Midterm Exam, MDJ

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Mike JohnsonProfessor Craig PiercyMIST7500, Fall 200915 October 2009Midterm ExamThe internet web site game of drawing visitors and racking up points in the page hit-count has been in play for many years. During the build-up of the dotcom bubble, it seemed thatfolks had begun to believe that, “if you build it, they will come” (

Field of Dreams

). That notionwas not quite true, while web-bots would eventually provide some exposure automatically; it hasalways been the case that acquiring high volume, quality traffic to a site requires work and acertain level of expertise. Starting out as a complete novice, creating a first web site, one mightwonder how a search engine like, Google will find this site and, in response to a users searchquery, and return its address on the first page of search results, or even the 20

th

, or 100

th

page.Then, and even more so now, sites must be structured with attractive content to draw and make best use of quality traffic. In order to monitor and tune page performance, the charts, graphs, percentages, etc. provided by an analytics package, and/or a professional in the field, are veryhelpful. The following paragraphs take a closer look at these areas, and the current meanings of SEO/SEM.Part 1: Web AnalyticsThe first web site produced by this author was in 1996, using Microsoft web authoringsoftware,

FrontPage.

The page was hosted on a third party server located in Florida. WebAnalytics were offered as part of the hosting service and were very useful in gauging the sitesvalue, especially as statistical trends changed in lockstep with various other promotionalendeavors, such as:

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Registering the web site with internet search engines

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Using client lists to generate Email informing customers about the web site

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Telling clients about the site during phone calls and face-to-face visits

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Putting the web site address on business cards, advertisements, letterhead, brochures, etc.

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Placing an employment opportunities page on the siteThe statistics module tracked how many hits the site received, which pages visitor clicked into,how long the visitor remained on each page, how long they remained on the site, where thevisitor was located in the world (roughly), sites that placed links on their pages linking to thissite, and other relevant metrics.During research for this writing, the first analytics service investigated was onWordPress.com. Bloggers using this web site automatically receive free access to a page thattracks what is going on with their blog postings. The following paragraph, quoted from theWordPress web site, details this service. (

WordPress.com.)

“All blogs on WordPress.com get Stats as a free feature. Every time a visitor views aURL on your blog, the web browser loads a smallsmiley-face imagefrom our statssystem. The action is logged and the logs are summarized every few minutes to updatethe graphs, charts, and lists.The following are not counted:

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Visits from registered users of the blog when they are not logged in.

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Visits to uploaded documents and files

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Visits from browsers that do not execute javascript or load images.

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GoogleBot and other search engine spiders. “ (WordPress.com)

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Screenshot (WordPress.com)The above screenshot displays the WordPress.com analytics page and metrics availablefor viewing thereon, immediately after it was set up on this Author’s blog.Google, among others, currently offers an analytics module for tracking similar information, and as is the case with most things, analytics are much improved since 1996. Thisservice is available free of charge, to anyone signing up on the Google Analytics web site. After registering and entering credentials for the web site to be analyzed, a short bit of script isgenerated. This script must be copied to each page, just above the <body> tag, that the user wishes to track. While investigating the possibility of using this service with WordPress.com blogs, documentation revealed that analytics for WordPress.com are currently handled byGoogle Analytics.There is much more to web analytics than what is conveyed in the few screenshots anddescriptions displayed within these pages. Getting the most out of the tools available takes time