Awarded at Toronto "Ultra Advanced SEO Symposium" Nov. 2005.

Your Internet Marketing and Website Logs - Opportunities Galore For You. Continued from last week

Seoza News June 29 2004 Number 407. 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) ..

Last week we discussed daily visits and visitors as well as top pages visited.

Maybe the most important aspect of your site stats is the section that deals with where your visitors came from and how they got there. Using this information allows you to check efficacy of advertising programs, email openings and so on. It also shows you which search engines sent traffic to your site and how much. Not only that it tells you the search terms that were used to find your website. This information is normally described as REFERRER information

This is extremely valuable information and allows you to create even more traffic to your site by interpreting this information. Take a look at this screen shot from one of my sites for the last 7 days

site statistics graph

You can plainly see the source of most of the traffic ... it is from Google

In this screen shot from the stats for a different site take a look at a few of the keywords for which this site was found during June to date ... notice that it was found for 3,382 different keywords. This will identify the importance of keyword discovery for you and why your logs can be valuable information.

web stats for newsletter

In the beginning of any new web campaign it is imperative to watch these logs and take action based upon what is seen.

And all this intelligence for peanuts when you use the right hosting company.....

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.

Windows Updates and Internet Security article by William Kelly

It is a fact of life. Microsoft products are far from perfect when they are released. Windows XP is a case in point as was Windows 2000, Windows 98 and Windows 95. I dont consider Windows Millenium Edition to be a Windows at all, it was that bad.

But Microsoft arent stupid. They have future proofed their product through a useful tool called Windows Update.
In essence what this tool does is to audit the operating system (in this case Windows XP) on your computer and feed this report to a Microsoft server on the Internet. This server then determines from the results of the audit what new patches and software updates are available for your operating system.

You then download these and voila! Your operating system is up to full current strength and any known vulnerabilities have been patched.

Why is this important?

Microsoft have closely integrated their operating system with Internet technology. This is a powerful and dangerous thing to do. Powerful in that as your PC increasingly becomes reliant on the Internet as a source of day to day workings, dangerous in that those virus writers and hackers know this and act accordingly.

My theory is that pirates used to follow the gold. The same thing applies these days pirates on the Internet follow the golden galleon Microsoft and target its operating systems for no other reason than its totally dominant on the PC scene and hence the Internet.

Updating Windows against the known vulnerabilities and there are no unknown ones you can protect against (because theyre still unknown!) is normally quick and easy provided you do it regularly. In Internet Explorer, click Tools and Windows Update and follow the instructions.

You can also set your PC to do the updates automatically although I have found these dont work so well if you dont have a permanent Internet Connection. To set this option, right click on My computer, click Properties, and select the Automatic Updates tab to set the process to run automatically. I would strongly suggest that you manually update from time to time just as a precautionary.

It goes without saying that Internet Security is an absolute necessity. The bad news is that its going to become increasingly sophisticated and increasingly more invasive. Windows Updates are the first line of defence and by no means are they sufficient. Good anti virus software and by good I mean software that you actually pay for and good Internet Security suites (not the same thing as an anti virus package) are essential for any computer connecting to the Internet.

We at Seoza do not want you spending considerable time and effort on putting together your website only to have it wiped out by a virus, or your PC in the shop having a virus removed when prevention is better than cure.

e Internet.

We are ethical South African search engine optimization practitioners based in Johannesburg, Gauteng. Internet marketing efforts in South Africa are still in their infancy. Search engine marketing and search engine positioning is built around 3 basic concepts - organic search engine optimization, optimizing for PPC (pay per click) campaigns and site functionality. All three areas must work together to succeed.