Archive for March, 2009
Google Analytics Individual Qualification Program
Posted on 10. Mar, 2009 by search_junkie.
Google Analytics Launched an individual qualification program recently. It is a skills qualification program for their analytics platform. Yes, yet another certification badge for every joe schmoe to tout is pretty cheesy. But I actually love this idea alot. I think that it will force many people to learn the Google analytics platform better. Too many yahoos out there install this free program and never go past traffic, sources, conversion, and sources.
The testing is actually pretty good and there are some tough questions regarding segments and advanced segments. Let me just tell you this, STUDY before you take it. If you think that you will be able to surf Google analytics help online while taking the timed exam and be able to answer all the questions you will be $50 poorer! I can tell you this, I will bet you that if a prospect is deciding between you and another person to do business with and you had the certification, that you would win the deal over the non-certified person. People don’t understand certifications, they just feel secure when they see them.
So do yourself a favor, study and get certified. Always take advantage of the opportunity to increase your knowledge. And hey that little certification badge is cool too!
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Case Sensitivity in SERPs
Posted on 04. Mar, 2009 by search_junkie.
I noticed today, that when entering in the same keyword phrase with and without capitals it pulled up different SERPs in Google. Now this was a revelation to me becuase in all my years I have never seen this happen unless it was an abbreviation or some really odd cases for specific brand names. But for a generic keyword phrase, never! Go ahead, test it out if you don’t believe me.
Try a search for “search marketing” and then try searching for “Search Marketing.” Bam! Different results. Make sure that you are signed out of your Google account when you search just to keep things isolated for this experiment. Now the results are not drastically different but they are nonetheless, different!. Please tell me if this is just something that has been going on for a while now and I just never noticed it. But from what I can tell this is new.
What does this mean for SEOs around the world? Well, things just got more complicated. Do you build links with anchor text that has both caps and no caps? Probably. But that just doubled your cost of link building. Is this a tactic for Google to lay a blow to the paid linking community which it cannot control? Probably. Does this serve up the most relevant SERP to the end user? I think not. I mean really, can one assume that a user’s intent is any different if they capitalize or not? Not really.
Oh Google, please come to your senses and rectify this.
