I have a friend, who will remain anonymous, who works at Google as a product manager. He does not work with Google Analytics. One night we had this heated discussion of how Google Analytics played into their advertising and revenue models. He assured me that all these departments were, and would always be, independent. This was the inspiration for ‘Does running Google Analytics affect your SEM?‘

Several months later, Google announces Benchmarking, which allows you to “compare report data against industry verticals and gain broader context for your site.” More importantly, it lets Google use the data from thousands of website to fine tune it’s search and advertising algorithms to maximize profit like any good company should.

But since this feature is for “my benefit”, I decided to take a look.

Since I just moved the analytics for Simple Pixel over to Google Analytics last week, we are looking at a pretty small set of data. Nonetheless, it is obvious to see the value of the report it produced.

Comparison

For comparison, each site is categorized into one of three groups based on the number of visits received: small, medium, and large (outliers are removed). Based on my stellar numbers, and those of the benchmark, I am going to guess I am in ’small.’

In addition to your size classification, you can compare to a particular category, such as ‘Marketing Services.’ Each of these groups has a minimum of 100 websites in it.

Here are my issues with this:

• I have no idea what category I am in, Google doesn’t tell you.
• I have no idea how are they determining which category I am in. Does it analyze my content, keywords, etc? Most websites don’t fit neatly into one category. Shouldn’t I be allowed to tell Google how to categorize my site?
• If I don’t know how I was grouped, then what am I comparing? I have no point of reference.
• What constitutes a ‘medium’ site? 200 visits? 200,000 visits?

Basically all this has told me is that for most sites that are ’small,’ I am getting a lot more traffic than most. Great. That and $1 will get me a soda.

I could go through each section on the benchmark report, but that would be tedious and boring.

So what’s my point? I have a two:

1. This feature, as it stands, it a joke. The only value it provides is to Google.
2. Benchmarking is a great idea and everyone should do it, but set your own benchmarks, don’t let some automated software make some assumptions.

Set benchmarks against your own traffic, using historical data. Look at your own patterns over different time periods and sources of traffic. Here are a few stats that are typically good things to benchmark:

• Visitors - total, unique, returning
• Conversions
• Cost per conversion
• ROI
• Total page views
• Visits by sources of traffic

Ars Technica is reporting that spambots have cracked Hotmail and Gmail CAPTCHA, allowing spammers to open thousands of email accounts and flood our inboxes with even more SPAM. It takes less than 1 minute for the spambot to crack Hotmail’s CAPTCHA .

Spammers are using these new email accounts to spam advertisements for “lottery tickets and watches.” Apparently the current economy’s state has not had any effect on the demand for lottery tickets and watches. Go figure.

More importantly, this questions the effectiveness of CAPTCHA to stop spammers and bots. While creating more advanced CAPTCHAs might thwart spambots in the short term, eventually they will find a way to crack them. In addition, if these CAPTCHAs get any more complicated, users will complain. Typing in a string of random letters and numbers all mixed up can be annoying as is, I can only imagine what a harder to crack version would be. So what can Hotmail and Gmail do?

Create a Better CAPTCHA
If you think about the evolution of media on the internet, video CAPTCHAs are the next logical step. I can see it now, YouTube CAPTCHA. Watch this short clip and answer a question. Using YouTube’s huge library of video with user supplied tags and descriptions, there is enough data to create thousands of computer generated clips and answer keys. Can users suffer through a 5 second video and answer a question? What about visually impaired users?

Limit the Number of Accounts per IP
If these spambots are running on unsuspecting users’ machines, limit the number of email accounts that can be created for each IP. Only a bot would create 1400 email addresses a day and log into each account and send out email. How long until they figure out a way around this one?

Make Users Confirm Their Account
Use phone call back to confirm the account. Sure its annoying, but would you trade that one simple step for a world with a lot less SPAM?

SitePoint has a great article entitled Web Site Optimization: 13 Simple Steps detailing some great ways to improve the performance of your site.

Inspired by Yahoo’s best practices for speeding up your website, the article details some more practical details for the average website as well as greater detail on implementing the changes.

To analyze your sites performance, get Yahoo’s FireFox/FireBug plugin YSlow.

In a nutshell, here are some of the best tips in the article:

1. Decrease file sizes - writing efficient HTML, CSS and Javascript will help to reduce file size, page load times, and often times SEO efforts
2. Optimize external files, such as CSS and Javascript - Combine multiple style sheets or Javascript files into one
3. Compress your HTML, CSS and Javascript - use Apache’s gzip/deflate to server compressed version of your pages to compatible browsers

Here are some essential WordPress plugins to assist in the process of optimizing your blog for pickup and sharing by visitors, search engines, and aggregators. Make sure you know what you are doing before you go and install these, some play nice with each other, and some do not.

Social Marketing

Share This - provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to add your posts to various social bookmarking sites.

Sitemaps

Google Sitemap Generator - automatically generates XML sitemaps for WordPress. Includes many options such as auto-ping, change and priority adjustments and selection of content for inclusion.

Dagon Design Google Sitemap Generator - support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Title Tag - Allows full control of title tags for all pages and posts. Allows you to setup default title tags for your 404 page, homepage and categories. Includes support for Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Another WordPress Meta Plugin - adds META tags (keywords and descriptions) to your posts and pages.

All In One SEO Pack - generates META tags and lets you define them, automatically optimizes your titles and lets you specify your own, avoid indexing of duplicate content.

Feeds

FeedBurner FeedSmith - detects all ways to access your feed and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Stay tuned for part 2…

Mashable has a great posting featuring 120+ web development resources.

As we make it through the list, we’ll highlight of our favorites and others to check out.