Is it time to start designing for 1280, as opposed to 1024 ?

Anyone who has done it? Any ideas as to how use the increased space in 1280, while at the same time not excluding the 37% of users with “only” 1024 ?

It depends. It depends mainly on the competition for the words you are trying to win.

We have at least two experts on SEO in Norway, and they seem to have opposite approaches to SEO. Karl Philip Lund from IXD seems to prioritize linking into the page first, while Roar Eriksen at Tarantell, seems to go for technical visibility first.

I’m going to start with a high technical visibility for my case, and only a few links into my page, and increase the linking as we go along, and as much as needed. I’ll report status in the commentery to this article as time goes by.

The page in question is my page: http://www.baranyi-eriksen.com.
The words I’m fighting for are:

• Kenneth, Baranyi, Eriksen
• Kenneth Baranyi Eriksen
• Kenneth Eriksen
• webstatistikk
• webanalyse
• and any combination of the last two in connection to my name.

Usually optimizing on your own name or company brand should be easy. In my case there are a lot of people with the same name (Kenneth Eriksen) as me, and some of them have gotten a substantial media and community coverage. I’m even competing against myself and my old company that was organizing my soccer coaching activities. It was closed down last year, but still remains indexed through a bunch of catalog services. And having the same name as the above mentioned SEO-GURU, does not come to my advantage…

At the moment I have no ranking or control of my own name.
That stands to be corrected.

During the last few days, my pages are starting to get indexed in Google, but there is a long way to go…

I’m still outside the first page on these key phrases:

• Kenneth Eriksen
• webstatistikk
• webanalyse
• Kenneth
• Baranyi
• Eriksen

Stay tuned for more updates, and feel free to suggest further actions to help me achieve a higher ranking.

As an “Avinash-fan” I’ve bought and read his book, read several of his articles on his blog, and there wasn’t much new in his presentation. But he’s a cool dude ;-)  You don’t see many analytics professionals like this man. What a blessing he is.

But he has an important message, and if you haven’t heard it before, go read it here: Web Analytics 2.0

He also showed us some of the new features that are coming to Google Analytics in the near future. See the detalis in the GA-blog. I’m impressed. With the custom reports and segmentations possibilities GA is giving even the bigger tools, like WebTrends and Omniture, competition.

I’m still, and even more, an Avinash-fan after his visit.

You have one of the biggest Norwegian conferences (Webdagene) in Oslo Sep 18-19, and you have eMetrics in Stockholm Sep 23-24 and then again back to Oslo with a webstatistics course with Nina Furu Sep 25.

If you’re the least bit interested in the web, this is the week for you. I’m hedging my bets, so I’ll be attending everything.

Some highlights:

• Gerry McGovern; Webdagene, Sep 19: How to create killer content.
• Jim Sterne,  Emetrics, Sep23 – Tough Times Call for Tough Measures
• Neil Mason, Emetrics, Sep 24– Advanced Web Analytics

What’s New?
If you have been working with online surveys anywhere I Scandinavia there is a big probability that you have experience with Instant Survey. Maybe you remember a grey, dull and a little slow user interface but also a product that delivered great results once the cumbersome setup process had been done. The user interface is still easily recognizable but a refreshing stay in Omniture-land has really improved the usability and look of the product. From my first login it took me less than twenty minutes to produce the survey below and the answer to the question was obvious!

The intention was to produce something close to the new Creuna look, and I could have spent even more time fine-tuning the layout of the survey to perfectly match it to the launch page. Thereby I could prevent that users perceive the survey as “dangerous” third party involvement.
The ability to adjust the layout was already pretty good with Instant Survey, but in addition Omniture has added P&P functionality to embed the survey in a container on the site thereby making it an actual part of the site – nice!
Other great features is the ability to connect survey answers to a context e.g. a page or an element on a page as well as the ability to manually launch surveys when a user interacts with an element on the page such as a “No this information was not what I was looking for” button. With these features it is easy to get continuous user ratings of and feedback on your FAQ-pages, special offers, self-service pages and so on.

Pandoras Box
Obviously I am very excited about the product and this is only version 1.0. When the next version is released and what it will contain is of course a deep green secret, but we are still allowed to hope and guess 
I think it would be obvious to attach a visitor ID to every survey answer thereby making it possible to analyze every single visitor who has answered the survey.
This would work very well with Pathing Visulization that is a feature in Omnitures deep data mining tool Discover. This functionality allows you to visualize a single user session and would enable you to find out how a user entered the site, what the user subsequently did on the site, and the sequence of events. This would facilitate an understanding of why the user who wrote “useless homepage” in the free text of the survey was so horribly disappointed.
Similarly there would be a lot insight to gain by segmenting groups of users by the answers they had given or by asking targeted questions to users on the basis of their browsing patterns identified by SiteCatalyst variables.

Survey….Really!?
Most of us have at some point been subjected to long and very boring paper or digital surveys, and maybe you are thinking that your user do not want to answer a survey anyway or that they at worst might be inclined to leave you if you subject them to something that dull.
My experience is that a little rational thought and a good and reliable survey tool gives you the possibility to gain a lot of insights without any risks at all.
Online surveys are your chance to engage in a dialog with a very big share of your users and get feedback and suggestions from the most dedicated of them.
You will be able to test whether your users agree with your conclusions and you will be able to dig out information that can help you form new business questions for further investigation.
The use of online surveys does not end with the optimization of your site. In addition you have a unique chance to understand trends and developments in your industry and in what directions your products and services should develop.

Is this just a promotional trick from Halogen, who’s sponsoring this first event, or is it a sign of a new trend in the Norwegian marketplace. I think it’s a little bit of both.

In February there were two rather large events for people interested in analytics in Norway. Arena Data (the WebTtrends partner in Norway) had its annual event, with approx. 200 people attending. Nina Furu had a web statistics course with more than 50 participants. She’s having another course September 25 aswell.

It seems to me like webanalytics is becoming more interesting to the general public.

In the beginning I used Facebook every day, several times a day. It was important for me to study and understand the tool, as fast as possible and as extensive as possible. I’m a web professional so it was kind of mandatory…

After a while it all turned into a big overload. A time consuming activity with little real benefit. For a few months I was “all-out”.

Then (now), suddenly messages started popping up in my mailbox with a “normal” frequency and suddenly the messages were more relevant and tangible.

It seems like not only I, but also my friends and family, have matured in the use of Facebook. Gone are most of the “too much fun / spam” things, and suddenly it all got more relevant.

I use Facebook less, but get greater benefits than before, with less effort. So do obviously my friends and family. We all use the tool less, but more importantly we still use it, and we enjoy it more than before.

No wonder that the number of Facebook users in Norway are increasing again, after a few months with little or no real growth in numbers.

Unfortunaltely, they are all focused on American standards and the English language, which are limiting the potensial results for e.g. Scandinavian advertisers.

Let me give som examples:

Linkedin.com segment their users in American business sizes. The interval 1-10 employees are their lowest segment, in essence defining a startup company. In NOrway the business sizes are different, because the amunt of people in the nation is smaller, making the markets smaller too.

If I was to market startups I would like to target companies with 1-2 employees, maybe 1-3, not any more. Combine that with the linkedin parameter “Owner” and we have a good case.

The reason for me reacting to this, is that I and an email dialog with linkedin.com about a markleting campaign, and their price were 6 times what we normally pay. Their reason was better targeting, which could have been the case, but for Norwegian startups it really isn’t.

Another case is Facebook. They have very good segemntation on age, that give me value, but the interest section doesn’t give any utility. Why is that? Because Norwegian users use Norwegian terms, and such does not fit into the English language categorizing supplied by Facebook. I can guarantee that there are thousands of Norwegian Facebook users interested in Business, but that’s not the term we use… The consequence is that Facebook cannot offer me the targeting value of interest that it can in English speaking markets.

Will something change? Norwegians have the highest interenet penetration in the world (88%) and the second highest Facebook penetration (22+ %) in the world, only beaten by Canada. Unfortunately we’re only 1.000.000 millon users and 4.5 million people, so we are rather small in absolute numbers…

• Hintaseuranta
• Ostokset.fi
• Vaivaton.com
• Vertaa.fi
• Webinfo.fi

In my opinion, Webinfo is the closest match on Google’s unpaid shopping search. Vertaa.fi has CPC (cost per click) pricing method and the rest have some kind of small monthly or annual fee. Almost each of these announce different metrics about usage: page views, visitors and unique visitors. Hard to say whether these are really good for your online business, but they are probably worth to try.