After you’ve spent the last 30 minutes shopping online for that new movie DVD or gift idea for ma’s birthday and you’ve got your credit card ready in hand, you end up at a payment/checkout page that says “warning: this page contains secure and non-secure items. Select yes to continue”. Still feel like giving out your credit card info? Yea, me neither. This is usually the case when an HTTPS web page references items from the HTTP protocol - or more specifically - when the web master has placed the standard Google Analytics code onto the HTTPS page.

Google has analytics tracking code specifically for HTTPS pages, and to my surprise, the same HTTPS code will work when placed on non secure pages:

You can add this secure code to both secure and non-secure pages of your site

Straight from their website. Pretty nifty, so why even bother with the non secure (HTTP) analytics tracking code? I asked a Google representative that very same question and they said it was from a time before HTTPS tracking was in demand and a new version of the tracking was in development… ok, so we’ll have to change it again some day? Happy tracking until then!

Today I ran accross a nice little tip: use Google Webmaster Tools to view all your back links to your web site. By looking at your back links you can potentialy catch and prevent people from creating unwanted anchor text links to your site in an attemp to knock your pages out of the SERPS.

Google really hates SEO people, those who perform search engine optimization. But why? Well, at least that’s what the following video explains about people doing SEO work: essentially SEO’s have a “parasitic relationship” with Google in a way that not only feeds off of them but brings Google down.

Does this mean that Google tries to kill the SEO business?

No, they just want to kill spammers or anyone who tries to move search results away from what the majority of people actually are looking for (under a given keyword search), i.e. spammers trying to put Viagra affiliate web sites at the top of search results for quick and easy gain. Sadly, there is little distinction between good SEO people and spammers, since we all have to follow the same rules and guidelines set forth by the search engines. But there is hope.

Leveraging interest of the general population

As the major search engines increase their search engine A.I., SEO can be thought of as moving away from manual link building and into the realm of natural buzz and interest of public relations, i.e. the most talked about articles and pages will show up first, not necessarily the content that has been submitted to directories a million times over for SEO purposes.

How can we generate interest and or “buzz”?

It’s not that directory submission are bad, some of them are good, like the Yahoo! directory, DMOZ and Business.com, links created in these directories have been known to be syndicated else where, and there may even be other quality niche directories worth your time depending on what market you’re optimizing for - but submitting your site to hundreds of directories is losing it’s value as the search engines get smarter. A better idea would be to create Google alerts for your top keyword competition (and URLs) to see where they are getting their directory links from.

Online profile sites can also be a good place to generate buzz, places where you can write a page of fresh content about your web site and generate some value to the reader, search engines love this. Some good places to start are: Squidoo, City Search and Merchant Circle.

Social media sites are a great place to leverage interesting material such that you can generate back links & interest if your content is actually worth talking about. Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit are among a few of the worthy sites. Having an article on the front page of a social media site such as Digg can generate thousands of free back links, this can be an efficient use of your SEO time.