Monday, November 28, 2005
What I Do
People have asked me a lot recently what I do at my new job at Intelligent Direct. Well, I do a couple of things.
1.) I'm working on learning/doing Search Engine Optimization. This is the process of optimizing your website so that it ranks better in the different search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) without doing things that will get your site banned by any or all of the engines. It is definitely part art, part science, and a little part unknown I think. It's a very interesting field, and the industry of search seems to be an ever-evolving field.
2.) I'm also working on some web statistics stuff for our different sites. We use a program called Deep Log Analyzer that takes our log files from our web server and puts them into a Microsoft Access database. My program I'm working on uses custom SQL queries to pull out the pertinent information from the database. That information is then transformed and put into an Excel spreadsheet. Some of the things we are looking at tracking are: paths for visitors that made orders, paths for those who didn't, and some other visit information. It really is quite fascinating once you start looking at the data and seeing how people actual traverse your website. Sometimes people do stuff that you wouldn't guess at all.
The other parts of my job include writing Visual Basic programs to automate reports that I run (like a report that tracks our websites' positions on the big search engines) and supervising a student from Mansfield. He works on making changes to our different Pay Per Click accounts.
So that, in a nutshell, is what I do at my new job.
1.) I'm working on learning/doing Search Engine Optimization. This is the process of optimizing your website so that it ranks better in the different search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) without doing things that will get your site banned by any or all of the engines. It is definitely part art, part science, and a little part unknown I think. It's a very interesting field, and the industry of search seems to be an ever-evolving field.
2.) I'm also working on some web statistics stuff for our different sites. We use a program called Deep Log Analyzer that takes our log files from our web server and puts them into a Microsoft Access database. My program I'm working on uses custom SQL queries to pull out the pertinent information from the database. That information is then transformed and put into an Excel spreadsheet. Some of the things we are looking at tracking are: paths for visitors that made orders, paths for those who didn't, and some other visit information. It really is quite fascinating once you start looking at the data and seeing how people actual traverse your website. Sometimes people do stuff that you wouldn't guess at all.
The other parts of my job include writing Visual Basic programs to automate reports that I run (like a report that tracks our websites' positions on the big search engines) and supervising a student from Mansfield. He works on making changes to our different Pay Per Click accounts.
So that, in a nutshell, is what I do at my new job.
Copyright 2005 Jared Barden
