Search Engine Optimisation - Content Coding

'Content' Coding Optimisation

These are the parts of your coding which tell your computer what to display via your browser. And there are several key parts to take into account.

• Keywords in your text:
  
  The keywords you decide upon should also have a certain prominence and weight in the visible text of your site, its links and its images. This can also be checked using Web CEO.
  
  This is a fine art and a light-handed approach should be used.
  


• Relevancy:
  
  The one thing Web CEO cannot check is the relevancy of that text. Don't try and squeeze your 'keywords' in as often as possible, and sacrifice good plain English which makes sense. This is far more important than 'prominence' or 'weight'.
  


• 'Alt Tags' - Alternative Tags
  
  Provide 'Alt' tags for all images on your site. These were first introduced when modems were slow, and some people switched off the images in their browser to speed up their surfing.
  
  They provide a text description of an image, which not only gives an enhancement to your images, but it is also vital to 'Screen Reader' software, which is used by the visually impaired.
  
  Hover your mouse over an image on this site and a description of it should appear.
  


• Structured Text
  
  Have a clear structured layout for your text. Allow the search engines to find out what the main points are and what their importance is by using 'Header' tags. These can be ordered as 'Header1', 'Header2' etc.
  
  Use the list "<li>" tag when making bullet points. These further help to de-lineate what your content is about.
  


• Validate Your Coding
  
  All coding should adhere to the World Wide Web consortium guidelines. They invented HTML, and the developers of browser software use this when designing 'Internet Explorer', 'Firefox' etc.
  
  Having valid HTML code will mean your site works on as many platforms as possible. And if you use 'Style Sheets' you should also validate this. You can check both of these by clicking here ....
  
  

Search Engine Optimisation - Meta Tags

'Meta Tag' Optimisation'
The 'keywords' associated with your site allow other computers to assess their content. To effectively use these 'keywords' you have to consider the following:

• Which words reflect your site best


• How prominent are they in your 'Keywords', 'Description' and 'Title' tags


• What 'weight' do they have in these tags

• Keywords
  
  This should be a short list of words (about 20 or 30 max.) which people might use to search for your site.
  


• Title
  
  This is the title which appears at the very top of each web page. It should provide a summary of the page.
  
• Description
  
  This is a brief description of your web page, about 100 words or so long at the most.

Of course, not everyone has the time or inclination to be a coding expert so help is at hand, with many analysis tools available on and offline such as :

Web CEO

Submit Express

You can also use a site like 'AnyBrowser' to generate good 'Meta Tags' to use on your website.

Search Engine Optimisation - Intro

The internet is still essentially an information medium. And where web information is concerned the Search Engine rules.

It is impossible to have an effective web presence without being aware of Search Engine Optimisation.

So what do search engines want from your website? Well, search engines want to deliver as good a service as possible to their customers and delivering relevant results is what matters to them. In the main they judge your site on relevant content, useability, and popularity.

They guard their secrets very well, the algorithims that they use to judge your site are deeply complex and ever changing, but there are a few basic principles to follow.

The first of these is to understand how search engines see your site. And since computers don't have eyes, they have to read the coding behind your site. By 'right-clicking' on any web page and selecting 'view source', you can get an idea of what this coding looks like.

Parts of this code is used to layout the text and images that you see through your browser, and other parts provide information to other computers.

These are called 'Meta Tags' and are the first place to start when optimising your site. The main 'Meta Tags' to be concerned with are as follows:

• Title (a heading to be displayed in the browser)


• Keywords (words which relate to your website content)


• Description (a brief summary of your site and its purpose)

E-Marketing Tips - Assessments

So you've created your blog, uploaded your podcasts and you're paying Google for your sponsored links, and what difference is it making to your site?

Are visitors happy with your site, are they spending time (or money) there? How do you find out?

Well, there are two main ways of getting the information you desire :

• Ask your customers directly


• Observe what they do with your site

The simplest way to get information is to ask your customers what they like/dislike about your site. Add a simple feedback form on your website, or you can email them.

But a more effective way is to examine your website stats. And for this the best tool by far is Google Analytics. This allows you to view not only how many visitors you get, but where they come from; how long they spend on your site; what pages they dwell on; which pages make them leave; and how they got there in the first place.

Analytics is not currently available to everyone however, and there are other options:

Webalizer (usually available via cPanel)

Click Tracks
(software)

Web Trends

Stat Counter

Web Log Expert

There are lots of other tools available across the internet to help you track your marketing, try clicking here for a sample

E-Marketing Tips - Paid Strategies

Paid Strategies:

The advantages to paid strategies are that you can generally get a good idea of how much traffic your advertising is generating. It also easier to target specific customers or sectors. These include:


Sponsored Links:
This method allows you to place an advert on a search engine, whenever the appropriate search term is entered. The position of your advert is dictated by a bidding system, which judges the price by popularity of the search term and what other people are bidding.

Google Adwords

Overture


Site specific advertising:
You can place an advert or a link on high-traffic sites which would be relevant to your business. So if you are a hotel owner you could advertise on Expedia or the like.


Affiliate Marketing :
Affiliate Marketing is basically an electronic version of paying other websites to generate revenue on your behalf, or they can pay you. You find people who will direct customers to your site and give them a commission when/if a customer makes a transaction. You can also offer to use your site and direct potential clients to other websites.

So for instance, if you have a car hire company, then you could direct customers to a particular hotel website, and they would pay commission to you, or vice versa.

There are many models available and you should research this area in-depth before proceeding. But the main benefit is that you only pay when you have received a benefit from it.

SMS Marketing
Similar to email marketing you can use the ubiquitous text message to get in touch with your customers. This is good because of the personal relationship peopl have with their phones, and the fact that they tend to take them everywhere.

Websites such as
SMS 2 Email offer bulk text messaging services at reasonable prices.

There are guidelines and legal aspects on using these services for marketing and you should read the following...

Caveat: Always research paid advertising strategies. There are a lot of companies online offering these services, and not all are suitable for your business.

E-Marketing Tips - Free Promotion Methods

If the search engines fail you, or you can't wait the 6-8 weeks to get a listing, then there are many other options for promoting your business online. These fall into two main categories :

FREE Strategies

PAY Strategies

FREE Marketing:

As a rule FREE marketing strategies are a bit more vague in the results they produce, however, they can be effective and they are free so utilising some of the following methods should be considered.

Blogging

Producing your own 'Web Log' is not only fun. It can provide another way of letting people know more about your products or services. Blogs also get listed in Search Engines and this can form part of your 'Link Strategy'.

Blogs which offer useful advice, are entertaining, or are controversial usually perform the best.


Podcasting

Podcasting is similar to 'blogging' but you use sound files (mp3) instead of text. This is very important if you are involved in the music industry, or any kind of public performance or speaking. You could even just do a podcast offering advice or handy hints for any industry.


RSS Feeds

Really Simple Synidcation - Allows you to distribute your content around the globe easily. Any kind of infromation can be distributed this way, and once you have created it, you can offer it up to anyone who is interested.

You can also put other people's feeds on your site, and this provides extra content.


Google Videos

Google videos is the visual equivalent of podcasting and blogging. It allows you to upload movies you have made.


Email marketing

Email marketing can take many forms. From newsletters, to offers and general updates. It keeps your website fresh in the mind of people.


There is a modicum of 'netiquette' invovled with any form of email campaigns, and the DTI website has a good guide...

Linking Strategies:

Getting links into your website from other sites can mean valuable extra traffic. Not only that, but all the websites you have links on will be registered with the search engines as well. Which means your name will appear to be 'popular'.

You should however take care to list yourself on sites that are relative to the area you are working in. If you have listings in a lot of irrelevant sites the search engines may mark you down for this.

E-Marketing Tips - Part 1

The search engines are the first place to go when marketing your site. This is because the major engines still let you submit your site for free, and achieving a good ranking on Google can mean a large amount of traffic to your site, for little expense. As well as this, the process can take several weeks (or even months), so submitting your site as soon as it is launched is a good move.
Search engines want to deliver as good a service as possible to their customers and delivering relevant results is what matters to them. In the main they judge your site on relevant content, useability, and popularity.

Directories :
Getting into a directory can mean that the major search engines will pick you up without submitting, but it is vital to read the 'submission guidelines' before proceeding.

Some of these directory sites still use real people to edit the submissions, and because of this the search engines put a lot of stock in their opinions.

Open Directory Project
About.com
GoGuides.Org
Web-Beacon

WebSavvy
Gimpsy
WoW Search Engine and Directory Service

Search Engines:
The following is a list of search engines who still maintain free submission.

Google
All the Web
Gigablast
AltaVista
Lycos
Yahoo!

HIE Moray Seminars Get Going

Just delivered our 'taster session' to a small but keen group of local businesses yesterday.

I'm always amazed and intrigued by the diversity of people who attend these events. And my innate fear of public speaking is usually overridden by the interesting discussions generated. And it's always good to make a contribution to their success.

Yesterday we had everything from ceramic flower designers to a Brazilian brother/sister music duo. Which shows how far reaching and hopefully beneficial the interweb can be, even in a relatively unpopulated area like Moray.

The seminars are open to all (within that area) and if you want to know more then visit www.hiemorayworkshops.co.uk for more details.

The Beige Invasion

The web it seems is not immune to the all-consuming blandness which has been slowly eroding all kinds of creative industries recently.

Music has definitely been drawn into a malaise of well-produced but inoffensive tripe, with the likes of Norah Jones, Jamie Cullum, David Gray, Katie Melluah, James "cockney rhyming slang" Blunt and Daniel Powter to name but a few of the perpetrators of this tapioca of trite nonsense. Get a nice voice, a nice face, a nice personality and a nice producer and bob's yer biscuit (rich tea of course, for blandness).

And TV too has descended into a morass of unadulterated tedium. The never ending stream of consciousness pouring out from every member of Joe Public, defies the poular belief that the world is in a downward spiral because people are basically just so beige that it is hard to believe we're on a fast train to hell.

And having just read an article on Web Design Trends for 2006 I am beginning to fear that the dangerous sparks of creativity which the web has always engendered will be snuffed out. Apparently, with the rise of blogs, wikis, xml extranets and so on, the trend is towards standardisation and the inevitable sameiness this brings.

Ah! ha! Well, standardisation is what we've all been asking for, and there's no doubt that in some ways it helps more and more people to produce content for the web without having to be html literate. But I just hope that it isn't too successful and I end up living in a world where me doing the ironing is the top rated tv show, and all I listen to is Norah Jones on a loop.

Maybe hell is closer than I thought........

The ghost of internet past

Whilst working on the latest series of seminars for Netdata and HIE Moray I've been designing a quick 2 minute presentation to sum up the entire history of the web. Of course I made it doubly diffcult by going right back to the invention of the telephone. Well I had to start somewhere, and being as I live in Edinburgh, where better than with Alexander Graham Bell. But when he uttered the famous words "Mr Watson. Come here. I need you" in 1876, he obviously knew he had made a great invention, but just how great he couldn't have known.

Humans love to communicate and time after time any invention that involves communication (even one-way) becomes all pervasive. The postal system, morse code, the telegraph, telephone, radio, TV and the mobile phone have all had a huge effect in bridging the physical gap between one human and another.

But the internet was also born out of post-war paranoia and justified fear. Paranoia over mother Russia's space exploration and the justified fear of the atomic bomb. And from these negative emotions was born the idea of a communication system which had no hub, no centre point, no 'Achilles Heel' . A self-replicating network of nodes. Destroy one and another takes its place.Thus the internet slowly, amorphously developed and continues to sprout forth its digital tentacles into every aspect of our lives.

Parasitical? Viral? Maybe. But it is more a reflection of your own particular world vision .

I prefer to believe that it creates more than it degrades and that my Edinburgh born fellow citizen, Mr Bell, would have been chuffed indeed.

By the way, what did he need Watson for anyway?

World Wide Web Workshops

Over the past few years at Netdata we have been aiding Highlands and Islands Enterprise in raising the profile of electronic commerce within the local business community. The benefits of e-business to such a diverse and sparsely populated part of the country are potentially huge and have already been embraced by a lot of companies.

Highland Innovation are just one example of this. They have gathered a name for themselves in recent times for inventions such as the hand-held breastchecker amongst many other things and have more recently been trading online to reach a far larger marketplace. This has seen them garner interest from all corners of the globe.

But with the gradual upsurge in usage and knowledge of the web, it is now time to re-assess the approach that businesses should take for the coming years.

With this is mind we are currently developing a series of seminars aimed at local business who want to move up the ladder of e-business. These seminars will reflect on Web v1.0 as well as progressing the users onto the latest advances and hopefully help them to broaden their scope and take advantage of Web v2.0.

The workshops will be taking place from April onwards....updates to follow.

AOL? Discussed? (disgust?)

I don't think I've ever been a fan of AOL. This hasn't always been a rational dislike, though what they did with Netscape was inexcusable, and some of my dislike has simply come from a general Michael Moore-esque paranoia of large corporations. But, recently, I have grudgingly spent some of my precious man-hours on the AOL website.

The reason - advertising. Simple, apparently uncynical, well presented advertising.

The recent spate of AOL/discuss promotions has slowly seeped into my sub-conscious until I just could not resist its allure any more. It poses basic questions about the internet, information and ultimately about humans themselves.
The addition of comment from respected individuals from all backgrounds has given it kudos, and it generates healthy debate through a simplistic format.

But most of all, it made me think. Something which I like doing probably too often, but there are plenty of people around who could benefit from a bit more time in contemplation and discussion.

So what exactly did it make me think of/about? The basic abstract properties of the internet. Its nature and essence, and therefore our own.

I have long held a belief that technology (like art) only reflects us, it rarely changes us. For instance, PC's can tell you a lot about the individual that owns them. You install a basic framework like XP, and then use that to do your bidding. And after a few years of ownership, a computer provides a nice little snapshot of its owner. Whether you fill hard drive with mp3's, movies, games or pornography, all provides a glimpse into your thought processes. But it isn't the technology that does that, only yourself.

And the internet is the same. It only allows us to propogate a digital version of humanity, not to re-define it. It is in some senses, impossible to define the internet. In philisophical terms it exists, but in physical form it has no outline, no recognisable shape that makes it easier for humans to delineate, pigeon-hole. Ultimately it is whatever you want it to be, a friend, lover, workplace, opportunity, demon, or simply nothing at all.

But it is our choice, perhaps that's the point......if there is one.

The Emperor's New Clothes - "Sod the iPod"

"Sod the iPod", I heard a friend say recently. This statement was greeted with 'Crusade'-style cries of 'heretic' from the immediate assembly, which I must admit I found somewhat embarassing because, in some senses, I have to agree.

Although the web and media are my own playgrounds and workplace, I do have to stop and check myself regularly. We've all been here before. 2000/2001 and the dot com crash came as no surprise to anyone with a modicum of perspective, and I myself welcomed it. Nihilism isn't always about destruction, it is actually about creating something better from the ruins.

So what my friend was saying was, what is so great about the iPod? It is after all only a hard drive with MP3 software installed. Pretty though it may be. It is not, as some appear to think, a magical cure for shallow lifestyles. It doesn't make you glamourous, it doesn't make you cool, and it definitely won't make you successful.

Now I understand peer pressure when you're a teenager, having committed most of the fashion mistakes of the 1980's I feel well qualified to comment. But the assembled group were all in their 30's, and although not always the case, each of them should have known better.

And of course I'm cursed with ageing, but I still think it appears to sum up the lack of depth and social engagement in modern life.

So I second that emotion.......if you'll excuse the poor musical reference, but my playlist is limited.

Spam and Your Control Panel

At Netdata we get a lot of customers asking how to control the level of spam they receive, and there are many ways of doing this. The most effective ways are by utilising the control panel anti-spam features on your domain.

The newest version of Cpanel allows you to use two features: Spam Assassin and BoxTrapper Spam Trap. Both of which can be tweaked in many ways to deny unsolicited emails.

Spam Assassin uses algorithims to give any inbound email a score out of 10. And, depending on where you set your threshold, Spam Assassin will make sure that any email which scores lower than that threshold will be diverted to a spam box or even deleted.

So, for example, if you set your threshold at 10, you will probably still receive a fair amount of spam, but if you lower the threshold to 5, you will receive less. The trouble is balancing unsolicited email you don’t want (spam) against unsolicited emails you do want (new business enquiries).This is usually a matter of trial and error to find the right level for your business.

Visit the SpamAssassin website for more details or call Netdata for advice.

Disruption is Good

Disruptive Technologies come in various guises, and it’s a term which has negative connotations when you first hear it. But, it appears to be a good thing, or at least a very popular thing. Digital photography is one example.

Althought the quality of digital cameras is inferior to traditional film based cameras, their popularity greatly outranks their more-mature counterparts.

And so it is with Skype, possibly the ultimate example of a ‘disruptive technology’, albeit in a slightly different way.Skype is a FREE piece of software which saves you money on phone calls. Simply download it onto your PC and use your PC to call another Skype user for FREE over your broadband connection. And you can also use Skype via your PC to call a normal landline at greatly reduced prices.

So there we have it, a FREE piece of software which saves you money, and has already made a fortune for its developers (having just sold it to Ebay for £1.4bn). Try taking a business plan like that to your own Bank Manager and see his reaction.

Its good to see that not everything that’s ‘too good to be true’, isn’t.

2006 - The Year the web grew up?

With the start of a New Year comes a bold new confidence in the Internet and what it can do for all of us. Certainly 2005 had a number of interesting developments but it looks like this year will see a lot of change, and, as ever, a lot of hype.The buzzword is definitely "Web v2.0", but what does this mean? Well, because it is essentially a marketing phrase it remains difficult to completely pin it down but we're going to try anyway."Web v2.0" is a steady realisation that the interent is finally beginning to live up to some of its expectation. It is a mixture of converging technolgies and disruptive ones.The ubiquitous mobile phone is converging with Wi-Fi and Broadband to bring us high speed web access anywhere (given time). More and more services are being offered solely online, and proving to be effective. And pioneers like Google and Skype are proving to be a thorn in the side of many businesses by giving away state-of-the-art services for FREE. And yet they still make vast sums of money.Broadly speaking Web v2.0 is a way of summing up the fact that the internet has put to bed most of its bad memories of 2000/2001, and is finally showing signs of coming-of-age. With ever-increasing usage and decreasing prices of broadband, greater education and a general knowledge of how the web works filtering into the collective sub-conscious, it may finally be deserving of some of its hype.So 2006 will be an interesting year and if you're not on the bandwagon yet, I think it is probably time you hitched up.