Now for the Trick!

Step 1: Add a parameter to the URL, such as twitter=1

If your URL is http://mydomain.com/blog/post.html then it should be http://mydomain.com/blog/post.html?twitter=1

If your URL is http://mydomain.com/blog/2008/5/postname/ then it should be http://mydomain.com/blog/2008/5/postname/?twitter=1

If your URL is http://mydomain.com/page.html?id=9 then it should be http://mydomain.com/page.html?id=9&twitter=1

You can of course use any parameter you want, like tw=1 or source=twitter, be creative. Your analytics program (see step 3 in just a sec) may benefit from using the same one consistently so you can measure all your twitter traffic.

Step 2: Type or cut/paste the new URL into the text box

Put in your link just like you would any other link, just make sure you have the “twitter=1″ at the end.

You can use the online interface for Twitter, or any other application like Twhirl or Twitterific. This trick takes advantage of one of Twitter’s built in capabilities of shortening URLs that are longer than 30 characters using TinyURL, so you’re not wasting any of your precious 140 chars.

Step 3: Track it!

Using whatever analytics program you use, you should be able to differentiate views by the full URL. With Google Analytics if you go to Content > Top Content you will see a list of all the viewed pages, including your link with “twitter=1″ (see page #9 in image for an example). If you don’t see the page with “twitter=1″ at the end, do a search at the bottom (Find URL:) for “twitter=1″.

Now you can see how many pageviews, unique views, etc. came ONLY from the link you shared from Twitter, giving you a more accurate idea of how many people actually click on the links that you share!

If your analytics program lets you view statistics by parameter, you will want to use the same parameter consistently so you can not only see stats for each page, but for all of your twitter traffic. (I used to be able to do this on Google Analytics, but I don’t see this feature anymore.)

With this simple trick you can track your Twitter traffic in a jiffy! And if you liked this trick, share it with your friends on Twitter with this URL: http://tinyurl.com/4zjopu

And if you’re looking for a way to track who else is linking to you, try one of my new Twitter tools, TweetBeep.com. TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter, and it even has x-ray eyes to see through shortened links, so even if they are disguised with TinyURL, TweetBeep catches them.

You’re either sick of hearing about the iPhone or you eat up anything said about it. I have gadgetitis, and so does Aaron, so we’ll be getting iPhones next week. If you’re a Mac user, the iPhone is a heaven sent, despite what others are saying. I’ve tried the Sidekick, Blackberry, and the Treo, all of which either didn’t sync or really had a lame attempt at syncing with my Mac. Plus, the interface for the phones has been clunky and 1990s at best.

First off, if you’re interested in iPhone visitors you may want to consider creating an application. I created my first iPhone application that so far I have called iPhone Scriptures (yes, I’m religious ). I read from the scriptures every day and I like to have them with me when I have a spare moment to read. Since the iPhone doesn’t allow for 3rd party applications (you know, when you load those on your Treo et al then it starts crashing) except through the browser, I figured I had better just build my own. I found a database of the scriptures and made a quick and simple AJAX interface. It’s not perfect, but it will improve over time (and especially after I get my iPhone!). You can see what it might look like on an iPhone simulation.

iPhone Visitors in Google Analytics

From initial Google Analytics data from my iPhone app, it looks like the only way to distinguish the iPhone from other Macs is through the screen resolution, which is 320 x 396. You would think there would be some further distinguishing, but not so far. I looked at the browsers, OS, hostnames, and network locations but could not distinguish the group of iPhone visitors through any of those.

So to check for iPhone visitors, open up Google Analytics, go to Visitors, then to Browser Capabilities, then to Screen Resolution. Look for 320 x 396. You may be asking (if you are a crazy iPhone maniac like me) why not 320 x 480? The viewable area of the browser goes down to 396 in height with the address bar area, etc.

Google Analytics is always a bit delayed, so I haven’t seen a bunch of traffic yet. Plus, I’m sure reading the New Testament on your new iPhone probably isn’t on the top of most people’s lists for discovering its cool features. For anyone with a new iPhone, I found this cool application (well designed, much better than mine) that works as a home page for accessing all the different iPhone apps.

A recent article posted on Slashdot looked at various website design points of the top 6 Presidential Candidates. Here I compare SEO statistics of the top 6 Presidential Candidates’ websites: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain.

I will compare SEO statistics and information about the age of domain, length of domain registration, domain characteristics, backlinks, Technorati links, .edu links, Alexa Rank, Page Strength, indexed pages, supplemental results, name search on Google, other search terms on Google, and pay-per-click. The order of candidates is listed in order of “rank” within each category of statistics.

Age of Domain

This comes from either Alexa data or WHOIS data. The age of domain is important in SEO because older sites typically hold more credibility and trust with search engines.

Hillary Clinton – 22-Oct-2001
John Edwards – 16-Jul-1998
Barack Obama – 28-Dec-2004
John McCain – 17-Jul-1997
Mitt Romney – 08-Feb-2002
Rudy Giuliani – 17-Nov-2006

Length of Domain Registration

This statistic looks at how many years the domain has been registered for beyond the create date (based on WHOIS data), and the candidates are listed in descending order of year that the domain expires. It’s considered good SEO practice to register a domain for a longer amount of time (5+ years)

John McCain – 15 years, expires 26-Jan-2017
Hillary Clinton – 15 years, expires 22-Oct-2016
Barack Obama – 11 years, expires 28-Dec-2015
John Edwards – 11 years, expires 14-Jul-2009
Mitt Romney – 8 years, expires 08-Feb-2010
Rudy Giuliani – 2 years, expires 17-Nov-2008

Type in Domain

Everyone except Rudy Giuliani has a perfect type in domain for their name, so you can just type in their name, add the .com and you’re at their site. This may hurt Rudy a little, but his last name is hard to remember how to spell for many so perhaps joinrudy2008.com is better in some ways.

Backlinks

Backlinks, or inbound links, are how many sites link to your site. These figures are from Yahoo.

Barack Obama – 119,909
Hillary Clinton – 79,219
Mitt Romney – 39,245
Rudy Giuliani – 38,236
John Edwards – 15,498
John McCain – 7,428

Technorati Links

This is used as a measure of popularity in the blogosphere world. The more the better.

Barack Obama – 6,527
John Edwards – 4,952
Hillary Clinton – 3,710
Mitt Romney – 1,756
John McCain – 670
Rudy Giuliani – 342

.edu links

Links from educational institutions are regarded as passing more weight or confidence as a backlink, and are highly desirable (and hard to get).

Hillary Clinton – 97
Barack Obama – 87
John Edwards – 35
Mitt Romney – 33
Rudy Giuliani – 21
John McCain – 0

Alexa Rank

I know Alexa isn’t perfect, but it’s an interesting comparison. The lower the number, “the better”. The number represents the rank of the website out of the top websites on the Internet in terms of traffic. The most visited site on the Internet is ranked 1. A zero (0) means either an error or not enough traffic to rank.

Barack Obama – 12,581
Hillary Clinton – 18,727
John Edwards – 33,485
Mitt Romney – 129,490
John McCain – 178,788
Rudy Giuliani – 0

Page Strength

John Edwards – 6.5/10
Hillary Clinton – 5.5/10
Barack Obama – 5/0
Mitt Romney – 4/10
Rudy Giuliani – 3.5/10
John McCain – 3.5/10

Indexed Pages

Google and Yahoo both give a different number of pages in their index, so I’ll show both, Google/Yahoo.

John Edwards – 4230/66
John McCain – 457/155
Hillary Clinton – 387/1133
Mitt Romney – 309/157
Barack Obama – 148/525
Rudy Giuliani – 91/34

Supplemental Results

If pages show up as supplemental results (use this query, just change domain) it means they aren’t carrying as much as weight as they could be and their rankings probably suffer. The figure shown below is supplemental/total indexed, as well as what percent of pages are supplemental results out of their total number of indexed pages (both from Google). Lower % is better.

John Edwards – 260/4230 (6%)
Mitt Romney – 71/309 (23%)
John McCain – 104/457 (23%)
Barack Obama – 35/148 (24%)
Rudy Giuliani – 38/91 (42%)
Hillary Clinton – 168/387 (43%)

Name search on Google

If you type in the candidate’s name in Google, where does their “official” election site come up in the SERPs?

Hillary Clinton – 1st result
Barack Obama – 1st result
John Edwards – 1st result
Mitt Romney – 1st result
Rudy Giuliani – 2nd result, 1st is Wikipedia entry
John McCain – 33rd result, 1st is his Senate page

Rankings for name, party, etc

Terms searched for included: presidential election, presidential candidates, 2008 elections, compare candidates, and candidates issues. The top 100 results were checked for each search term. If no ranking is listed below, the candidates site does not rank in the top 100 for that term.

Barack Obama – #35 for presidential candidates, #66 for candidates issues
Hillary Clinton – (none)
John Edwards – (none)
John McCain – (none)
Mitt Romney – (none)
Rudy Giuliani – (none)

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Terms searched for included: presidential election, presidential candidates, 2008 elections, compare candidates, candidates issues, democrat, democratic party, republican, and republican party. Certainly there are many others I could have typed for but these are ones I thought would be critical to any PPC campaign.

Barack Obama – presidential election, presidential candidates, 2008 elections, democrat, democratic party,
John McCain – presidential election, presidential candidates
Hillary Clinton – (none)
John Edwards – (none)
Mitt Romney – (none)
Rudy Giuliani – (none)

Obviously we are very early on in the elections, but certainly SEO efforts should be underway if they are going to occur at all. In some ways it is evident there are definitely SEO strategies in place, but what about the lack of PPC? What are some of your observations?

Also check out my post from yesterday about what Analytics programs the Presidential Candidates are using.

Hillary Clinton uses Google Analytics

John Edwards uses Google Analytics

Barack Obama uses Google Analytics

Rudy Giuliani uses Google Analytics

Mitt Romney uses Omniture

John McCain uses either Revenue Science (if they have some analytics system built-in) or it is a server-based (non-Javascript) analytics solution.

We use Google Analytics for SoloSEO but I have heard Omniture is a great solution too. Setting up with Omniture takes a little bit of work because you need to put in variables for each page (like page name), but other than that it is pretty easy and has lots of features.

I would suggest the candidates use Crazy Egg and track where people are clicking around on the site. We’ve discovered a lot of interesting behavior on our site, I can only imagine having that much more traffic and learning what you can do to maximize it.