Even with all the hype around SEO over the last few years or so, I am still coming across people that are completely unaware of the importance of SEO and some basic best practice. This is aimed at those who have been so inundated with information that they have chosen to simply switch off and ignore it, rather than accepting it and making the most of it.

It's not that difficult to get the basic structure right, honestly.

On May 26th 2012, a new EU law comes into effect that requires website owners to have made significant changes to their sites, in order to obtain informed consent from visitors before they can store or retrieve any information on a computer or any other web connected device

What is a Cookie?

Cookies are small files, which are stored on a computer and hold a small amount of specific data for a particular website. They allow website owners to deliver a more personalised experience to their visitors. They can come in a variety of forms, the most common of which are:

• Session - last for the duration of the visit.
• Persistant - can last for up to 1 year.
• Secure - used on sites served over https.
• 3rd Party - cross domain typically used for ad tracking.

Spree Commerce was a natural fit for our business as it integrates  perfectly with our in house developed content management system (CMS) intextra.web. Both of these systems have been developed on the ever popular Ruby on Rails framework making them technically compatible as well. The addition of the Spree Commerce system to our CMS platform, strengthens our ability to provide our clients with a highly customisable and reliable ecommerce solution to help boost their online sales potential.

Over the last month I have been trying out a new addition to Google Analytics called Visitor Flow. Visitor Flow provides a graphical representation of how visitors meander their way through your site. The old tools were notoriously difficult to generate any kind of meaningful insight as to how visitors navigated through our clients websites, so this has been a god send, especially when delivering reports and recommendations to clients. 

You can vary the dimensions used to generate a flow diagram, so you can start to build a picture of how people found you, what they looked at and where they got bored and literally dropped off your site. The example below shows a flow diagram using 'Traffic Source' as the first step.

As you will no doubt have noticed as you are reading this blog, we have finally got round to adding a blog module to intextra.web. It has been a long time coming as we have spent a considerable amount of time evaluating the best commenting system to use. In the end we chose to use the Disqus commenting platform for its ease of use, great feature list and well engadget.com use it so it must good!