So most of us are sick of Google Analytics, its inaccurate and has some real dodgy implications for busineses.  Google already has too much data about all of us and lets face it "dont be evil" went out the window a long time ago.

I normally run awstats unless I want to test specific things with Google analytics ;-) but recently have been reviewing piwik which is positioning itself as a google analytics replacement.

Recently I have been running some experimental Seo Strategies on live.com V google V yahoo, now out of laziness I had analytics to monitor the stats installed. However it seemed to be a bit odd to me that I was not receving any traffic from live despite knowing I was turning up in the serps as expected with serp positions of 1-3 on reasonable phases.

Hmmm, why was I not getting any traffic, I have a little script that I can use to reconcile my analytics data against raw logs so I ran it and I was completly blown away by the results.

A critical part of any Seo Strategy should be Social Network Analysis (SNA). When you pick your niche one of your first tasks should be to kick off some SNA of to the top social networks in your niche so that you can strategically spend your time getting to know the right people.

What you are looking to do is figure out who are the real influencers in your sector, lets take SEO an an example. If we have a quick look at sphinn we can quickly gleam some useful information on where we should spend our time if we wanted to get integrated quickly into a community.

The impact of Googles Fear, Uncertainity and Doubt Strategy against SEO's over paid links has started to come back and bite them.

The problem is that since going public they have started to morph in M$ but without the experience or knowledge to pull off a large scale FUD campaign and end up benefiting.

When M$ created FUD around products the end result was that people standarised on there products as a defensive mechanism to avoid the potential issues that they did not understand.

If google are going to pontificate to the rest of us then surely it should get its own house in order.

Matt Cutts in this post says "In general, we’ve seen that users usually don’t want to see search results (or copies of websites via proxies) in their search results."

So why then are google returning google maps search results?

What am I suggesting?

Simply that you do not count people who were coming to your site anyway  even if they come from Google as part of your Google SEO success.

Why do I say this?

I am often told by people that 80% of there visitors come from google and that they would be out of business if Google dropped them. 

Ok, I got this question on skype earlier today. "What is this site and why the hell has is their a ref to Sun Tzu for the web?"

Well its a place that I have wanted to create for a long time, somewhere that people can some to learn about and discuss the relevance of Sun Tzu to the web and in particular to SEO / SEM / IM but also how these impact (or should) modern business strategies