After following the last 2 weeks articles you should be in a position where you’ve optimised your site for the search engines, successfully submitted it and worked out a strategy to enable your site to be picked up by all the smaller engines by creating a number of links to [...]]]>

After following the last 2 weeks articles you should be in a position where you’ve optimised your site for the search engines, successfully submitted it and worked out a strategy to enable your site to be picked up by all the smaller engines by creating a number of links to your site from external pages which the search engines can follow.

This week we’re going to look at ways to monitor how your search engine optimisation is going as this will allow you to check that everything is working properly and also to improve the techniques you are using to create maximum exposure.

Use a Hitcounter – Hitcounters are extremely useful when determining where your traffic is coming from and how many people are visiting your site on a daily basis. One useful and free counter that I have found is the ‘lite’ version of Onestat (www.onestat.com). By placing a small bit of code on your site you can instantly track how many people are coming onto your site and whether they are getting to you by typing in your address specifically or whether it is via a search engine or a link from another page. If they have jumped to you indirectly (i.e. via a search engine) then it will let you know where they have come from and so, for example, I can see today that 42% of traffic for Refresh Cartridges has come from Google, 20% from people typing the address in directly and the remaining 38% has come from other sources.

A Hitcounter will also show you other useful data such as which countries your visitors are coming from and which browsers they are using; both are extremely important bits of data. For example, if you only sell to the UK market you want to ensure that 90% of your visitors aren’t coming from America and likewise you want to ensure that your page is properly set up for the browsers that the hitcounter indicates that your visitors are using.

Check your Google rating – Download the Google toolbar from http://www.google.co.uk/options/ and install it on your computer. It is only a small little program but it includes a feature that will tell you how important Google rates a particular page; use it to check yours and then work on making Google consider your page more important. Last week I explained how to do this by creating lots of links back to your site so keep working on these and you’ll find that the more important Google believes your site is then the higher it will rank it.

Check links to your page – Use a search engine such as Google (www.google.co.uk) or All the Web (www.alltheweb.com) and type in your website address as the search term. For example, type in www.refreshcartridges.co.uk as a search into Google and it will give you a list of options including the ability to see links that are pointing back to that page. You can use this to check up on how many people are linking to your site and this information can obviously be used to monitor how your search engine optimisation is progressing as well as checking up on links that your competitors have which can be useful if looking for new people to link back to you. If you do a search for your page and the search engine doesn’t recognise it then they have no record of it in their database so you have quite a bit of work to do yet.

Check out the competition – Search for a word in Google that is important to your business; for example, if you sell widgets then type in ‘widgets’ as a search term and see who comes top of the list. Go to their site and look at who they have linking to them, how their pages are laid out, the Meta tags they are using (see last week) and so on. They are obviously doing something right and there is no harm in learning what they are doing so that you can emulate it and hence position yourself better in the search engines

I’ll finish by asking you all to check out www.webmasterworld.com as it’s full of useful tips for getting your website maximum exposure.

Search engines are fickle beasts but ultimately you’re going to want to learn how to tame them if you have a website that you want people to be able to find. There are plenty of people out there with fantastic sites but unfortunately if they’re not listed in the search [...]]]>

Search engines are fickle beasts but ultimately you’re going to want to learn how to tame them if you have a website that you want people to be able to find. There are plenty of people out there with fantastic sites but unfortunately if they’re not listed in the search engines then even the best sites will more than likely remain undiscovered. Refresh Cartridges enjoyed a surge of hits recently when Google, the worlds most popular search engine placed our site at the top of their lists when a user searched for the word ‘cartridge’ – it stayed this way for 2 weeks before someone else knocked us off but I know that we’ll be back.

Having spent the last year running a Internet mail order business I know a few things about getting a site listed in the search engines and for any of you reading that have a site then please take heed as my top tips follow below. This week we will be discussing how to prepare your site for your sites to be added and we’ll follow on next week with the actual submission to the search engines.

- Use a sensible domain name. Many search engines will see a site such as www.refreshcartridges.co.uk as a much more likely match when someone searches for the word cartridges than www.rc.co.uk, as will potential visitors. Make sure your domain name is descriptive of your company or your companies activities.

- Title all your pages. Using your HTML editor make sure that you add descriptive titles to all your web pages as this will allow a search engine to more easily recognise relevant pages.

- Use Meta Tags. These are used to add text to a page that it invisible to people viewing the site but is something that search engines can pick up to decide what a page is about. For example, in your Meta keywords you would pick a number of keywords that sum up the page such as ‘ink’, ‘paper’, ‘cartridge’ and ‘printer’ and then in your Meta description you would write a short description of the page in question. For more information on writing good meta tags, please visit http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/metatagtips.html

- Link all your pages. In a similar way that search engine spiders jump links to discover new sites on the Internet, they also use links to jump to all the pages on your website. If your pages are all linked together using something fancy like Flash or even drop down menus then it is unlikely that the search engines will be able to follow these links and if you have 200 pages on your site then you obviously want the search engine to be familiar with all of them and not just the first page. Therefore if you do use non standard linking mechanisms then be sure that you have a sitemap (just a single page that links to every page your website consists of) that the search engines can use to spider your entire site.

- Use ALT text on all images. All images on a webpage have the ability to have ALT text which is used whenever a user looks at your page and for one reason or another is unable to see the pictures; for example, a picture of a cat would be turned in to the word ‘cat’ if the page was designed by a savvy web designer. Search engines pick up on this alternative text so be sure that every image on your page has a relevant description as it will help the search engines pick up on relevant pages.

- Use descriptive text. Your actual website text should be worded in a way that means you mention the keywords that are relevant to your business at least several times. For example, I have made sure that the text on our front page contains the word ‘cartridge’ at least once.

- Don’t do the following.
Don’t spam keywords; for example repeating a word 30 times on the same text in the hope the search engines will consider you more relevant for that particular word.
Don’t use hidden text (using text that humans can’t see) as text on a similar coloured background is frowned upon by many search engines.
Don’t use non relevant keywords on your site; I’ve seen several CLEAN websites use text along the ‘Britney Spears Nude’ on their pages in a desperate attempt to drag visitors looking for porn on to their site by fooling the search engines. Not only is this likely to be frowned upon by many search engines but what is the point in attracting a visitor who is only going to leave after 2 seconds when he realises you’re not offering what he’s after?

Whilst searching for a broad range of search engines on which to promote my website I recently stumbled across a site which I hadn’t seen or heard of in the past which is actually shockingly good. For the last couple of years, Google has been my search engine of choice [...]]]>

Whilst searching for a broad range of search engines on which to promote my website I recently stumbled across a site which I hadn’t seen or heard of in the past which is actually shockingly good. For the last couple of years, Google has been my search engine of choice and is still in the majority of cases the first site that I’ll go to when searching for information on the Internet although the original layout of the site that I’m going to cover today definitely earns it a position as one of my favourites.

Kartoo (www.kartoo.com) is a meta engine which means that it searches more than one database at a time when you look for something on the Internet so that if, for example you typed in ‘houses for sale’ then it may question both AltaVista and Yahoo to bring you the most comprehensive results. In addition it can also intelligently choose which databases to question based on your search phrase so if you were to type in a question such as ‘Where can I view houses for sale?’ then Kartoo would ask a search engine that specialises in recognising natural language such as www.northernlight.com.

The best aspect of this site has to be the interface that it uses as for as long as search engines have been around, their layout has changed very little indeed – You simply type what you want into a box, hit search and then a big list of sites come up for you to choose from. Kartoo on the other hand uses a Macromedia Flash interface which makes things much more graphically intensive which many of you are probably thinking is a stupid idea as surely a graphical search engine will take longer to load and offer no advantages over a tradition engine, right? Whilst it’s true that on the first time using the site it will take a little while to load on a slow connection, repeat visits will be significantly faster and surprisingly the graphics actually help you to navigate your search results quite nicely.

Type in ‘Cheap cartridges in Devon’ into Kartoo and it comes up with a list of possible results all floating on the screen in little balloons and a list of keywords associated with the sites that have been returned focused towards the centre of the page. If you now put your mouse cursor over one of the balloons representing the site you want to go to then the search engine will join together the balloon and all the keywords from the centre of the screen that are associated with that site.

Vice Versa, on that particular search that we just did one of the keywords placed in the centre of the screen was the word ‘canon’ so if you float your mouse over this word then the site will join this word with the balloons of websites using this particular keyword. All of the balloons can be clicked on to open up that particular site or if you click on the top of the balloon then you can search from within that site, search for related sites and so on.

A list of other related searches that you may wish to try is listed down the left hand side of the screen as well as a list of top sites and sponsored links. There is an expert version which offers you greater control over how the results are displayed on your screen as well as more advanced searching options and the ability to save the searches that you’ve performed.

Basically, I recommend that you head to www.kartoo.com and give it a try as it is fairly difficult for me to explain how a graphical interface looks without the aid of pictures; you may hate it, you may love it but at least give it a try.

Once again I’ll take the take out this week to help out with any problems that my readers have been experiencing.

I usually read your column in the [...]]]>

Once again I’ll take the take out this week to help out with any problems that my readers have been experiencing.

I usually read your column in the Herald Express and have a problem I wondered if you could help me with as I am now receiving what I can only describe as unsolicited dirty emails.

Some time ago we thought of starting a small business selling quit smoking kits and someone suggested putting an advert on the ‘FFA’ sites.  We have since given up the idea of a business but do wonder that if by going onto these sites people are ‘selling’ our email address.

Up to now, I have dealt with the dozen or so daily unwanted emails by ‘blocking’ them, but they are increasing and I really don’t have the time to unblock every one.  Also, sometimes the same ones appear again under a different address,

What I would like to know is: -

1. Is there a way of stopping these emails coming through, perhaps by only ‘accepting’ ones from people in my address book?

2. If someone new wishes to send us an email and we are agreeable, if we add their email address to our address book will this mean that their emails will then be able to come through?

I am currently using Windows ME, and Microsoft Outlook 5. I shall be grateful if you could please help. Rose Griffiths, via e-mail.

This is a common problem amongst the majority of Internet users and I still maintain that the most effective way of not receiving junk e-mail (spam) is to be wary about who you actually give your e-mail address to in the first instance. This obviously isn’t much use to you Rose at this stage but for the benefit of my other readers I will start by telling you all to sign up for a second e-mail address. Then if you’re on a website that you don’t trust to handle your e-mail address is an appropriate way or if you’re submitting a website to the search engines and FFA sites, you can always use this alternative address.

When I was submitting my website to the search engines I began receiving around a hundred junk e-mail messages a day but one of the conditions with these services is that you are obliged to provide a working e-mail address and so I opened a free Hotmail account then gave that to the FFA sites so now I just check my alternative mailbox every couple of weeks in order to delete all the unwanted messages.

For those of you who find yourselves on a list that is regularly being spammed, the process to get yourself removed from these lists is somewhat more complicated than you’d imagine. Most mailings come with a link so that you can ‘remove’ yourself from their list but in the case of the rouge mailers this is quite often just a red herring. If you attempt to remove yourself from the list then they know that your e-mail address is active so it is likely you will actually receive more mailings!

The best bet is to either change your e-mail address and inform only the people you actually want to be able to contact you or get hold of a free program that will sit and actually monitor every incoming e-mail and will remove those it considers to be spam. One product that particularly caught my eye is Mailwasher (www.mailwasher.net) as this program has many unique features such as the ability to accept e-mails from recognised addresses only, it refuses e-mails from known ‘spammers’, it can read the e-mail and attempt to assess whether it is junk or not and you can also view and delete e-mails on the main server before you download them in order to save wasting time downloading junk.
Any mail that is deemed to be junk mail can then be ‘bounced’ back to the sender to make it appear that your e-mail address was invalid which would hopefully mean they’d remove you from their lists.

It seems to be rare nowadays to see a website advertised on the TV after the recent crisis in the .com industry and so it’s refreshing to see the site www.fish4.co.uk always advertised during prime time viewing. As one of those sites that attempts to cover a broad spectrum of [...]]]>

It seems to be rare nowadays to see a website advertised on the TV after the recent crisis in the .com industry and so it’s refreshing to see the site www.fish4.co.uk always advertised during prime time viewing. As one of those sites that attempts to cover a broad spectrum of services I thought it was about time that it was reviewed for Click.

The site itself is essentially nothing more than a collection of search engines tailored towards specific categories, from jobs to lettings all accessible from the one front page. So, from the start we have the ability to do a quick search for cars, a quick search for jobs or a quick search for houses in an area of our choosing subject to several search restrictions which we can place such as maximum price, number of bedrooms etc. There are also links to allow you to do searches for homes, local newspaper sites, local lettings as well as a number of buying guides for each kind of product available online.

Below I’ll evaluate roughly what is included under each category as each different area of the site also includes a number of services that you may not be expecting to find within.

Jobs – Involves filling in two sections; what do you want to work as and where you want to do it. Just then hit the search button and it’ll find any jobs that match your criteria although I found the results somewhat inaccurate in terms of the location that I was specifying.

This section also includes specific sections for different career paths, for example there is an entire section dedicated to engineering and an entire section for IT as well as a travel section that offers discount flights for business travellers through Thomas Cook.

Homes – You can search here for houses for sale and houses for rent, specifying the amount you want to pay, the number of bedrooms and the type of property as the search criteria. Addition sections on this category of the site include a mortgage searcher, legal advice, insurance services and guides for moving, selling and buying.

Cars – You start by specifying a make and model of car, the miles you want it to ideally have done, the location of the car and the approximate prices you are willing to pay for it. This page also includes a car loan searcher, insurance advice, a used car valuator as well as links to sections that allow you to search for boats, caravans, vans and motorbikes. This section has a number of guides on road tests, motoring products and services as well as a dealer directory.

There is also a section that you can use to search for local businesses by either specifying the type of business that you’re interested in, the business name or the location of the business. Overall, the site is well designed for ease of navigation although the biggest problem I found is that the amount of information in each section was somewhat limited if you compared it to a dedicated search engine (for example using Autotrader rather than the Fish4 cars section) however this is to be expected really.

Fish4 is however a good place to start for pretty much anything that you’re searching for but should ideally be used in conjunction with targeted sites such as www.autotrader.co.uk for cars or www.yell.co.uk for a business directory.

As far as sellers are concerned, I am unable to comment on the results that are generated by this site as although the prices seem very cost effective it is obviously not of use if no sales are generated as a result. Just to give you some kind of an idea, it costs £5 to advertise your car on the site for two weeks so any readers attempt to advertise on www.fish4.co.uk then please let me know the kind of results you achieve.