organized.

When the WordPress categories on a blog number more than about, um, twenty, it’s hard to see how they help to organize the site. Assign 4 or 5 or more categories to the same post and the utility of the categories is watered down or lost altogether.

But you still need to highlight keywords in your posts so that directories like Technorati have something to grab onto. This is what WordPress plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior allow you to do.

Keywords are not the same thing as categories. There are way more keywords than there are categories. See my comment on the ConversionRater post above for an example. The blogosphere is not clear on this, however. People use the word “tag” to mean “category” and also “keyword”.

This deserves more attention, because the way you use tags, categories and keywords has a significant effect on the visibility of your blog to search engines AND to the organization and usability of your blog for human readers.

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In order to draw lots of traffic, I really should write about National Workplace Napping Day, but I’m determined to hang up the black hat.

After just over a year on Blogger, it’s great to finally be here under the mcbuzz.com domain.

It’s the view of many SEOs that a blogger is better off using his own domain for a blog rather than a free service like Blogger or WordPress.com because the visibility garnered by the blog goes to that domain rather than to the domain of the free service. (The old McBuzz Blog is at mcbuzz.blogspot.com.)

I wonder whether it might be more advantageous, though, to have a domain like blogspot.com pointing to mcbuzz.com, which is how things were. My mcbuzz.blogspot.com site had links to mcbuzz.com on every page.

More on this question at a later date. Soon I hope to have some worthy topics to discuss with readers.

Thanks for visiting!

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Hello Google!

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