Intermediate Search Engine Optimisation

Last week we have focused on Basic Search Engine Optimisation, this week we will be taking a step up and looking at more comprehensive ways of SEO.

I will be covering the following in this article:

• Dynamic / Static Links
• Alt Tags
• Robots
• Sitemap

As we have discussed in the previous article it is all about keywords and ensuring that your website is well described for search engines and for humans. Today we will focus on more in depth analysis of what search engines are looking at when they are crawling through your site, so lets start!

1. Dynamic / Static Links

   Dynamic Link: www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/gui.aspx?12938ds9828dj123d

   Static Link: www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/corporate-branding/

   Ok so whats the difference? Dynamic links don’t really give much information to search engine, where static links will tell them that web page is talking about (in this case it is corporate-branding). Also, Google use to ignore dynamic links, this is no longer the case. However it is still not healthy to have dynamic links as they can effect your web page rankings massively.

2. Alt Tags

   When you have images on your website don’t just add <img src=”logo.gif”/> but add a alt tag, this is good for accessibility and also Google will have some kind of idea what image is all about.  So do the following <img src=”logo.gif” alt=”your domain logo”/> this will also show image in the image search results when some one research for your domain logo.

3. Robots

   This is not very important, however it is good to tell search engines where to look and where not too. All you have to do is create text file document and upload it to your httpdocs folder. File should contain something like:

   User-agent: *

   Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml

   Disallow: /administration-section/

   This way Robots will know that they are allowed to spider the website, and they will see where sitemap is. Also they will know where it shouldn’t look as sensitive information might be in place.

   Robots page should be located in www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt

4. Sitemap

   Now this is very important, if you want all web pages to indexed and if you want to ensure that it is done quickly then you defiantly require sitemap.

   First thing to do is register here:

   https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A//www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard&followup=http%3A//www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard&hl=en

   Sitemap should be located in the following area: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

   As you noticed it should be .xml file, this is how you should write it:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
   <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
   <url>
     <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/</loc>
     <lastmod>5/16/2008</lastmod>
     <priority>0.5</priority>
     <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
   <url>
     <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/page1/</loc>
     <lastmod>5/19/2008</lastmod>
     <priority>0.5</priority>
     <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
   </urlset>

   You can literary take that and paste this it in to notepad and then save it as .xml . And just change www.youdmain.com and www.yourdomain.com/page1/ to your web pages. It is very simple but can make a significant difference to speed of indexing your website.

This was written by Zan Kavtaskin , Director of Prosper Web Solutions. Prosper Web Solutions is a web design Cheltenham .

LG Viewty (KU990) VS IPhone (Review)

There has been many rumours and arguments regarding these two phones. Lets just take a look at the features and draw up a conclusion.

LG Viewty Our Score 9.0

The Good:

• MP3 Player
• Full Size Touch Screen
• Internet Browser (can surf youtube, facebook, etc, works just like any normal PC browser would)
• 3G+ Internet Connection (loads web pages very quickly)
• PC Suite – you can use your phone as a internet modem
• 5 Mega Pixel Camera / Video Recorder – really high quality
• Picture Editing Software
• TV-OUT
• QWRTY Keyboard
• Phone Simply Doesn’t Crash!
• Phone charges while your uploading music on to it from your laptop
• Multitasking

The Bad:

• PC Suite “Music Manager” is slow when it comes to writing music on to your phone (however you can just take the memory card out and plug it in to your laptop and copy music over then it is mega quick)
• No Wi-Fi feature – however it does work on 3G+ so there is no real need for it, Ipone does have Wi – Fi only because it doesn’t support 3G.

IPhone Our Score 8.5

The Good:

• OS Leopard
• MP3 Player / IPod
• Synchronization With ITunes
• Safari - Internet Browser
• QWRTY Keyboard
• Phone charges while your uploading music on to it from your laptop
• WI FI Connection
• Multitasking
• Lots of different software

The Bad:

• 2 Mega pixel Camera
• No Video recoding
• Slow EDGE Connection
• Only available on O2 unless you buy it
• Very expensive handset

Conclusion:

For the money your are paying and for the current technology that is out there we have t face it and bow down to LG Viewty. I strongly believe that LG has done it, they have made IPhone killer. I can't stop using LG. Such a solid, easy to use, and amazing phone.

It has really quick internet connection, it doesn’t crash, takes amazing pictures, has a IPod style MP3 player. What more can you want? It does everything that IPhone does apart from Wi – Fi and ITunes synchronization.  This phone is just pleasure to use, and I am a person that is hard to impress! I am very impressed with this Phone, far more impressed then I was with IPhone.

IPhone is simply out of date only because it is using EDGE internet connection and it has 2 Mega pixel camera, that is about 3 years behind the current technology!

You can get LG Viewty on contract from Vodafone on £25 a month, now compare that to IPhone. I strongly believe that LG Viewty has not just met IPhone league but also gone beyond it.

LG has sold 310,000 models after 5 weeks of launch! It sold 6,300 units a day across Europe. However vocal Apple has kept figures to them selves. Clearly something is not right.

Written By:

Zan Kavtaskin - Director of Prosper Web Solutions . Prosper Web Solutions is a web design Cheltenham

Content Management Systems Issues

We have been looking around for a good Content Management System for a while and we have to say all of them fail in one way or the other. All we wanted to find was a system that will let our clients update their pages by just logging in and simply editing it.

We are running .NET on our servers so we have decided to move away from PHP and utilize as much as we can our resources. But we have been disappointed with most Content Management Systems out there are, for the following reasons:

1. Hard to use
2. Not Search Engine Optimized
3. Take a while to load

Hard To Use
Most content management systems like DotNetNuke have grown so much and forgot the main purpose of it existence. To give user control over the pages and let users simply change the content. If it takes a good while for a expert programmer to realise how to use it, how long will it take normal non computer literate person to use it?

When installing CMS like dotnetnuke which is the best open source ASP.NET CMS out there it fails on you. After doing file tests and checking that database connection is active when it comes to installation stage it fails. If you ask me that is poor testing. Once again they have grown it so much that they are forgetting about the main points.

Not Search Engine Optimized
It is confusing to see CMS and BLOGS for that matter that don’t produce sitemap.xml . This is in web standards and should be added as a normal feature but so many open source systems forget to do it, same goes for robots.txt. Sitemap.xml can be one of the most important things, if you are installing a CMS chances are that you are a large organisation. If that is the case sitemap is crucial for your website, it will speed up the process of indexing your web pages.

URL friendliness, to many CMS are trying to be smart and use AJAX to update web pages when some one clicks on URL. Now it is funky, however the content is missed! Even worst having a Global Identification Number.

Good:

www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/e-commerce

Bad:

www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/?gid=21298usd9232139898dw989832

Take a while to load
What we find is that all pages are generated each time different user goes on to the page, now that is fine. But what if you have hundreds of visitors? Pages should be compiled in to .html document. That way content is being sent and no processing is done on the server. This will cut the processing time beyond believe. Another solution is to activate a web catch however some CMS systems don’t support that.

Best free .NET CMS systems:

DotNetNuke – http://www.dotnetnuke.com/

Umbraco – http://www.umbraco.org/

These are the two that are very popular and seem to satisfy peoples needs, however both of them are not great.

Best free PHP CMS systems:

Joomla! -  http://www.joomla.com/

PHP Open -  http://www.phpopen.net/

These are the best open source CMS that are available for PHP and also are very popular, however once again they are not amazing, but ironically enough they are better then .NET CMS systems that are available out there. They are simply more flexible.

Prosper Web Solutions is releasing it is own CMS called socms.net in next few months, this CMS will be open source and will focus on issues that have been raised in this topic, it won’t be the best CMS out there but it will be simple to use and it will do basic functions that most companies want. Currently this CMS is being tested with Prosper Client Base, to ensure it has a reliable framework.

Written By:
Zan Kavtaskin - Director of Prosper Web Solutions . Prosper Web Solutions is a web design Cheltenham

Basic Search Engine Optimisation

Many web agencies out there forget about main purpose for the website and that is simply to generate more business and make more profit. But why so many people are so sceptical and say web marketing doesn’t work? There is an easy answerer; it is because they haven’t actually marketed their websites correctly.

So what does Search Engine Optimisation actually mean? In effect it means “making your websites easy to read and making sure that your website is targeted for certain keywords that will sell your products”

That is it really, there is no more to it. I will give you a little quick tutorial on how to target your market correctly.

Lets imagine that you a garden designer and you are based in Bath Spa UK. When it comes to selling your services you want to be found on Google when some one searches for you. But how do we do this and how do we know how?

• Ask your self, what you would put in to Google when you want to find some one. If you want to find a garden designer would you put “Garden Designer Bath”?  Think of what kind of search terms would you put in to Google to find your self.
• When you know what you want to be found for, review the search terms and see if you can come up with more keywords. For example instead of “Garden Designer Bath” have “Landscape Designer Bath”.
• Once you have collected your keywords have a look at your competition and see how many search results there are. See how competitive your search phrase is.
• Once you have done your analysis it is time to apply these keywords to your html.

Applying these keywords to your html is very easy all you have to do is the following:

• For the home page title don’t have “Home Page” but add something like “Garden Designers Bath Spa” *It is crucial that you do this for your index page*
• Add Meta Tags with description and keywords (make sure they are different on different pages , they should match the content on the page)
• When writing the content use “Garden” , “Design” , “Bath Spa” as much as you can, but don’t be silly with it. If you use it to much Google can pick up on that and then black list your domain name

That is it, for the basic Search Engine Optimisation. I will be writing next few articles that will be going more in to depth. But by simply doing these few easy things you are targeting your market and you are focusing on traffic that you really want. Remember it is all about being specific!

If you are a web master and you don’t know why you cant find your website at all,  then make sure that you have added your website to Google list:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

This was written by Zan Kavtaskin , Director of Prosper Web Solutions. Prosper Web Solutions is a website design Cheltenham .