Google bought Urchin Web Analytics in 2005. Since then we have seen some major changes to the original Urchin software. Earlier this year Google upgraded their analytics offering significantly. Google Analytics is now a very popular and powerful website reporting tool.

Fatpublisher have up until now offered a customised version of webalizer to all clients. We now simply recommend and configure Google Analytics accounts. Webalizer continues to be available however we have found that as soon as our clients begin using Google Analytics they very rarely refer to webalizer anymore. Read the rest of this post »

We are always looking for ways of accurately reporting the success of websites in the search engines. Screen scraping the search engine result pages is not always an option since they often lock you out after a certain number of queries. We devoted some time to developing a web based log analyser that charts the number of referrals from the major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Live Search.

Check it out, feedback welcome : siterake

The majority of search engines today handle singular and plural keywords differently. Were they to treat singular and keywords the same, the search results would be the same, evidently they are not.

Try it now by searching the major search engines for both ‘website designers sydney’ and ‘website designer sydney’, the results are often remarkably different:

Live : website designers sydney »
Live : website designer sydney »
Google : website designers sydney »
Google : website designer sydney »
Yahoo : website designers sydney »
Yahoo : website designer sydney »

It is important therefore, to optimise a website for both singular and plural keywords and in proportion to their respective usages. If most people would search using a plural than more effort should be directed towards optimising the website for the search phrase involving the plural keyword.