Everything changes, including keyword usage and visitor interests. Accommodating these as they occur, without starting over, is something of a challenge. But it can be done very quickly and simply with some plain vanilla javascript and a straightforward processing structure. Topics: The Challenge; Living On The Edge With Javascript; Get The Keywords First; Doing Double Duty; and Lining Things Up
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It seems that crass commercialism as applied to vegetables has some benefits that are right in front of our eyes. Topics: Demand Pull; Markets Responding; A Small Wrinkle; Look Before You Eat (more…)

There’s always someone who knows exactly how you can get from A to B, and is ready of offer you the roadmap for a very reasonable fee. Make sure the scenery doesn’t get boring. Topics: Employing Part Time Expertise; Staying Out Of The Briar Patch; A Marvel Of Efficiency; and Recognizing When The Lesson’s Finished
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Noticing that there can be large disparities in the results among the various keyword discovery tools led to an interesting and useful discovery. It certainly wasn’t all that obvious, and we had to do the math do get there. Topics are: Disclosures And Assumptions; Moving Forward; and An Expanding Universe
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The learning curve for Google’s AdWords can be a steep and expensive. Here are a few things we learned for ourselves during our education. Simple to apply, they were a bit of a struggle for us to recognize and verify. Here are four of them:

• Demerits For Long Sentences
• Content Is What A Visitor Sees
• Keyword Cosmetics
• Know Your Customer

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Software releases generally bring new capabilities, but like Ralph Story’s LA, some things aren’t here anymore. The results have some very negative consequences that may not support a new conspiracy theory, but being locked into a sales funnel is not pleasant. We’re starting to do something about this by rolling our own tools; perhaps you can too.  Topics:

• The Good Old Days: When Software Worked
• Things That Aren’t Here Anymore
• Outsourcing Quality Assurance
• How Did It Come To This?
• Hot Wax And The VW Beetle As Models

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An Early Morning Music Lesson

Music may well sooth wild beasts, and it can do other good things as well. This fairly obvious observation came as an accidental lesson during a morning workout. While listening to music on an MP3 player, one cut (Cerulean Skies, Maria Schneider Orchestra) in particular was really engaging, and when it ended I noticed the pulse rate display had gone down considerably. Couldn’t leave it alone.

A Correlation Between Noise And Blood Pressure

In February 2008, Reuters did a piece on a study of the effects of airport noise One conclusion was that airport noise increases blood pressure, which probably is not Nobel prize material. A lot of newspapers around the US picked up the story, which in turn generated other related stories on the effects on blood pressure from things like lawnmowers, garbage disposals, even snoring. However, none of the articles I reviewed were very specific about certain details, like the nature of the noise that can cause an increase in blood pressure.

Noise: Good And Bad

Noise is noise, and at some point can cause physical damage, and not only to the ears. Noise that influences blood pressure doesn’t have to be inherently loud as such, so the negative physiological effect on blood pressure must be related to its constituents. For a given loudness, coherent noise from, say, a jet plane’s engine, grates on our senses, while the surf line at the beach is relaxing. Coherent noise is usually made by a mechanical action, and is often called black noise. In contrast, the surf’s sound is reasonably random, and like most other sounds in nature, like the pattern of raindrops on a hard surface, is called white noise.

How Does Black Noise Raise Blood Pressure?

The short answer is: No one really knows. It’s one of the Mysteries Of Life. There are a lot of theories, and most of the ones I’ve seen have to do, ultimately, with resonance. Black noise increases it because of its coherent, accumulative nature, while white noise decreases it because the randomness acts as dispersing agent. What the resonance is within the human physiology is unknown. That may be Nobel prize material.

Music: A Form Of White Noise

Actually, music is more complex, having both coherence, like a repeating melody, and randomness, such as counter point. The complexity is a result of the Law Of Cosines, one consequence being that four frequencies are actually present when two frequencies are mixed (the original, their sum and difference), and there certainly a lot of frequencies involved. This effect is taken advantage of in how orchestras are arranged physically, and the assignments of musical parts to the various sections of an orchestra. Not surprisingly, the soothing effects of music have drawn the attention of serious
medical researchers

What Does It All Mean?

Probably nothing, other than general advice to listen to music you like, stay away from people who snore, spend as much time at the beach as possible, and always use a noise canceling headset when at the airport.

Overview

The accuracy of Google Analytics can be manipulated, either by accident or by intention. The bounce rate and average time on site metrics are particularly sensitive to manipulation, with one effect of reducing the web site relevancy, resulting in traffic loss. This effect is more pronounced with organic search matches, but also influences PayPerClick matches as well. Interestingly enough, the manipulation works in the other direction as well, with only a moderate increase in effort.

The Mechanism

The manipulation is very simple. To increase the bounce rate, open a web page and then quickly exit the web site. To decrease the average time, connect to a web page and then quickly move to another web page in the same web site. To go the other way, merely do the opposite.

Manipulation By Accident

This is internal traffic that usually results from testing, and usually has the effect of reducing the relevancy metric. A change is made and deployed, and the web site is eyeballed by quickly moving from one page to another, with the sequence often repeated for different browsers. FutureWare has separate development, QA and production servers, but we still look at the production site after changes are deployed, just in case (and, more often than not, a good thing we do). Some web development tools purport to have a locally operable copy, but it virtually always differs from the production copy after deployment. Caveat Emptor.

Avoiding Accidental Manipulation (Maybe)

Google Analytics provides a way, through the FilterManager, to isolate local traffic by IP address, singly or in ranges. However, this does not help for dynamically assigned IP addresses, which are often changed for each browser session by a firewall or router somewhere.  A javascript snippet can also be added to web pages that isolates activity, but this makes deployment problematic, given the change that has to be done to remove the snippet.

Manipulating By Intent

The world being what it is, and the bad guys getting badder, manipulating the metrics programmatically is amazingly easy. It certainly does not help that the browser vulnerabilities are now increasingly being exploited, perhaps helped along by their open source, with roots going back to the original Mozilla. Caveat Emptor indeed.