• 3 Reasons Why Alexa Sucks (And They Know It!)
  This is the result of a bit of research I did on Alexa some months ago. It received some citations and recently some stumbleupon attention.
• .htaccess Hacking for Fun and Profit
  This was one of my first articles, and is still one of my top 3 entry pages
• Change Title of Your Older Posts to Target Popular Search Terms
  A simple tip that received a lot of attention from stumbleupon
• Bonus Search Tip: Finding mp3 files with Google
  This was just a pointer to my ultimate google guide, but it receive a lot of visits on his own from reddit searches (don’t know why, but there are a lot of searches for “mp3″ on reddit that returns this story)
• 10 Tips for Italian Espresso
  this is 100% off topic, still is very appreciated by readers. We all need caffeine, after all! ;)

Here’s my tag list… Stefano, Chris and…
YOU! t
This means that you, the one that’s reading this right now, have to keep this meme alive ;)
No excuses!

Looking forward for your entries!

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Check it out and let me know what you think about it :)

But too often we look at the popular search terms that took visitors to our site, and forget about the less popular ones.
Our own long tail.

Digging into our own long tail can be effective in many ways:

Find inspiration for future posts

Long tail search terms are uncommon groups of keywords.

This means they often point out non-banal relations between concepts and they can offer inspiration for future posts, because they raise questions or point out something you may want to investigate and write about.

Understand your visitors better

Tipical long tail search term is a long sentence, and it’s focused, so it let you know exactly what the visitor was interested in.

Since a blog is a source of information, knowing what type of information the visitor wants is the key for offering a better service.

Optimize posts with side keywords

There are some pages that does not rank well for their main keywords, because the top spots in the serps are crowded with different sites, but they rank well for a couple main keyword + side keyword.

Looking in the long tail is a great way to find this “side keywords” and optimize the pages (or future posts on the same topics) using together main keyword and side keywords.

What do you think?
What are the other advantages of long tail digging (apart from finding out google oddities and funny search term you rank for)?

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I’ll be back in a couple of weeks… stay tuned! :D

Clicktale has been opened to public on Monday, and looks very promising to me, as it offers a lot of unusual feature for a web analytics tool

Video

Probably the most impressive feature is the recording of each movement the user made on your page. Each mouse gesture, page scroll, click and input is recorded and can be reviewed as a video.

here’s a quick example from one of my visitors

Impressive, isn’t it? The video was scaled down for youtube and the speed is 2x the real speed, but clicktale allows you to see movies in full size and normal speed.

Attention and Visitors Heatmaps

Heatmaps measuring the attention time and the number of visits received by a section of the page are provided

Click Metrics

Each heatmaps can include different click metrics, including

• click count
• hover count
• hover time
• hesitation (how much time passed between hover and click)
• average hoover order (order the link was hovered by the visitor)
• etc.

User Segmentation

There is a promising beta feature that that uses the data collected to perform user segmentation, allowing you to see visitors with given behaviors, like

• lots of clicks
• lots of mouse gestures
• percent scrolled
• …

or using traditional informations (O.S., browser etc.).

Sounds Great. Is this Free Stuff?

It depends.
The free subscription to clicktale analytics allows you to track up to 100 visits / week for free, if you want more, you have to pay.
100 recording / weeks are not that much, but it’s enought to have a look at how your site is used and how powerful can be ClickTale.
Subscription plans are not cheap, in my opinion:

• $19 / month (100 recordings / day)
• $49 / month (400 / day)
• $99 / month (1000 / day)

I’m happy with the free package ;)

Opportunities

This metrics, the heatmaps and the videos provided by clicktale can add a real value to your analytics tools, offering a new way of looking at your website and a lots of hints about usability, driving attention and in-page optimization.

Adding tools like Clicktale to your “analytics kit” can help you to better undestand how users interact with your site and what section and aspects can be optimized.

The free version can give just a hint of how your website is accessed, but I think it can be really useful for usability and user behavior analysis.

I’m trying to get the most out of this tool, and I believe it can really help me to understand how my sites are used and what catches the user attention and why.

Being new at this type of analysis, I’m still trying to understand what are the main aspect I should consider… If you tried clicktale, or you’re gonna to try it, I’ll be happy to know what your experience is and what metrics you think we should look at…

Let me know in the comments how you think we can get the most out of Clicktale!

That means that if you leave comments or link to one of my posts, the link to your site will be seen as a “vote” from my site to your by search engines, giving you some help for better ranking in SERPs. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should read this introduction and a brief explanation on how pagerank works)

I want to encourage comments and trackbacks and to reward the readers that with their contribute helps the discussion to grow, and since I added the math question antispam plugin, I feel confident I’ll be able to handle comment spam.

The Top Commentators plugin remains active, to give an additional reward to the most active users that receive a link from each page of this blog.

Comment Policy

A comment will be deleted if:

• Contains links to splogs or MFA (Made For Adsense) sites
• Contains racists statements and stuff like that
• Adds no value to the discussion

Keep in mind that I accept and am happy to receive constructive critics… so don’t be afraid to criticize me, and I love to have fun, so jokes (in small quantities ;) ) are welcome… just use your brain when posting a comment!

Moderation

Comments containing more than one link in the comment body are moderated.

I check comments quite often, so you should be able to see it in a few hours, but sometimes I have to sleep, too.

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The feedburner feed was not in sync with feeds and they had problems with the ugly chicklets (another reason to use my feedcount plugin).

Did you have the same problems too?

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To me, you are still nothing more than a little blog who is just like a hundred thousand other little blogs.
And I have no need of you.
And you, on your part, have no need of me.
To you I am nothing more than a visitor like a hundred thousand other visitors.
But if you tame me, then we shall need each other.
To me, you will be unique in all the world.
To you, I shall be unique in all the world. . .

That’s what the Visitor told the Blog. Or what the Fox told the Little Prince?

Today, both Daniel and Darren wrote grat posts about “charming” visitors … and they made me think of the Fox and the Little Prince.

What about taming your visitors and be tamed by them? It’s a different point of view from creating relationships or giving your reader the appreciation they deserves.
It’s trying to fall in love with each one of your visitors.

Can this be too much?

How do you think it can be done?

What do bloggers have to change in their minds to be tamed by their readers?

1.Rounded Corners with CSS

There is a draft for CSS3 that supports rounded corners, and firefox has a property that somehow mimic the behavior of the proposed draft (there are some difference though…).
This means that it is possible to add a rounded corner effect to your divs by writing something like

<div style=”border: 3px solid #cccccc; padding: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 10px; ” >

Sorry IE users, you’ll see the boring square corners. Maybe it’s time to try Firefox?;)

2.Rounded Corners in AdSense Units

Yes, it’s possible. And if you don’t want to be punished by the God of Web 2.0 you really have to use them instead of the crappy square corners.

Here is an example with a real adsense unit (sorry, to see this you have to visit the article webpage if you’re reading via rss feed…) :

They look cool, don’t you think?

To add rounded corners, you have to log in to your adsense account and create a new ad unit. After the color selection you’ll find a nice drop down list called “corner styles”.

If you’re wandering why you never noticed this cool feature, it’s because it has been released recently. :)

3.Rounded Corners from Google

If you want to create an image or something with rounded corners you can have google draw the corners for you! :D

Just use as image src something like your browser to something like: groups-beta.google.com/groups/roundedcorners? c=999900&bc=ccc&w=34&h=34&a=tr , changing the parameters as follow:

• c : corners color (in hex or plain text form, e.g. ‘red’ or ‘ffccdd’ or ‘fca’)
• bc : background color (same as c, can be omitted for transparent bg)
• w : width (px, default 8)
• h : height (px, default 8)
• a : one of tr (top right) , tl (top left) , bl (bottom left) , br (bottom right)

This is the resulting image:

(thanks to google blogoscoped)

4.Rounded Corners with javascript

There are a lot of javascripts tools that can help you to round the corners of your divs, but I found Nifty Corner really simple to use. :)

You just have to load the .js file and place some calls defining with elements in the page should be rounded. If you don’t bother depending on javascript, this can be a simple solution.

5. Rounded Corners Online Generators

Obviouly there are online rounded corner generators.

They generate images and/or html and css files to be copied and used on your website… You still have to upload images on your server and tweak some code, but it’s better than doing everything on your own :)

• http://www.roundedcornr.com/
• http://wigflip.com/cornershop/
• http://www.fritscher.ch/dojo/roundedcorners.html
• http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/css-rounded-box/index.php

If you have some other rounded corners resources, tips or advices, please share them with me and the other readers! I’m waiting for your comments ;)

Few days ago, years after the release of Firefox 1.0, an official Alexa toolbar for firefox has been released.

It’s called Sparky, and shows a small alexa stats graph in the bottom right corner of your browser.

It can be used to monitor alexa stats for the sites you’re visiting. Apart from that, it seems to be almost useless.

The lack of firefox support was one of the reasons why I never trusted alexa. I’m happy to know that their data can now be a little more accurate, if only people had a reason to add this toolbar to firefox.

get Sparky from mozdev