69 Tools to Monitor, Measure, and Track Your Website

Published October 15th, 2007 in Tools

PAGE ANALYSIS:

1. SEOmoz Page Strength Tool – A useful tool that gives an overall look at the strength of a page.
2. Sitening’s SEO Analyzer – See if your pages are structured to achieve high search engine rankings.
3. Self SEO’s Page Speed Checker – Test the load time of your pages and your competitor’s pages.
4. GoogleRankings.com – Check the use of keywords and phrases on your site.
5. Popuri – See several items such as PageRank and inbound links all at once.
6. Keyword Density Analysis – See how frequently you are using certain words and phrases.
7. Meta Tag Analyzer – How are search engine spiders seeing your meta tags?
8. Code to Text Ratio – Check for code bloat.
9. Strongest Subpages Tool – Finds the 30 strongest subpages on your domain.
10. Similar Page Checker – Avoid duplicate content.
11. SEO Analysis Tool – Measures the ranking potential of a page.
12. WebSitePulse – A few different tools to test your sites performance.
13. Website Grader – Get a score for your site and even compare it to competitors if you want.
14. Watchfire WebXACT – Test for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.

STATS:

1. Google Analytics – The leading free stats program.
2. AWStats
3. StatCounter
4. AddFreeStats
5. OneStat
6. Smart Tracking
7. Alexa – See where your site ranks.

BLOG STATS:

1. FeedBurner – Stats on your feed and your subscribers.
2. pMetrics – from Performancing.
3. pMetrics Plugin- Extending pMetrics.
4. IceRocket – Free stats program for blogs.
   
5. Technorati – See who’s linking to you.

STATS PLUS:

1. Crazy Egg – Provides visual data about your visitors.
2. Mint – An extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program.

WEBMASTER TOOLS:

1. Google Webmaster Tools – Lots of information that shows you how Google sees your site.
2. Web CEO – A collection of a number of useful tools. Free and paid editions.

CHECK AND TRACK SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS:

1. Sitening’s SERP Tracker – Test your page’s optimization.
2. Search Engine Rankings Checker – From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
3. Google Banned Checker – Has the largest search engine in the world banned your website? Find out here.
4. Number of Pages Indexed – How many pages do you have indexed by search engines?
5. Website SEO Checkup – Make sure you’re ready to get high search engine rankings.
6. GeoTargeting Detection Tool from SEOmoz – Determine how well your site is targeted to country specific search engines.

GOOGLE PAGERANK:

1. PageRank Prediction – You need a minimum of 100 backlinks.
2. Smart PageRank – Check your PR.

REPUTATION AND BUZZ MONITORING:

1. Google Alerts – Have preset alerts sent to you by email.
2. co.mments – Monitor comments on blogs.
3. Conversation Tracker from BlogPulse
4. Trend Search from BlogPulse
5. Keotag – See if blogs are using your company name in the tags of their blog posts.
6. BoardTracker – Watch for mentions of your company in forums.

LINKS:

1. Dead Links tool from W3C – Find broken links.
   
2. Link Popularity Checker – From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
3. Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Find broken links.
   
4. Backlinks and Anchor Text – See who’s linking to you and what anchor text they are using.
5. Reciprocal Links Checker – Do you have agreements with others for reciprocal links? Check them here.

SPIDER SIMULATOR:

1. Summit Media’s Spider Simulator
2. Spider View
3. Webconfs.com Spider Simulator

CSS ANALYSIS TOOLS:

1. Clean CSS – Formatting and Optimizing
2. CSS Tidy – Optimizer and parser.
3. CSS Redunancy Checker – Redundancy is easy to do with CSS. Fix it with this.
4. CSS Analyzer – A validator plus.

VALIDATORS:

1. HTML – Validator from W3C.
2. CSS – Validator from W3C.
3. RSS – Validator from W3C.

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE:

1. AlertSite Website Performance Monitor
2. KeyNote
3. WebWatch Bot
4. IPCheckPoint

GOOGLE ADSENSE:

1. Free Charts and Graphs
2. AdSense Notifier – Shows your AdSense stats in the status bar.

BROWSER COMPATIBILITY:

1. BrowserShots – See screenshots of your page in a number of different browsers.
2. Ready.mobi – Test your site for use with mobile browsers.

OTHER:

1. Geotargeting – find the location of your host’s servers
2. Find Your Site’s IP Address

Subscribe to the Vandelay Design Blog

Our blog is updated regularly with content related to web design and development. If you don’t want to miss out on future posts, you can subscribe by RSS or email.

Great list with all sorts of handy tools…

Posted via web from SocialDeb

69 Tools to Monitor, Measure, and Track Your Website

Published October 15th, 2007 in Tools

PAGE ANALYSIS:

1. SEOmoz Page Strength Tool – A useful tool that gives an overall look at the strength of a page.
2. Sitening’s SEO Analyzer – See if your pages are structured to achieve high search engine rankings.
3. Self SEO’s Page Speed Checker – Test the load time of your pages and your competitor’s pages.
4. GoogleRankings.com – Check the use of keywords and phrases on your site.
5. Popuri – See several items such as PageRank and inbound links all at once.
6. Keyword Density Analysis – See how frequently you are using certain words and phrases.
7. Meta Tag Analyzer – How are search engine spiders seeing your meta tags?
8. Code to Text Ratio – Check for code bloat.
9. Strongest Subpages Tool – Finds the 30 strongest subpages on your domain.
10. Similar Page Checker – Avoid duplicate content.
11. SEO Analysis Tool – Measures the ranking potential of a page.
12. WebSitePulse – A few different tools to test your sites performance.
13. Website Grader – Get a score for your site and even compare it to competitors if you want.
14. Watchfire WebXACT – Test for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.

STATS:

1. Google Analytics – The leading free stats program.
2. AWStats
3. StatCounter
4. AddFreeStats
5. OneStat
6. Smart Tracking
7. Alexa – See where your site ranks.

BLOG STATS:

1. FeedBurner – Stats on your feed and your subscribers.
2. pMetrics – from Performancing.
3. pMetrics Plugin- Extending pMetrics.
4. IceRocket – Free stats program for blogs.
   
5. Technorati – See who’s linking to you.

STATS PLUS:

1. Crazy Egg – Provides visual data about your visitors.
2. Mint – An extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program.

WEBMASTER TOOLS:

1. Google Webmaster Tools – Lots of information that shows you how Google sees your site.
2. Web CEO – A collection of a number of useful tools. Free and paid editions.

CHECK AND TRACK SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS:

1. Sitening’s SERP Tracker – Test your page’s optimization.
2. Search Engine Rankings Checker – From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
3. Google Banned Checker – Has the largest search engine in the world banned your website? Find out here.
4. Number of Pages Indexed – How many pages do you have indexed by search engines?
5. Website SEO Checkup – Make sure you’re ready to get high search engine rankings.
6. GeoTargeting Detection Tool from SEOmoz – Determine how well your site is targeted to country specific search engines.

GOOGLE PAGERANK:

1. PageRank Prediction – You need a minimum of 100 backlinks.
2. Smart PageRank – Check your PR.

REPUTATION AND BUZZ MONITORING:

1. Google Alerts – Have preset alerts sent to you by email.
2. co.mments – Monitor comments on blogs.
3. Conversation Tracker from BlogPulse
4. Trend Search from BlogPulse
5. Keotag – See if blogs are using your company name in the tags of their blog posts.
6. BoardTracker – Watch for mentions of your company in forums.

LINKS:

1. Dead Links tool from W3C – Find broken links.
   
2. Link Popularity Checker – From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
3. Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Find broken links.
   
4. Backlinks and Anchor Text – See who’s linking to you and what anchor text they are using.
5. Reciprocal Links Checker – Do you have agreements with others for reciprocal links? Check them here.

SPIDER SIMULATOR:

1. Summit Media’s Spider Simulator
2. Spider View
3. Webconfs.com Spider Simulator

CSS ANALYSIS TOOLS:

1. Clean CSS – Formatting and Optimizing
2. CSS Tidy – Optimizer and parser.
3. CSS Redunancy Checker – Redundancy is easy to do with CSS. Fix it with this.
4. CSS Analyzer – A validator plus.

VALIDATORS:

1. HTML – Validator from W3C.
2. CSS – Validator from W3C.
3. RSS – Validator from W3C.

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE:

1. AlertSite Website Performance Monitor
2. KeyNote
3. WebWatch Bot
4. IPCheckPoint

GOOGLE ADSENSE:

1. Free Charts and Graphs
2. AdSense Notifier – Shows your AdSense stats in the status bar.

BROWSER COMPATIBILITY:

1. BrowserShots – See screenshots of your page in a number of different browsers.
2. Ready.mobi – Test your site for use with mobile browsers.

OTHER:

1. Geotargeting – find the location of your host’s servers
2. Find Your Site’s IP Address

Subscribe to the Vandelay Design Blog

Our blog is updated regularly with content related to web design and development. If you don’t want to miss out on future posts, you can subscribe by RSS or email.

Great list with all sorts of handy tools…

Posted via web from SocialDeb

You have to have a Google account to use it.

According to the site you have to have above a particular version of FF or IE – what – no Chrome?

When you open the browser after installing the toolbar, the default page looks just like the Chrome default page – little thumbnails of “Most Visited” pages.

It directly competes with Digg, Delicious, etc and is will be much easier to use and more accessible.

It reminds me of panels like Quantcast, etc, that collect visitor data – over time, the Google sidewiki will enable Google Analytics users to marry up sidewiki data to their web analytics data.

If marketers thought they were losing the ability to control their brand because of user-generated content on Twitter, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, etc – just wait……..

Posted via web from SocialDeb

What is Scout Labs?

Scout Labs is a powerful web-based application that tracks social media and finds signals in the noise to help your team build better products and stronger customer relationships. Take the tour to see all the features in action.

Persistent Searches

You know what you and your team need to be monitoring closely. Set up a search and it is immediately available for your whole team to review and optimize.

Rants and Raves

See what people are loving or hating about your product or your brand. Let them help you make more customer-centric decisions about your business and products. It’s like a real-time focus group of millions.

Buzz Tracking

See at glance which searches are up or down. The Scout Labs dashboard offers real-time metrics for buzz volume, customer sentiment, and competitive share of voice across the web.

Email Alerts

Get insight summaries pushed to you via email. Like Google Alerts on steroids, you can see top conversations, new words, positive and negative posts, recent Tweets and more — on a daily, weekly and monthly schedule.

Team Collaboration

Insight needs to be actionable. That’s why everything you find in the Scout Labs application can be acted upon. Forward items to make sure they get responded to, bookmark them for later, initiate discussions around new product ideas, download graph data or copy graphs.

Conversation Digest

You don’t need to read all 4,000 new posts of the week to get a sense of what’s going on. We summarize the most buzz-worthy stories for you and call out what’s hot and what’s new so that you can tune in early.

Wide Coverage of CGM

Wherever people are sharing thoughts and perspectives through CGM (consumer generated media), Scout Labs is there. Blogs (in english-only), forums, social networks, image-sharing sites, video-sharing sites, Twitter — with more volume and data types coming online every day.

Automated Sentiment

We use natural language processing techniques to assess the sentiment and tone of your searches in each post, on the fly, as it hits our system. If we get it wrong, you can override it for your team (this becomes labeled data that our systems learn from over time). We can also provide historical sentiment data to you in less than a day (sometimes in minutes). For all the sentiment geeks out there: no user training sets necessary.

Kill Posts, Add Sources

From day one of our development, savvy agencies and customer community managers have wanted to be able to see and interact with the data in our system. Missing a source? Add it. Don’t like a result and don’t want to see it any more? Kill it. Additional controls will be added on an ongoing basis.

Real-Time Content

With Scout Labs, you can create a search, hit go, and seconds later get a dashboard fully populated with insight and intelligence on same-day english content. Our proprietary search-based architecture means no stale data or long delays while the system is locked up “getting” or “processing” data.

Unlimited Users

Invite everyone on your extended team to tune into the rants, raves and wishes of customers and great things will happen. No limit on the number of users per workspace.

Designed for Agencies

Agencies of all sizes can use Scout Labs to power their social media monitoring offerings. Add your logo, curate the data for your clients, and add your insights. The Scout Labs application is your collaborative client dashboard to share the voice of the customer in real-time along with your own insights and recommendations.

Building a list of social networking monitoring/metrics products and services – Scout Labs looks interesting….

Posted via web from SocialDeb

He likens the current concept of putting the “real internet” on the phone (Like the iPhone) to

• putting the real horse into our car
• the real symphony orchestra inside our radio
• like using your TV to listen to radio

It using a mobile phone to access the 6th mass media.

He’s not saying that there isn’t a market for the iPhone, rather that using the iPhone – or any smartphone – to access html-created websites is NOT the form factor or the utility of the mobile services business.

His article is jam-packed with information and anecdotes – here I’ve summarized a lot of the metrics he cites. It is not a substitute, though, for reading the complete article.

First some basic numbers, according to a recent presentation by Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker at the San Francisco Web 2.0 conference (see image below), there are currently 349MM Broadband users globally, and 3.3BN mobile users – 9 ½ times more mobile subscribers globally than broadband subscribers

Now, the summary of Tomi’s article (and a note of thanks for his permission to quote):

Mobile is The 7th Mass Media

• with Print the first – 500 years old,
• Recordings the second – around 100 years old,
• Cinema the third, – around 100 years old,
• Radio the fourth, – around 100 years old, took 38 years to get to 50MM people*
• TV the fifth and – around 50 years old, took 13 years to get to 50MM people*
• The Internet the sixth in this sequence -15 years old, took 4 years to get to 50MM* people

This year, 2008, will be the cross-over point when more users will access internet content (including WAP) via a mobile phone, than via any kind of PC/laptop.

• has already happened in advanced mobile-savvy countries Japan and South Korea,
• happening the mainstream countries like the UK
• and in developing countries like India and South Africa

On Nov. 4 Nokia announced a series of new devices and services designed extend the benefits of the Web to rural India, including crop information for farmers and mobile e-mail for people who don’t have access to a personal computer.

Today, the internet is worth 45 Billion dollars in revenues – three largest revenue types are

• advertising,
• adult entertainment and
• gambling

By contrast, mobile is worth $72Bn with adult entertainment, gambling and advertising on mobile – each worth about 2 Billion dollars, more or less. But of the $72Bn value of mobile content, there are several far bigger content types:

• Music on mobile is worth over 9 Billion dollars.
• Gaming is worth 5 Billion (Source Netsize Guide 2008).
• There are half a dozen content types already for mobile that have grown to be bigger than adult entertainment and gambling. (screen savers, Sudoku puzzles, personal services.
• In Japan, in 2006 text-based books sold directly to mobile phones totaled 82MM.

Mobile social networking was launched commercially in South Korea only in 2003;

• was worth 6 Billion dollars in 2007 (source Informa 2008) and
• had over 100 million paying users on mobile

Zero in 2003 – 6BN in 2007

At the end of 2007,

• 2.4 billion people – 74% of all mobile phone users – were active users of SMS text messaging
• 800 million active unique users of email
• <500 million active users of all kinds of IM Instant Messaging services
• In Finland interactive SMS text messaging already delivers more revenues to the TV broadcast industry than advertising or subscription income
• UK – 20% of the total viewing audience participates monthly in voting on reality TV shows via SMS
• Japan, 30% of TV viewers interact with TV content in all manner of ways via the mobile

With all this, I’m now convinced that the Mobile Web will not replace the PC-based web.  It will cause a lot of disruption as organizations experiment and struggle and come to grips with whether and how they need a Mobile Web presence. The Mobile Web is all about connecting on a personal level with people.  It’s about giving people what they want, not what you want them to have.  It’s about engaging them on their terms, not yours.

Wow. Power to the people!

*The Emerging Digital Economy – http://www.amazon.com/Emerging-Digital-Economy-Dept-Commerce/dp/1892209160

First, Boone Pickens has turned to social media to get the word out about the Pickens Plan. If you want to get on board to help change our dependency on foreign oil, this site gives you a plethora of ways to get involved – from an RSS feed, to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and YouTube.   So here’s a guy that is about as opposite from the plugged-in-iphone-toting-twitter-mob-participating 20-something as there is.  No matter. Boone Pickens is a self-made man and he got where he is by figuring out what he wanted to accomplish and then marshalling the forces to get it done.  Nothing has changed; he’s just implemented some new tools.

Second, Webguild published an article about a recently released study by Sapient that can accurately be described as a call to arms to digital agencies.  Ninety percent of respondents agree that it is increasingly important for their agencies use “pull interactions”  – social networks and online communities, rather than “push campaigns”.  This same study found that “nearly half (45 percent) of the respondents have switched agencies (or plan to switch in the next 12 months) for one with greater digital knowledge or have hired an additional digital specialist to handle their interactive campaigns”.  Whoa, think about it – what is the churn rate of agencies if 45% plan to switch.  If I was an agency CEO, first I’d be reaching for the Maalox. Second, I’d be learning everything there is to know about social media, and developing “best use” profiles for each one.

Third, social media has outstripped pornography as the most frequently searched topic on the web. According to Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, surfing for porn has dropped from 20 percent a decade ago to about 10 percent of searches.  The hottest internet searches now are for social networking sites.  This is doubly interesting since pornographers use some really aggressive and shady techniques to gain visibility on search engines.  And despite it all, their numbers are falling. Of course, 10 percent of today’s searches is significantly larger in sheer numbers than 20 percent of  searched 10 years ago would have been.  Still, going from 20 percent to 10 percent is a significant loss.

But Wait, There’s More

Whether companies are aware of it or not,  their employees are out there networking all over the place, on blogs, LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube. New outlets are popping up like mushrooms after a big rain.  Some of them, like Yammer, are providing enterprise-specific social networking spaces.

Some companies – I’m fortunate enough to be employed by one of them – are embracing the notion of social media and looking for ways to enable employees to network, form communities, and work more seamlessly with their teams.  Very cool stuff.

What To Do Next

Companies can’t stop social media from intruding into their world, so it’s really time for executives to start getting their heads around how it will change their business and how it fits into their strategy.  Don’t wait for your agency to figure it out for you.  There are people in your own organization that are all over this- find them, engage them. listen to them.

What networks are you engaged in?  Is your company adopting social networking? Your experiences and observations welcome.

Related post: We’re Looking for the Mouse

Watch Clay Shirky’s presentation at Web 2.0 Expo 2008 San Francisco

A website exists to further the organizational objectives of its owners.  Those objectives are directly related to the nature and purpose of the organization. For example, the challenges for pure online companes like Amazon.com, Overstock.com, eBay and others are quite different from bricks-and-mortar businesses with online presence, which in turn is completely different from government agencies, universities or non-profit organizations.

Large organizations, particularly those with online/offline operations, have many competing interests and stakeholders. It is imperative for the organization to know whether their website is pointed in the right direction, whether it is structurally sound and able to deliver on its objectives, and whether landing and conversion event pages are being optimized over time.  To the extent a site does this, it is in turn contributing to the organization’s larger goals and objectives – their true KPIs – increase leads, increase revenue, decrease cost per customer, improve self-serve rates, decrease complaint rates, increase inventory turn rate, etc.

Visitor measurement enables organizations to determine the effectiveness of their online presence.  Online web analytics has received, and continues to receive, significant attention. A whole new discipline and career choice has emerged. Articles and blogs are written about it.  It has its own industry association. Events have evolved that are devoted to it. All these things have cemented the term “web analytics” firmly in the online dictionary, and linked it at the hip with “visitor traffic”.

The downside is that online metrics have taken on a life of their own, as if the website is separate from the organization.  The development of web-specific KPIs for example, puts the focus on short-term goals, not organization goals.  While measuring web analyics data points that contribute to the organization’s overall success metrics is valid, those measurements are only a piece of the puzzle.

Management is bombarded everyday by people who claim to have the one thing to cure all ills.  Managers may not understand the web environment well enough to ask for analysis that goes deeper than conversion rate or page views or any of the other basic measurements, and frankly, they shouldn’t be expected to.   What they want is the “big picture” information, and what they need are people that understand these dynamics and that can be proactive in putting the web analytics information into the broader perspective.

In the recent “Where in the Organization is the Web Analyst” Survey, when asked “How do you feel about your web analytics activities”, 41% responded that they are frustrated because the organization does not act on the information, and 30% indicated they are overwhelmed with the amount of information they have to deal with.  I believe this is a symptom of the internal disconnect between online and offline objectives.

And in the face of chaos lies great opportunity

With that framework, here are six things I believe savvy web analysts can to to raise their profile within their organizations.

1. Understand the total business. Are you in an organization where inventory is important?   Are you in an organization where supplying information or support after the sale is vital? Are you in an industry where the website drives leads for sales that occur offline?  Are you a non-profit whose goal is to educate people and secure donations?  Are you in a government agency, providing information and services to citizens? Are you in the news business, where despite falling subscription rates, lots of people still get their news from the daily paper?  Even if you are in a business that “grew up” on the web, offline activities such as fulfillment, customer service and returns come into play.
2. Understand how your organization measures itself against its strategic goals. If you don’t know what the overall organization goals are, ask. If you don’t get an answer, keep asking.
3. Identify the “goal gaps”. Think about how the website contributes to – or gets in the way of – those goals, and identify how the information you see every day sheds light on where the two are aligned and where they are in conflict with each other.
4. Apply the 80/20 rule. With enormous volumes of data, it can be difficult to know what to focus on – another issue pointed out in the Survey results.  As you gain more clarity around the organization’s goals, and how the strategy for the website supports them, focus on the 20% of the visitor data that supports overall organization goals, and disregard the rest.
5. Frame your conversations with management in the broader context. Even if you don’t get it exactly right, at a minimum, you’ll make your boss aware that you are interested in the success of the business as a whole and you’ll create an opportunity to expand the conversation.
6. Widen your circle. Seek out and network with the people in your organization that are responsible for web standards, search optimization, search marketing, overall site quality, responding to customer comments about the site, responding to customer inquiries that come in through the site.  Encourage them to share their insights with you and share yours with them.

Web analysts that can get outside the box, look at the nature of the organization they are part of, think about why it is there and what its goals are, how the website fits into the picture and what other moving parts impact decisions, and present their data in that context will elevate web analytics – and themselves – in the organization. Those that focus on short term goals based on web-specific KPIs risk being sidelined.

Do you agree? Disgree? Let me know your thoughts.

Jared Smith’s article on the WebAIM site provides a summary of the settlement, commentary, and opinions of some WebAIM readers.

From the Joint Press Release

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “Access to Web sites is critical to the full and equal participation of blind people in all aspects of modern life. The National Federation of the Blind is pleased to have reached a settlement with Target that is good for all blind consumers, and we recognize that Target has already taken action to make certain that its Web site is accessible to everyone. We look forward to working with Target in the coming months to help make additional improvements that will enhance the experience of blind visitors to Target.com. It is our sincere hope that other businesses providing goods and services over the Internet will follow Target’s example and take affirmative steps to provide full access to their Web sites by blind consumers.”

From the AP story on MSNBC:

“We feel that it is a wake-up call to companies that have Web sites that are selling goods and services,” said Christopher S. Danielsen, a spokesman at the NFB. “They need to pay attention to accessibility. It is the right thing to do.” He also pointed out that the benefits of attracting new users far outweigh the costs of making changes to the site…Danielsen said that currently there are many retail sites that are “at least somewhat accessible” to the blind, but there’s more work to be done.

Back to WebAIM, their site contains excellent, detailed information about accessibility issues surrounding PDF and Flash, how they can be made accessible, as well as challenges and shortcomings.

I also recently ran across information about a browser specifically designed for visually impaired persons, called WebAnywhere.

Webguild tried it out and provided some observations.

The challenge of organizations to make their sites accessible is not going away. In looking at the comments above, I believe that the NFB, which has right on their side, is pretty comfortable being proactive on this front. Most, if not all, of the states have already passed or are considering legislation. Even though this settlement did nothing to clarify ADA Section 508 requirements where corporates are concerned, individual states have not stood still. Because of that, the NFB has plenty of other venues to press their case, if (when) they identify other opportunities to raise awareness.

Your comments/thoughts/observations welcome…..

First Michael Wexler holds up the mirror and asks “What Web Analytics is Missing”. Now Gerry Bavaro ponders the same thing about search engine marketing. Is there something in the water?

Gerry’s article is behind a password over at MediaPost, so I’ll summarize a few key points:
He starts out sharing feedback from people who attended the recent SES in San Jose.

“…it was really tactical…the widespread feelings primarily from agency folks about the state of our industry’s most popular trade shows reveal that they’re missing something….we’re not an industry that places the consumer at the center. Even worse, our channel (which gleans the most comprehensive, valuable intent data possible), is still a siloed, ancillary function in many organizations. “

OK, stop. I remember somebody else talking about disciplines fragmented (siloed) in organizations and how ineffective and ineffecient it is….oh, yeah, that was me, in February, 2007:

When Focus on ROI is Flawed

And again in February 2008 – Top Four Characteristics of the Optimal Web Team
And again in June 2008 – Web Optimization Defined
And again in July of 2008 – Continuing the Conversation with Joseph Carrabis
And again in the Response to Michael Wexler’s Post re:What Web Analytics is Missing

The words “broken record” come to mind.

So I wonder if they’ve been reading my blog, or have just finally come to the teachable moment on their own

His next point:

“Where Are The Experts When “Everybody” Is An Expert? …we’ve created a virtually indistinguishable society of search marketers without a highly respected short list of true expert agencies….how to find the true experts…”

An excellent observation, and a question worth pondering. While I don’t eat, sleep and breathe SEM, and SEM and SEO are third cousins, not identical twins, analyzing a site for its “indexability” by search engines is one of the aspects of holistic site structural quality and an important part of SEM. You can’t run an SEM campaign extolling the virtues of nice cab savs and merlots and then attract people to a site selling soy milk. I would love to know how to find the true experts. We could have some interesting conversations.

“Do We Even Care What Clients Actually Think? …I’d love to know whether, as the WPP’s, IPG’s and Publicis’ of the world continue banking on digital and staffing up their search postures, their clients are happy or disappointed.”

What a clear-eyed and relevant question to ask. Congrats, Gerry for being brave enough to voice it.

“Where’s Strategic Vision & Best Practices Beyond Our Sandbox? ….Are discussions about the challenges and rewards of breaking down silos in global businesses and transforming operational processes to effectively manage change, what’s missing?”

Bravo – give that man a prize. None of these disciplines – not web analytics, not search engine marketing, not search engine optimization, not VOC, not A/B testing – none of them can stand alone. And the answer to his question is YES. We (I and my colleagues at Accenture Marketing Sciences) are out in the market every day talking to organizations about this very thing, and people are responding positively.

I do disagree with one concept:

“…the sleeping giants in the SEM industry are technologies that will go far beyond bid management, Web analytics, and post-click landing page optimization systems.”

The technologies are merely the means to an end. Without breaking down the silos, recognizing that Web sites must be treated as an asset, at the same level as land, labor and capital, with deliberate attention to the business strategy and how the Web properties contribute postively to it, and then implementing the governance structures, processes and infrastructure to support that vision, the technologies are nothing more than a shiny toy.

Do you agree or disagree? Isn’t it time to come together and realize that it’s not either/or…it’s and, and, and, and, and…..