The Internet is changing rapidly. Many practices that were used a few years ago are ineffective today. To be successful on the Internet, one needs to stay on top of the ever changing environment. At Lakeside Analytics, we invest heavily in research and studying the industry. Our success depends on it. Yours might also.

What's Working on the Internet

Remember the days when Yahoo ruled the search engines? Then a startup called Google came on the scene and the rest is history.

Consider the rise of blogging and the social networks. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and a host of others allow people to interact with folks all across the world. PHP and MySQL rose up as new ways to publish data on the Internet.

More than ever, the Internet is becoming the best research tool ever created. As such, the Internet rewards those who publish rich, quality content, over those sites with minimal or spammed content.

Videos are becoming immensely popular, not just for YouTube, but on all kinds of sites where the viewer can see and hear more than just having to read a page.

Specialty sites that target visitors of a particular niche market are popping up because of the ease of being found for "long-tail" keywords. As time passes, the difficulty of creating a successful single site for general keyword terms increases dramatically.

The use of a web analytics service is virtually mandatory to track your visitors and root out the actionable information that can improve site performance.

What's Not Working on the Internet

The days of publishing a site and they will come is long gone. Competition is fierce, and countless new pages are being published every day.

Being found on the first 3 pages of a search engine is a zero sum game with a small number of available positions sought after by countless competitors. Gone are the days of making some changes and leaving it alone. Today, sites that don't change and update to the changing environment, perish.

The "Black Hat" search engine techniques that manipulate search engine results are thankfully becoming more difficult to implement. Search Engines are becoming far more diligent in weeding out the manipulators and rewarding those who follow the rules.

Content written for print media does not work on the Internet. Viewers don't read as much on the Internet, but rather scan and hit the highlights.

Design techniques have advanced. Sites built around the use of tables are giving way to CSS table-less designs. HTML pages are moving to XHTML, PHP, and ASPX. XML and RSS have gained momentum as new browsers have been released utilizing their capabilities.

Certain Meta Tags that used to help search engine rank web pages are no longer used since search engine technology and indexing power increased.

Lakeside Analytics, Inc. is Committed to Internet Research

Internet research is a fundamental activity for Internet consultants and those looking to be successful on the Internet. Since our inception in 1998, we have always been devoted students of the Internet Industry. Our dedication shows in all the work we perform, for ourselves, and our consulting clients.