I am GAIQ

Yes ladies and gentlemen, from this day on I am GAIQ (Google Analytics Individual Qualification).

I have passed the exam two minutes ago and you can see a copy of my certificate below:

Unfortunately Google does not provide a GAIQ certification logo like the one for Adwords Qualified Individual.

Overall the test was preety easy and if you’re using Google Analytics on a daily basis you should do ok. I studied for a weekend and passed with 98%. Also I should note that basic knowledge of the Google Adwords product and some advertising/online marketing terms will come in handy !

During the online exam the following will be useful to have a tab away:

1. A working Google Analytics account with some data in it (preferably with a profile that has E-commerce, Site-search and Adwords reporting enabled)
2. Search and replace filters
3. The Analytics Help website
4. The filter RegEx tool
5. Google Conversion University materials (which I watched two times before taking the exam)
6. optionally you could also have the Google Analytics Tracking API reference (I didn’t need it)

The exam has 70 questions in 90 minutes, of which some are multiple-choice multiple-answers, some are choose-two answers and most are single choice answers.

I found the time to be more than enough, having enough to review all the answers one more time before submitting. Upon graduation you’ll receive a downloadable PDF from the test website, which by the way is google.starttest.com. The certification is valid for 18 months since the passing date.

Good luck to anyone that’s attempting the GAIQ certification exam and drop me a line if you have questions, if you have passed the exam or if you think I can be of any help !

The new Canonical url rel-tag

I just read on SEOmoz that a new rel tag was announced to be supported by Search engines: "canonical".

From what I understand you will be able to tag different pages with the <link rel="canonical" href="original page url" /> tag.

This means that you’ll be able to cover a whole bunch of potential duplicate content within your site. A quick application for this would be the merging of pages that are typed case insensitive, for example:

• /Page
• /PagE
• /PAGE

could all be marked as canonical to "/page".

For more information please read the canonical tag article on SEOmoz.

Non-profit’s guide to Search Engine Marketing

Seobook.com does it again… they launched yet another good SEO guide, although they call it "… guide to SEM".

You can read both these guides as you’ll probably learn something from them.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this guide is aimed at non-profits.

I haven’t had time to read the guide yet, but I glanced over it and the information seems solid and well structured, nothing you wouldn’t expect from Aaron. They reference a third party in regards to PPC tips.

I will update you after I read the guide, but I’d appreciate any comments from people who read the guide(s). Thanks !