Archive | Software RSS feed for this section

Google Analytics Version v5 Coming Soon

23 Nov

FinallyFast.comBusiness news from the Finally Fast team

As the sun sets on the old Analytics interface, version v5 is coming closer to reaching fruition. While the beta version has already been available for users to try out, Google says in a matter of weeks the new version will be activated in all user accounts. You will still be able to switch back to the old version while you get your feet wet with the new interface, but only until January 2012. After January, version v5 will be fully integrated and the old version will be gone. With all the cool new features on the v5 interface, however, we don’t see any need to switch back. New Features include:

Visitor Flow

Visitor flow provides a great visual for how visitors navigate your pages and where they drop off. In the drop down bar, you can choose what flow chart you want to see, whether it be direct traffic, referral traffic or even mobile traffic. This feature also lists the numbers of visitors to each pages, how many go on to another page and how many drop off.

Real Time Tracking

Real Time Tracking provides a visual breakdown of real time visitors to your website. You are able to see the number of visitors fluctuate as they enter and exit your website each second. You are also able to see where in the world these visitors are coming from on a map, how many pages they have visited and the amount of time they have spent on the website.

Mobile Tracking

With mobile search becoming more prominent, Analytics v5 has added the capability to track mobile devices, as well as iPods and iPads. The Analytics team was even nice enough to provide images for each mobile device, just in case you forget what an iPhone looks like.

Multi-Channel Funnels and Goals Funnels

The multi-channel funnels give you a visual breakdown of what traffic sources preceded a conversion. This is a useful tool which can reveal what is more influential in yielding conversions. Under the ‘Conversions’ tab, you can find funnel visualization and goal flow, which are also unique visual tools which can help track conversions.

Key Differences Between the New and Old Versions

Even with the addition of all these new features, many of the key features of the old Analytics version have been preserved. The overall layout and menu bar have changed slightly, since Google has done away with the ‘Dashboard’, ‘Intelligence’ and ‘Goals’ tabs from the old interface and added the ‘Advertising’ and ‘Conversions’ tabs on the new menu.

New tabs have been added along the top, where ‘Home’ will take you to your dashboard and ‘Standard Reporting’ will take you to the familiar reports. ‘Custom Reporting’ allows the option to create your own reports based on customized factors.

In addition to the new features, some of key features from the older version have been switched around. For instance, the ‘Keywords’ tab, which used to be under

‘Traffic Sources’ in the older version is no longer there. Instead, you can find keyword tracking by going to Traffic Sources > Overview and your keywords are there on the right hand side.

Even with the new features and alterations to the layout, the new Analytics platform is straight-forward and easily understood. The Analytics team did a great job of providing an enhanced version of the Analytics we love, creating a visual approach to the variables that matter most, like conversions and site navigability.

Photo Credit

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Webmaster Tools you can’t live without

13 Apr

Business Ideas from FinallyFast:

Anyone who manages a website on a regular basis will tell you that there’s more to website management than just uploading content. As a webmaster, one must also analyze the site regularly for the best SEO possible, check for File Not Found errors, and keep an eye on the site security, just to name a few of the hurdles. Luckily, there are Webmaster tools available to assist webmasters with these tasks. Webmaster Tools are software kits for web developers. The often include tools for SEO, Search Engines, Domain Checkups, along with HTML scripting tools. Here’s a breakdown of the three most popular collections of Webmaster tools on the Internet.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools are a free web service allowing you to analyze your site through the same methods Goggle uses for web crawling crawl and indexing. The toolkit allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize website visibility, including the ability to:

• Submit and check a sitemap.
• Check and set the rate at which web bots crawl your site, and view statistics about how Googlebot (Google’s WebCrawler) accesses a particular site.
• Generate and review a robots.txt file for your site.
• List internal and external pages that link to the site.
• Determine which keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the search engines results page, and the click through rates of such listings.
• Set a preferred domain, which determines how the site URL is displayed in search engine results pages.

Bing Webmaster Center

Bing Webmaster Center allows webmasters to add their websites to the Bing Index Crawler. The service also offers tools for webmasters to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of their website, sitemap creation, submission and ping tools, website statistics, consolidation of content submission, and new content and community resources. Their tools include:

• Crawl issues analysis tool, allowing webmasters to discover potential issues with their websites such as File Not Found errors, blocked by your site’s robots.txt file or robots meta tag, long dynamic URLs, and unsupported content-types.
• Backlink data tool allowing webmasters to access data about their referring links.
• Advanced filtering tool.
• Data download tool allows webmasters to access the first 1000 results in a CSV file to analyze the results.
• Keyword search tool.
• Robots.txt validator tool.
• HTTP verifier tool.
• Outbound links analysis tool

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer is a service which allows viewing of information on websites in Yahoo!’s search index. Webmasters who add a special authentication code to their websites are also allowed to:

• Submit Sitemaps.
• Submit up to 20 URL removal requests for their domains to Yahoo!.
• Rewrite dynamic URLs from their site by either removing a dynamic parameter or by using a default value for a parameter.
• Submit feeds for Yahoo Search Monkey.
• View Errors Yahoo encountered while crawling their web site.

Tags: , , , , ,

The Four Basic Types of Meta Tags

12 Apr

From the FinallyFast help desk

Meta Tags are HTMl codes that are usually inserted into the header of a webpage after the title tag. When people refer to meta tags in Search Engine Optimization, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keyword tag, both of which are not seen by users. The main purpose of these tags are to provide meta document data to search engines such as Google and Bing. Meta tags were originally intended to provide a proxy for information about a website’s content. Each of the four basic types of meta tags are listed below, along with a description of their use.

1) Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description Tag is a short description of a page’s content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results. This tag serves the function of advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from the search results.

2) Meta Keyword Tag
The meta keywords tag is used to declare keywords and keyword phrases that you’ve targeted for that specific page. In order for theses tags to function properly, the same keywords and keyword phrases must appear on the actual page.

3) Meta Robots Tag:
An alternative to using a Robots.txt file, the Meta Robots Tag can be used to control search engine spider activity on a page level There are several ways to use meta robots to control how search engines treat a page. Popular Meta Robots Tags include:

• Index/NoIndex: tells the engines whether the page should be crawled and kept in the engines’ index for retrieval. If you opt to use “noindex”, the page will be excluded from the engines. By default, search engines assume they can index all pages, so using the “index” value is generally unnecessary.
• Follow/NoFollow: tells the engines whether links on the page should be crawled. If you elect to employ “nofollow,” the engines will disregard the links on the page both for discovery and ranking purposes. By default, all pages are assumed to have the “follow” attribute.
• Noarchive: used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they indexed, accessible to searchers through the “cached” link in the search results.
• Nosnippet: informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of text next to the page’s title and URL in the search results.
• NoODP: a specialized tag telling the engines not to grab a descriptive snippet about a page from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) for display in the search results.
• NoYDir: specific to Yahoo!, informing that engine not to use the Yahoo! Directory description of a page/site in the search results.

4) Meta Refresh, Meta Revisit-After, and Meta Content:
These are less critical tags, with various uses for optimization.

• Meta Refresh: Instructs the browser to refresh after a given time interval, and is sometimes used to move the browser to another URL.
• Meta Revisit-After: an outdated tag used to redirect a browser to a page.
• Meta Content: used to declare the language, style, or script type.

Tags: , , , ,

Social Media Integration Plugins to Save you Time

8 Apr

From the FinallyFast Help Desk:

Keeping up your primary WordPress blog is tough enough. Additional social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous—are extremely appealing, but you might be afraid of multiplying your work. The answer is cross-posting and integration, and here are a few plugins you can use to automate your cross-posts and ditch the hassle of separately posting your content to four different platforms.

Wordbooker – There are a few Facebook integration plugins, but I like Wordbooker for its relatively rich set of features. You’ll be best served by carefully examining all of the plugin’s various options and toggles to determine the cross-post strategy that’s best for you. At the most basic level, Wordbooker automatically posts an excerpt of your WordPress entry onto your Facebook wall, with a backlink for users to read your entire blog article. Everything (and I mean everything), from the display font of the Facebook Like button to the length of the excerpt that appears on Facebook, is customizable. You can tweak your cross-posting for each entry, but obviously the goal is to save time, so spend the time setting your options prior to your first post, and then keep those settings in place for each subsequent post.

Importantly, you can also elect to back-post (is that a word?) any Facebook comments to your WordPress article’s comment page. For true integration and cross-posting goodness, consider this option.

Twitter Tools – You can probably guess that Twitter Tools allows you to automatically post notifications and backlinks of blog articles to your Twitter account. It’s a simpler tool than Wordbooker, which makes sense—Twitter is simpler than Facebook! In fact, the hardest part will be initially linking your WordPress to your Twitter—it requires hunting around for a few long “Access Token” character strings in Twitter, but the plugin’s tutorial is pretty clear about how to do that.

One option in Twitter Tools allows you to “go the other way” and automatically create blog posts from your tweets, and this brings me to a larger point. Usually, you’ll want cross-posting to be a one-way street. That is, you want to post your content to your flagship WordPress blog, and from there that content should trickle down automatically to your other platforms. Trickling up—making your brief Facebook posts or tweets into blog posts—rarely makes sense. Reserve your WordPress platform for permanent, quality, long-form content. You shouldn’t clog up your blog with the ephemera of Facebook and Twitter.

Tumblrize – our final weapon in the arsenal is Tumblrize, which cross-posts to Tumblr as well as Posterous. If you’re not familiar with these platforms, they are particularly useful for effortless posting of multimedia content, and their simple interfaces are nice for mobile blogging. All you need for Tumblrize is a Tumblr email and password.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Super-Pro: Essential Tips for Blog Formatting

1 Apr

If you’re a serious blogger—motivated by passion, income, notoriety, or a little bit of all three—it’s high time to get serious about formatting, which can make the difference between a blog that exudes professionalism and legitimacy, and a blog that looks slapped together by your nine-year-old. Here are a few specifics to get you started.

  • Start out your entries in a similar way – For example, see how this very entry gives you a brief, one-paragraph summary of what to expect? Intro summaries are great for applications that link to your blog with an excerpt, like Facebook. They’re also nice for the attention-span-challenged; that is to say, everybody.

  • Use the platform tools – We may not have all the tools of a true word processor at our disposal, but we can still make things nice. Use bold and italics to separate and emphasize key text. When you quote a lengthy quotation, use Blockquote. Use proper bullets or numbering when making a list. If your entry is separated with several headings, do something consistent and special with those headings to make them stand out. WordPress calls some of these effects “Kitchen Sink” tools, and you should definitely use everything—including the kitchen sink—available to you.

  • Hand coding is your friend – Sometimes, you love a theme but hate a certain part of it. Say that the theme’s picture captions are atrocious. What can you do? That’s when it pays to get familiar with hand coding HTML. In most platforms, such as WordPress, you can toggle between “Visual” (plain text) and “HTML” input screens. Don’t worry, you don’t need to learn the language, but you can learn just enough to be dangerous, as the saying goes. Realize that most of what HTML involves is tag words with brackets, and you’re halfway there. Throw in a <small> before that pesky caption to get it to a decent size. Toss in a <center> when your photo frustratingly persists in aligning itself on the left. Learn the table tags to make a chart that doesn’t look like it was smashed with a brick.

  • Strip formatting from other sources – With the ubiquitous copy-and-pasting going on, either from other websites or from your Word document or elsewhere, formatting can get pretty funky, from font to spacing to weird little artifacts and on and on. Start fresh and kill the formatting—usually with a “Remove Formatting” button—or at least take steps to exactly translate it. WordPress has special “Paste from Word” and “Paste as Plain Text” tools in its Kitchen Sink which will better preserve formatting. In Blogger and others, pasting your text into the “Edit HTML” window is the best option. Keep in mind, however, you may still need to tweak. Never forget to preview and proofread!

Tags: , ,

Seeing Green: Ideas for a Better Data Center

30 Mar

From the FinallyFast Help Desk:

While the “Zeronet” data center (that is, a data center that features net zero energy consumption) may be difficult or impossible to achieve with the systems, budget, or logistics you have in place, IT administrators at all points in the “legacy system” spectrum can take positive steps toward greening up IT infrastructure and saving significant energy costs that impact the bottom line. Here are a few strategies to think about:

Get hip to power management – The simple decision of configuring servers to operate at minimum power levels when not in use can save anywhere from 10% to 20% in data center energy costs. In the green way of doing things, IT admins need to examine downtime as much as they do uptime. Be smart about power management, an essential yet often overlooked tool in your toolbox.

Pay attention to the cooling system – Organizing your server racks according to the hot aisle/cold aisle containment system is a very important step toward exceptional energy efficiency. This involves server racks facing each other (creating “hot aisles”), and an air-conditioning system (complete with raised floor) that takes advantage of this concentration of heat. While it may be a significant expense if your server room is not set up for this configuration, the return of investment can be realized within a few short years.

Junk the legacy systems – The idea of “junking” doesn’t really do your cherished legacy system justice—it’s delivered the company many years of admirable service, and it may in fact be working just fine at the moment. It’s also, of course, a royal pain to think about the massive data transfer to be undertaken with any upgrade. But a generation of new and greener technology is achieving a level of energy efficiency that legacy systems can only dream about. Server upgrade is perhaps the single most impactful item on your list.

Go virtual – Server virtualization is also a key aspect of any green plan, particularly if you are loaded down with tons of outdated information and a variety of legacy systems. By consolidating data and then running more virtual servers on less physical servers, your data center will get smarter and smarter about gobbling up energy.

Get the bosses on board – Dovetailing off of the last point, it’s essential to get the check-cutters enthusiastic and involved with your green IT strategy. Make it a company-wide initiative to evaluate total energy costs and determine the ROI of implementing a green IT strategy. After all, the best way to go green (for the environment) is to get them to go green (for the money)!

Tags: , , , ,

6 Must-Have Freeware Applications

25 Mar

From the FinallyFast Help Desk:

Hey, if the price is right—free—there are several software programs floating around that are worth your attention. Here are six of our favorite freeware applications—some simple but effective, some more complex but worth the learning curve—that you might find valuable:

YouTube Downloader – a surprisingly simple but powerful program, YouTube Downloader does just that: facilitates downloading of YouTube videos. All you do is paste the video URL into the box and you’re off to the races. And this application is a two-fer; it also converts downloaded videos to a bunch of useful formats, like .mp3 and .avi. It can make smartphone-friendly videos as well.

TeamViewer – an essential and surprisingly robust tool for desktop sharing and remote control. It’s packed with features – switching control of the desktop, controlling the size of the remote desktop on your own desktop, and there’s even a browser-based version. If you have any need for remote desktopping (yes, I just made up that word), choose TeamViewer.

PhotoScape – for those of us who can’t quite justify the expense of Photoshop—or even the cheaper Photoshop Elements—PhotoScape is a great option for quick (and free) image manipulation. You won’t be able to do some of the super-advanced filtering and optical effects found in Photoshop, but PhotoScape will satisfy most of your low- and mid-level image tinkering needs.

PrimoPDF – for conversions of most any text file into PDF, PrimoPDF does the job admirably. I probably wouldn’t trust it for items that need to be converted with very high degrees of accuracy, like graphic design work or an ebook for publication, but for those everyday PDFs, this friendly freeware is a good choice.

GOM Video Player – there are way too many video formats and codecs out there, but GOM gobbles up most of them with ease. Why convert or switch video players when one does it all? The player also features several audio and video control tweaks so you can get the most out of your media.

Download Accelerator Plus – when you want it fast, accelerate it! Download Accelerator Plus will speed up your downloads anywhere from two to four times normal. It does this by splitting up files and locating better mirror sites. It also can resume downloads, which is a nice bonus.

Tags: , , , , ,

Adobe releases Creative Suite 5

14 May

On April 12, Adobe announced the release of its popular Creative Suite 5 program, which received favorable reviews from the IT community due to new features added from previous editions. The Adobe Creative Suite includes popular programs like publishing program Adobe InDesign and photo editing software Photoshop.

Perhaps the most widely discussed new feature is Photoshop new content-aware fill, which allows users to edit photos better than ever before. The new version replaces deleted elements of a photo with fills based on the colors and textures surrounding the removed area.

“While Creative Suite 5 continues Adobe’s storied history of delivering astonishing new creative features, this release puts us front and center of the big issues facing publishers and creatives worldwide – how to build businesses around digital assets and content,” Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe, said.

The suite also includes the newest version of Adobe Reader. The PDF reader has been the source of much scrutiny for the company due to the amount of malware spread using vulnerabilities in the program’s code. Adobe has released several updates to offset the issues in the early stages of 2010.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

%d bloggers like this: