Jul 21

What Is Quantcast?

Quantcast is a new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence. The free service empowers publishers to demonstrate the unique value of their audiences by tagging their websites, videos, widgets and games for direct measurement.

Quantcast Media Planner ranks millions of web properties based on their ability to deliver your target audience - the way you define it. Unlike panel-based services, much of Quantcast’s data is based on directly measured (Quantified) traffic - collected through a program publishers participate in. Other sites not participating in the program (non- Quantified) have panel-based audience estimates provided. Leverage powerful demographic, geographic (TV DMA), lifestyle interest, or brand affinities to drive unparalleled visibility across the web - major publisher sites, networks, vertical properties and more.

A Team of Engineers and Mathematicians

Quantcast Corporation was founded in 2005 by a team of engineers and mathematicians committed to advancing the digital media industry. The Quantcast team has conducted extensive research and development to provide publishers with a free and easy way to report on the audience metrics that advertisers demand, including traffic, demographics and lifestyle assessments.

Quantified Publisher Program

It’s hard to articulate the value of your sites and services to advertisers. Even expensive third-party research can underestimate your audience size, costing you money.  Quantcast can help. For the first time in history, Quantcast enables you to participate in the audience ratings process by tagging your sites and services for direct measurement.

Finding Your Audience With Quantcast

Define your target audience by age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, and DMA (for Quantified sites). Add result constraints tied to unique people counts, content category, or minimum composition index of your target. A real time search will evaluate millions of web properties and networks and present them in an interactive list. You can even constrain results to sites that accept ads, or that participate in the Quantified program.
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How Does Quantcast Work?

Start With Panel-Based Data: Most rating firms estimate web audiences the same way radio audiences were estimated 70 years ago: by surveying a sample of people and extrapolating to the larger audience.

Our estimates start the same way, with a panel of several million people who anonymously share their web usage history with us. Using statistical techniques we project which sites the rest of the U.S. web audience is visiting and publish basic profiles reflecting those estimates.

Unfortunately, panels aren’t perfect. Panels have biases, and with millions of destinations on the Web, even a panel as large as ours can’t do justice to niche audiences. So our analysis doesn’t end there.

Directly Measured Data: With publishers’ cooperation, web visits can be counted directly and accurately. Our Quantified Publisher program enables publishers to tag their sites and services for measurement free of charge. We can then gauge the actual reach, frequency and popularity of their websites, videos, widgets, games and more.

Direct measurement isn’t perfect either. Web logs ultimately measure page views, not people. Because of technical challenges like cookie deletion, it’s hard to know how many actual people are visiting, much less to get any insight about “who” they are.
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Summing It All Up

Quantcast offers a great service which at first sight is very similar to what Alexa offers. However Quantcast offers much more accurate data.

With the possiblity to measure visitors directly using code snippets (something which Alexa is missing) advertisers can know accurately how much people visit a certain website and another Plus, who these people are.

Quantcast is something that every website, blog and forum that are offering advertising spaces should consider using in order to their advertisers an incentive and fair view as to what they will get.

Take A Look At Google.com Quantified Page >>

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Jul 20

What Google Is Saying About Their New Flash Indexing Algorithm:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

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Some FAQ About Google Flash Indexing:

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?

We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?

All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?

At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: How does Google “see” the contents of a Flash file?

We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?

Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash?

There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

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The Flash Indexing Improvements:
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Before Without Flash Indexing

Now With Flash Indexing

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Jul 20

Google’s Matt Cutts posted a great article on his blog recently with simple and practical tips for small businesses.

The following are some of the simple tips made in his video.  Great advice for small business marketers.  The points in the video are simple, but it’s interesting because it’s straight, unfiltered advice from Google.

6 Simple SEO Tips For Small Business:

  1. What do people search for? Think about what people are going to type to find your site.
  2. Title tags matter.  It’s what the user first sees on Google results.
  3. Don’t worry that much about the keywords meta tag.
  4. Use the meta description tag.  It is often shown to web users when they search on Google.
  5. Start a blog! Things that are interesting to you are probably interesting to your users/customers.
  6. Find conversations using social media.  Try digg and StumbleUpon.
  7. You do not have to pay Google to get traffic from Google.  Just make sure it can find your website.
  8. Advertising on Google doesn’t influence rankings.  Buying advertising does not influence search results.
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