Microsoft's Windows 7 home operating system comes out on 22 October 2009, less than three years after the launch of Vista.  In order to get people "buzzed" about their new product, they are encouraging Windows 7 House Parties! 

Doesn't that sound like fun!?  Naturally, I want to use my Saturday preparing to encourage my neighbors to use an overpriced Microsoft product (I vote Linux).  Don't forget - Microsoft wants pictures!

I was laughing really hard this morning, as I learned how to host my Windows 7 party (yes, they are serious):



What's the incentive?  Why would anyone do this? The answer: a party pack which includes...

* One limited Signature Edition Windows 7® Ultimate (32 bit)
* One Deck of Playing Cards with Windows 7® Desktop Design
* One Puzzle with Windows 7® Desktop Design
* One Poster with Windows 7® Desktop Design
* Ten Tote Bags with Windows 7® Desktop Design for hosts and guests
* One table top centerpiece for decoration
* One package of Windows 7® napkins

I didn't even add in those little R's!  They came straight from the responder at Yahoo Answers!

Excuse me???  You want me to host a party in exchange for Windows themed napkins?  And playing cards!?  There are no streamers or balloons involved because those extras are only shipped in America.  For a keg and some meat to put on the BBQ I may be tempted.

So I've applied to be a host. I'm not sure why, because I don't need ten Windows 7 tote bags and I have a Mac at home. Maybe my roommate could use the "Signature Edition Windows 7® Ultimate" for work.

Two parts of the application process made me chuckle - and it made the whole experience so PC-ish. First, I had to go on a duck hunt running tests and confirming my PC here in the office is capable of running Windows 7. Okay, fine, no, I didn't actually do this, but I could have...
Secondly, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to receive emails about Microsoft products.  Oh wait - did I say "decide"?  Microsoft actually made the choice for me, kind of like when my Windows XP decides to restart at 11am to do some random updates I will never need.



And the "legal jargon" section - was FOUR PAGES LONG - single spaced size 12 font!  I feel bad about the internet trees, so I wont publish the whole thing but it's over 1,500 words.   

The Google AdWords ad scheduling setting lets you specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your PPC ads to appear. Ad scheduling can give your PPC campaign a better 'bang for your buck' by improving your ROI by making sure that your ads only run when it makes the most sense for your business.

If you are from a B2B context you might schedule your ads to run only during business hours - let's assume only weekdays say from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm. targeting business hours when you think your audience is looking for your products/services. Setting up the ad scheduling is easy as ABC - or B2B! Simply log in to your AdWords account, go to the settings tab, then advanced settings and there you find the ad scheduling settings.

But how can you be certain your scheduled ads actually target your audience effectively, that you are spending your cost per click on your desired audience? This is where your Google Analytics account come into play. Google Analytics Custom Reporting can help you take out the guesswork in ad scheduling when your audience is looking for your products/services. Let your website visitors, who are your audience determine when to target your PPC audience.

By setting up a custom report you can find out how visitors are behaving on your website at what hours of the day, at what days, pages per visit and bounce rate. With this information you can adjust the PPC ad scheduling and budget accordingly.

To set up custom reporting simply login to your Analytics account, click on custom reporting in the left menu and in the top right corner click on "create a new custom report". Nothing needs to be installed or verified.



In the left menu called 'Metrics' click on 'Site Usage' and drag-and-drop 'Entrances' (along with good traffic quality indicators 'Time on Site', 'Pages per Visit', and 'Bounce Rate') one by one across to the 'Metric' boxes. Then do the same thing with 'Dimensions', click on 'Visitors' and drag-and-drop 'Day' over to the 'Dimension' box and 'Hour of the Day' over to the 'Sub-Dimension' box.



Then rename your custom report to whatever you want to call it by editing the title. Click the 'Preview' button to see your custom report and if you are happy with the report then finally click on 'Create Report'. Now you have created your custom report!

With these metrics in your custom report you can in more detail find out how visitors behave on your website, during what hours of the day and at what days. Based on the information you get from the report you might want to refine the PPC ad scheduling.



In the example above the majority of entrances to the website happened in late afternoon between 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm and on Mondays and Fridays. From this example scheduling the PPC ads to run only on 8:00 am to 6:00 pm on only weekdays would be advisable.

Set aside a couple of hours to learn Google Analytics custom reporting. Apart from creating a custom report in Google Analytics to refine PPC spend and strategy you can create a custom report to help you optimise your online leads and conversions. More about that in another blog post.

Having gone through a series of SEO evaluations those last few weeks, I was shocked to come across so many cases of websites with bad internal linking structure.   I now think it's essential to stress on good internal linking since I have the impression that web designers often overlook the importance of having a well structured site in terms of internal linking.  The current situation is very sad since a lot of websites are not benefitting of the power of internal linking.  I therefore compiled a short list of factors that one should consider while building the website structure.

Good Navigation - The most important issue here is to make sure that the site navigation is correctly spidered by the search engines.  We can ensure this by either use of anchor text and text based navigation, or an image-based navigation type with significant 'alt attributes' attached to every image link in the navigation.  Avoid Javascript and Flash navigations because they are still not well crawlable and spidered by the search engines.  If you still want to keep your 'flashy' navigation then I'll suggest you include an alternative navigation that would be spidered by major search engines. For example, you could have a text based navigation at the bottom of your page, this will help you inner pages be more spiderable.  

XML Sitemap - I cannot stress enough on having a good XML sitemap on your website.  Sitemaps provide an overview of the site at a single glance but at the same time they help search engines crawl the website.  Submitting a XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool for example can be very useful since it gives the search engines a concise format that provides spiders with a super-fast blueprint for indexing a website. Furthermore, sitemaps also improve web usability as they are an alternative form of a site specific search, which brings users to the information they need quicker.  

Breadcrumbs - I believe breadcrumbs are excellent internal linking tools. Being 'links' by nature, they aid with internal linking and consequently increase the search engine visibility. In addition to anchor text differentiation, breadcrumbs are very useful since they increase the general usability of the website by allowing users to know exactly where they are on the website.  

Links in Content - I had the chance to analyse different kind of websites in different industries but it was quite common to see a lack of links in their copy.  It's essential to have in-content links, since not only they are more likely to have higher click through rates (increased confidence path), but they are also capable to add more significance to a link because of the neighbouring text.  Therefore, the rule of thumb here is to have links with anchor text with targeted keywords in the copy of the website.  

Links to Important Pages - It's essential to always ensure that all important pages are well linked to other pages on the website.  I sometimes found it amazing how some of the most important pages of a website are not properly linked to other pages.  It is better to link them directly to the homepage so that they can benefit from the power of link juice passing from the homepage.  But time and again I see websites with important pages buried too deep and ending up with no page-rank at all.  And it's not uncommon to find those pages not indexed by the search engines.  

Cross-check Robot.txt - This may look stupid, but I came across cases where I found important pages of a website not being crawled and spidered because they were found in a section where the robot.txt was preventing spiders to crawl.  This mainly happen by mistake or when new pages are added to the website.  Sometimes webmasters tend to forget to go back to their robot.txt and check whether all crawlable/non-crawlable sections are up-to-date.  In brief, your important pages need to be findable, if not there's no way they'll get crawled and indexed.  

Linking Policy - It is very important to be extremely consistent in your linking behaviour. What I mean is that while linking pages we need to be meticulous about how we are building the links.  I once had to re-build the links of a whole website since links to the homepage were very inconsistent.  Some links were pointing to the .com page whereas others were pointing to the .com/index.php page.  The website also had some major canonicalisation issues where several links were pointing to identical pages but with different URLs.  Cases like this actually decrease all the power of internal linking since the link juice is diluted around the site instead of being intelligently focused on the essential pages.  In brief a link policy should be setup so that everyone building links knows exactly how and where to link them.  

Just to remind, good internal linking ensures that all pages on your website get properly spidered and indexed on search engines.  It increases the relevancy of a page to the targeted keyword phrase.  Allows proper link juice passing to internal pages hence increasing their page-rank. That's it, hope that this helps tuning and enhancing your internal link structure.