Stats is the most important data to look at when building a site. You would want to know where your visitors are coming from, what they are looking for, what search engine brought them here, what pages they were interested in & how many people visited your site.

And thank god there are tools to help you do that. There are 3 really nice tool that I found and have been using for quite a long time. The first one is Awstats; it is free and it comes with your cpanel installation. It give you a quite good statistical interface without the need of inserting a piece of code in every page of the site you want to monitor. The second one is very popular with people who are used adsense or have a google account Google Analytics; I really like this tool as it has everything you might want to know aswell as things you don’t really need but you would want to look at every now and the. And finally Mint ; Mint is a commercial stats tool and it has the ability to record statistics from feeds aswell as static pages.

Awstats

Awstats is still my default statistics page where I can see a better overview of my pages statistics. It also tells me which files have been downloaded the most and which type of file also. But the problem with that it is a bit messy on the stats side; it doesn’t tell me exactly which page has referred to me, which is pretty annoying as some pages are dynamic have attributes which awstats doesn’t grab. The data can be updated as soon as you press update, or else it will do it in 24horus after the last time you pressed it. But overall this is a really decent tool for users who doesn’t have a google account or cannot afford mint.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is pretty good and is free. It has the ability to tell you who referred to your site, what keywords have been used to access your site from a search engine. The data is well displayed via graphs and charts.You can also look at stats from month or years ago if you want to see a monthly trend. it has everything you need to help you do some marketing.

Mint

Mint is my latest toy. It has a pretty interface, cool features and displays the stats nicely and orderly. I really like the way thatit tracks users down from page to page via IP or Cookies set by another software. Meaning that I could set an extra cookie within wordpress or any other softwares so that once you are logged in, I will be able to see what you like to view the most and if you return often. This is the perfect statistical software in my knowledge. The propblem with that is that it cost quite a bit to get for each domain.

Continueing from Part 1

Vb’s Title

VBulletin title system is pretty similar to IPB except that it does not have vbulletin powered by message in the header of every page on the forum. The only place that it seems to have it is in the index page. It seems to be much nicer for the bot to read the title as it doesn’t have a complex navigation separator. One more thing that vb does is that it displays the categories name before the actual overall forum title.

Suggested fix for any navigation for forums

My suggested fix for this would be to keep the same points mentioned in the brief intro on page title seo. Have your company name or website name at the end of your title. Next you should display a descriptive title of the page content as the first section in the title. Once you sorted this out the seprarator should be simple and not take too much space a simple dash like this: - is enough and it saves you space.

Part 3 coming soon..

This is just an analysis of VBulleting’s and IPB’s friendliness towards SEOed title pages on forums. Before we start I am going to brief a bit on the title page SEO, then how IPB & VB do the title page and finally I will try to cover some solutions that should be done to increase seo esaily on a regular forum.

Brief intro on SEO titles
SEO titles should be different all around your website and should not be constant on the first few words of the title. Meaning that the title should change according to the appropriate page and not have one uniformed way of displayed the title. Having your company name as the first keywords of your title is very bad, it should be moved to the end of the title if you really have to add it in. Google and other search engines looks at the title first before the text so it would be wise to improve the title.

IPB’s title
IPB’s title format is pretty much the same as WordPress’s one where the overall title of the forum is fixed to the prefix of the categories except the actual topic’s page. And what more it has this annoying (Powered by invision power board) suffix at the end of everything. This should be taken out, I don’t feel it would really benefit anyone viewing the forum except to help improve ipb’s seo. The only thing that I like about the titles is that it displays the actual topics title in the title header.

Part two soon…

Creativity is fueled by imagination so here are some links to some nice designed pages that I have found. Help yourself by looking at those design templates and try to use some of their ideas onto your own pages.

• http://www.zimbra.com/
• http://jquery.com/
• http://www.logosauce.com/
• http://www.andyrutledge.com/
• http://particletree.com/

More links will be posted once every few days, keep coming back. Don’t forget you can subscribe to my blog via RSS.

After a few reads on some articles on SEO on TAZ, I decided to implement some optimisation for my blog.

First thing that I have done is change the title format and the also the title of the blog itself to something more suitable for a search phrase All about community development. I chose this title because most of my recent entries were for community softwares such as Invision Power board. Even thought I have some random talks about design, I felt it would be stuiablt for now.

Next I moved my blog title after the title of the entry for individual entries. So that Google can focus on the title a bit more as this blog doesn’t have much search phrase. The only way to find my blog was to put icelabz in the search query but then not a lot of people do know about icelabz in the first place. But they sure do ask some questions or some topics titles that we cover.

So I changed the title code to this:

<?php wp_title(”); ?>
<?php if ( is_single() || is_category() || is_archive() || is_page() ) { ?>
-
<?php } ?>

<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>

Hope it does help you out if you want to increase title awareness.

Keep checking back I will be posting some more seo optimisation for wordpress and IPB.

After recently posting an article on rebuilding ipb’s template, I never analysed if it was even necessary to do a template redesign.

The structure is simply display a list of forums and each one of them displayed an icon in front or after the current forums row which told the user if there were any new posts in that forum.

The same visual template structure has been used by many forum software and why haven’t they tried to change the tabular structure to something else ? Then I realised that not a lot of people had the notion to try break out of that structure to something totally out of the ordinary for regular users.

To be able to intent a totally new way of displaying a forum would need a lot of time thinking and designing. It would need to be very simple and yet effective to any user.

So for the construction of Icelabz i hope that I would have developed  a new way of displaying information on the forum without it being an annoyance.

music currently jamming to:
C’mon C’mon (Album Version) – The Von Bondies