Your Internet Marketing and Website Logs .... Opportunities Galore For You

Seoza News June 24 2004 Number 406. Every website automatically creates log files. A log file is in simplest terms a record of when, from where, to where and by whom a file on your website was accessed. There is considerably more information than this.

Your website host should provide this information to you in 2 ways:

1. As raw log files to be downloaded in text format for later analysis by yourself if needed

2. As graphical and/or tabulated statistics - for people like you and me this is what we really need.

A good host will update this information at least once per day so that every day the website owner can look at the information generated and make website changes based upon the information provided. In this article I will use information form one of my websites to highlight the more important points (at least for me) ..

Information is taken from different websites using different web statistics packages. This information is confidential and real

Daily visitors ... this is clearly shown on this graph starting January 1st 2004 until yesterday

This second graph is from same site and shows HITS  - now you will see how much nonsense it is to talk about HITS! Average HITS per day = 14,811 whilst average visitors per day = 1,887. Only visitors can buy.

In this next graph you will see visitors peak around midday

In this graph from different site using different stats package you will see which are most visited pages on the site as measured by HITS ... this is where HITS can be useful measure. Note the home page was about 10% of information downloaded (from 278 pages in total on website). This will identify the absolute importance of optimizing Home Page on any site.

There are far more interesting things to be learned from logs and this subject will be continued next time.

A simple question for you .... Can *YOU* see this information every day for every one of your websites? ... if not you may want to do something about it or you will continue to waste your money and lose major opportunities. Read last week's newsletter again by clicking here. Importance of domains and hosting choice

Sentech, ADSL and Bandwidth in general

Sentech vs ADSL article by Seoza's William Kelly

A question that Ive often been asked is whether this My Wireless offering from Sentech is a good deal or not when compared to Telkoms ADSL offering.

Views on Telkom Out Of The Way First

I sincerely feel that the Telkom monopoly has robbed South African citizens of their rights to compete freely and fairly on the Internet for reasons that will soon become obvious.

It is gratifying to see that despite governments best efforts to avoid it, the Internet boom in South Africa is well under way, even if the majority of you reading this havent yet seen it or yet believe it. This despite the Telkom beast!

When Sentech first announced their intention to roll out wireless broadband I have to confess that I was as happy as Larry. Finally an alternative to Telkoms overpriced kneecapped and hamstrung ADSL service was looming over the horizon.

On principle I cancelled our ADSL line and signed up with Sentechs 256k offering. In the office we felt that this would offer sufficient speed to do our clients downloads and our Windows updates on new computers that we assemble for clients. For those of you who dont know, Windows updates for XP are in the order of well over 30 Mb a pop (I will touch on their importance for ANYONE using the Internet and XP in a subsequent article).

So speed is an issue for us. The uncapped Sentech offering we thought would give us a more stable throughout over a month as opposed to the Telkom ADSL whose 3Gb cap we regularly reach within a week or two.

Troubles surfaced in the application for a Sentech My Wireless contract. We should have taken heed there and then but the urge to get off Telkom was overbearing. Odd things like irrevocable 2 year contracts and in the FINE print the contention ratio.

Contention ratios are the be all and end all for any Internet Service Provider. A contention ratio is the ratio of users to bandwidth available. Although marketed as a 256 kb/s solution, the contention ratio actually guaranteed by Sentech is 30:1 which means that your actual theoretical guaranteed speed is 8.5 kb/s. In reality thats a little faster than a 56k modem (which is also about the same speed as GPRS from a cell phone). And believe me when I say that there are times when my 33.6k modem outperforms Sentechs 256 kb connection all hands down! At least it can find websites.

When I phoned to query the status of why line speed was so disastrously slow, Sentech stonewalled me. Not once did they phone me back until about two weeks ago when they solved the problem by adding more bandwidth to the network. Then I was phoned every two days with friendly courteous voices asking me how my speed was and how they valued my input.

This is the first rule that we at Seoza try and teach. On the Internet the customer is always right. If someone e-mails you then respond and quickly. Do whatever you can to sort their problem out because this builds trust. Without trust, someone who has never met you, or seen your product, or seen your company would have to be completely stark raving mad to buy ANYTHING from you. You cannot assume your customers are stupid.

But Sentech have done just that. The launch of My Wireless could hardly have been worse. The expectations and the delivery have been completely wrong and right now I dont trust them as far as I can throw that wireless modem out of my window, blindfolded with both arms tied behind my back. Especially when one of my customers in remote Modderfontein on their My Wireless 128k connection has speeds of 128k that make our 256k connection look like its standing still.

ADSL is far from perfect. It is crippled by not being able to have a permanent IP address assigned to it. This factor alone handicaps small business dramatically ... if you could have your own IP address you could host your own web site quite successfully off your own servers. The traffic cap limit is insane ... no other country in the world with broadband would even countenance such a travesty of justice. And the price is a down right rip-off ... the same thing in the UK goes for as little as 10 quid. Thats 10% of the cost here.

But (and it kills me to say it) it works. When you still have bandwidth its fast. Its reliable (more so than Sentechs My Wireless) and for those who can afford to put up with the headaches, ADSL is something to be considered. If you are running a leased line have a chat to us and we can make a recommendation if ADSL is a viable solution for you or not.