In the beginning Google acquired the San Diego based Urchin-Software Corporation, a company that offered enterprise-class Web Analytics, and then they lowered the monthly subscription cost from $495 to only $199. This alone caused the industry to get a little jumpy, to say the least. Well, now they’ve got good reason to be jumpy, because Google are now offering the newly branded Google Analytics to everyone for free.

So what exactly is Web Analytics and how can it help you?

Firstly, the term Analytics can be defined as: The process of gathering and analyzing information electronically then displaying it in a way which allows a company to track business trends (putting it simply of course). Web Analytics is a set of sophisticated tools that works on the same principle, they are used to analyse, report and track your web site visitors.

But how does Google Analytics differ from other competitors?

Not much really, except that this isn’t going to cost you thousands of pounds every year and it’s available to anyone with a web site, it also provides tightly intergrated AdWords support and remember this is enterprise-class Analytics, not your standard control panel weblog analysing software. This is the same product that companies up until now were paying thousands of dollars for each year.

Google Analytics -

Google Analytics offers a host of compelling features and benefits for everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to site owners and content developers.

Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.

Learn how Google Analytics features can help you start increasing ROI and better understand your visitors.

Learn more. »

We live in a time of instantaneous communication where people are demanding replies to their online correspondence within hours or even minutes, and they don’t want to be hanging on for a reply much longer than a day in most cases. Failure to keep up with the demands of your visitors will send them looking for quicker correspondence elsewhere, most likely straight to your competitors.

Help Center Live is a very powerful communications tool for your web site, which includes Live Help, Support Tickets (an osTicket module) and unlimited FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). You can use this free product to communicate with your visitors through the use of a real-time live help system (messenger style chat), canned messages, support tickets and unlimited FAQ topics. You can also monitor their footsteps throughout your site during their visit and initiate chat sessions, collect visitor information (referring url, number of visits, ip address etc), auto-assign tickets and transfer chat sessions to other Live Help operators.

This product can be downloaded ‘FREE’ from www.helpcenterlive.com, you can also try their online demo.

It also comes as part of the pre-installed scripts on our hosting package. Why not give the Help Center Live a go here, just click the live help link, top left, and drop us a note, or if a support representative is online have a chat. We don’t mind and you wont be bothering us

AdSense have just introduced a swanky new referral program. New and existing customers will have to agree to the amended terms and conditions before implementing it on their site first though. But when you’ve done that you can be earning yourself some serious cash (rubs greedy hands!). Every time your referrals make their first $100, Google AdSense will give you $100 dollars as well. We’ve already implemented our referral link on the left, just under the main menu options. Unfortunately due to the new TOCs you can only display one referral link per page and they only come in image format, like the one displayed (but not linked) in this post.

US bloggers/publishers are rumored to have an option that also lets them take advantage of the FireFox with Google toolbar download, which pays $1 per download. I’m not registered as an American publisher, so this isn’t an option on my account

digitalSURGERY will be moving to its own dedicated server during the next few days. So there will be no updates until the move has completed, meanwhile you may notice some interruptions in our service. We anticipate a full and successful transfer within the next 48hrs or so.

Why are we moving servers?

The purpose of this move is so that we can provide our clients with feature rich hosting plans and web design services, that presently we are unable to offer. More details about our new hosting plans and design services after the initial move.

digitalSURGERY is expanding. Stay tuned for updates!

Users of WordPress who are considering signing up with Chitika’s eMiniMalls and existing eMiniMall clients may be interested in reading about the Chitika eMiniMalls Wordpress Plugin by X74.org:

The plugin is very straightforward. Put it in your wp-content/plugins directory, then go to your Plugins configuration page and click Activate. Once you activate the plugin, you will see a new button on your Quicktags toolbar. The new button is eMiniMall. Click it to insert the eMiniMall tag.

We haven’t got the plugin running on this site ourselves because our eMiniMall code was already in place before this review. But if you’ve got the plugin installed, or are about to give it a go and would like to give your feedback then use the comments link below.

The Uniform Server (aka UniServer or MiniServer) is a free opensource all-in-one fully powered webserver that comes with Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl as standard. Either use it for production or as a live server, perfect for both developers and webmasters alike. Portable enough to store on your USB keypen (20megs in total) and is easy enough to start, simply double click the start.bat file in the UniServer directory and you’re ready to go. (Note: To get the control panel displayed in the screenshot above, you will need to download and install the UniTray plugin from their site.)

The Uniform Server was first developed by Taras Slobodskyy as an application for his clients, but later on, moved to becoming this free and open source project. It’s the perfect system for both beginner webmasters and experienced developers, a fully powered webserver you can take with you on a USB Stick or even your camera’s flash drive. The perfect sales presentation tool. It’s the new world WAMP Package.

This wasn’t as easy to setup as XAMPP. However this does seem more stable than XAMPP and by that I mean I’ve tested it myself. So just remember to read the user manual, download the right plugins, follow the on-screen instructions carefully and you’ll be up and running within 10-20 minutes.

I got an email from one of our readers the other day. Tyler from Longren.org had this to say about Intouch:

I just quit using Intouch because it prevented Blogpulse (maybe others?) from crawling my site.

He might be right you know, because since installing the Intouch plugin here at digitalSURGERY we’ve also noticed the software over at BlogPulse and Google have both stopped crawling this blog. We are going to give it another 24 hours to see if the authors of Intouch get back to us with a fix (we contacted them yesterday), after this period we’ll have no choice but to remove the plugin and amend or delete the original article.

UPDATE: Google HAS indexed digitalSURGERY now and that’s with Intouch running. Maybe this is just a BlogPulse specific bug? We still have an unsolved mystery on our hands

UPDATE 2: I’ve concluded that this problem IS exclusive to BlogPulse at this moment. I disabled Intouch in my own blog and BlogPulse still hadn’t indexed my site almost 3 days later. However, other search engines (the ones that count) have been crawling my blog regularly.

At the heart of Google’s Search Engine software is PageRank™, a system developed by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for the purpose of organising and ranking individual web pages using Google’s vast link structure, which it then uses as an indicator for each individual page’s value (pages are ranked on scale of zero to ten).

As defined by Google:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Simply throwing your web site address up on every guestbook, comments page or internet forum you come across wont achieve anything. Remember, high quality sites receive a higher PageRank™. The more high quality sites you get linked on (and the more relevant your own content is), the higher your own PageRank™ will be.

Just found this great Google AdSense Heat Map for Forums posted over at adsense.blogspot.com

Optimising Google AdSense for use on your forum is as simple as using Google’s Heat Map for Forums displayed on the left.

Research shows that the sidebar on the right doesn’t get as much attention as the sidebar on the left, so you may want to ignore placing Google AdSense on the right altogether. Placing a Skyscraper ad on the left of your forum and placing a leaderboard ad before and after the first post works best. Repeat visitors will not bother so much with the header, choosing instead to go straight for the main thread. You might consider placing a horizontal link unit just below the header though, these provide relevant topics for your users to browse.

Remember not to clutter your forum with Google AdSense. Find a layout that blends in with your forum and one that doesn’t distract your users too much from the main threads. Keep it simple, keep it unobtrusive!

In my last post ‘Tips for blogging and Google AdSense’ we talked about creating a blog optimised for Google AdSense. In this post we are going to discover the importance of keywords to help increase your search engine rankings and improve your success with Google AdSense.

Before we get started you should understand that this post is NOT about META KEYWORDS. They are totally useless in my opinion and considering that most search engines ignore them now anyway due to keyword abuse, you are better off not bothering with them at all. What search engines and Google AdSense are most interested in these days are keywords within the blog posts (the main content of your site), title headings of your posts and your html document title (web page title).

If you are writing a blog about blogging for example you will need to use keywords in your content relevant to your chosen subject of blogging. But you will also need to make sure you avoid overkill, use keywords this way and your posts will be uninteresting and people will stop visiting or you might find your site black-listed for being Splog (Blog Spam).

When linking to previous posts in your blog or someone else’s blog, try to be more creative with the links. Simply having click here or hyperlinking a single word wont do your rankings any good, try and use meaningful phrases that your visitors might do an internet search on instead. Take my example in the first paragraph of this post, notice how I use the full title of the post i’m referring to, that’s a great phrase and it contains good KEYWORDS. Search engines like this format and your sites will get better rankings if you keep doing it.

Your post titles should be descriptive and use good keywords. Try to imagine how someone might query a search engine for information your post discusses when constructing your post title. On the subject of titles, most blogging software will automatically add your post title to the html document title (displays in the blue title bar at the top of your browser), but if it doesn’t, either change your blogging software (try Wordpress for example) or try and edit the html document title tag directly.

So in short keywords are your Key to successful ranking and better results from your Google AdSense. Remember also that motivation and drive to keep posting those blog entries is also Key, don’t fall foul of Blogger Apathy.