On Friday we went along to the BrightonSEO event. We particularly enjoyed the demonstration Nikki Rae from Fresh Egg gave about Cookies.

You can read Peter Handley’s review of BrightonSEO here – and we’ll be posting more from the event on this blog later in the week. Silicon Beach Training offer a complete range of Web Design Training and Social Media Training courses, including a new public SEO Training in Brighton, Sussex.

Here’s our summary of what Cookies are – along with a clip of Nikki’s demonstration.

What is a Cookie?

A cookie is a small text file sent to your computer via your web browser when you visit some websites. They store information about you like where you went and what you clicked on, which is used when you revisit the site.

What do Cookies do?

Cookies can do many things – for example:

• Remembering purchasing information
• Recording your viewing preferences
• Storing results of online quizzes

Once downloaded by your browser, a cookie will sit on your hard drive until the next time you visit the same website.

Without the cookies the web server would have no way of knowing that you had been to the site before unless you logged in with a username and password.

* Cookies allow web servers to remember you.

How do cookies work?

Here Nikki from Fresh Egg explains how Cookies work at BrightonSEO with a little help from her friends.

Where are my Cookies?

In Mozilla Firefox you can see all the cookies sitting on your computer if you:

1. Click on tools at the top of the window

2. Scroll down and select Options

3. Click on the Privacy icon

4. Then click Show Cookies

You will then see a list of all the cookies relating to your Firefox Browser (If you have other browsers on your computer they will have their own set of cookies)

Here you can remove individual cookies or remove all of them at once.

Without the cookies the web server would have no way of knowing that you had been to the site before unless you logged in with a username and password. Niki descibes life before cookies

What are Third Party Cookies?

Third party cookies are the ones that make people worry about their privacy.

The problem is that many sites use cookies from third parties like marketing companies and give them permission to look at the cookie, allowing them to track you across all the sites that use their cookies. If you give your e-mail address to one site it could share then share it with their partners.

Do Cookies damage my computer?

Despite their reputation, cookies are very small files that don’t cause damage to your computer just by sitting on your hard drive.

In general, cookies are just text files and are not executables so they do not contain viruses, however, as well as third-party cookies they do contain information such as user names.

Cookies are about Browsers not People

As Nikki pointed out in her talk, cookies are about browsers not people, this means that analytics can be misleading. For example, if a browser is used by the whole family, the server that interprets the users behaviour will read all the family as one person. Also if you use a computer at work and another at home or even use different browsers for doing different things on the web, each browser you use will be interpreted as a unique user.

In this way using Cookies for attribution (finding out what led your client to a sale for example) is not without problems.

Nikki finished her presentation by giving the audience cookies (the cooked, chocolate chip kind). Thanks Nikki!!

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