Recently in Seo Category

We're delighted to finally be able to offer Awstats statistics for all our shared Linux based hosting accounts (it's also available for Windows).

If your site is hosted on any of our shared Linux hosting accounts you can now setup Awstats via your control panel

NB: Stats will not be viewable for 24 hours after setup, as the logs will need to be processed first.

We've also made available a screencast showing you how to set it all up in your control panel.

Since I'm a strong believer in making things as easy as possible where I can, you'll also find that our screencasts are available via iTunes as well.

If anyone has any feedback on the screencasts please do let us know.

Several of our clients have been in touch with us recently regarding yet another scam.

At least one company is targetting small businesses offering them "guaranteed first page position on Google".

To make matters worse they're also claiming to have a special relationship with Google.

Now don't get me wrong, there are plenty of reputable companies offering both search engine optimisation and search engine marketing services. However, it's when a company offers these kind of silly guarantees that I get rather annoyed.

Getting your site onto the front page of Google for certain keywords and phrases is possible, but it takes a lot of work, unless your niche is incredibly small and uncompetitive.

If you get an offer that sounds simply "too good to be true", then it probably is.

Sales people will always try to tell you that their product or service is amazing - it's what they're paid to do. Don't just take their word for it. Ask around.

If nobody has heard of them chances are they aren't as "wonderful" as they might like you to believe.

Remember the SEO competition from a while back?

We said we'd offer the winner two things:

1. Hosting
2. Domain
   

(boring details on previous post)

Damien announced the winner yesterday, so congratulations to Paul Savage!

SEO (search engine optimisation) competitions, where the entrants have to get their site to rank for a random keyphrase, are a bit of fun. They also allow people to show off their SEO skills.

Damien Mulley posted earlier today about an SEO competition he's running, but as he hadn't mentioned any prizes I thought we should step in.

If you're expecting to win a Ferrari or anything extravagant I'm sorry, but that's not going to happen.

The Prize:

What we've offered (and Damien accepted) was to give the winner the following:

• 1 year's hosting on our Medius plan (choice of Windows or Linux)
• 1 domain registration period for a choice of com/net/org/info/biz/mobi/ie/eu/co.uk (period as co.uk domains are registered for 2 years not 1 year)

The Rules:

The rules etc., are over on Damien's blog, so I won't repeat them here.


Disclosure

I will be "entering" but my entry is not to be taken seriously ie. I have absolutely no interest in winning a hosting plan from my own company, as I already have plenty of hosting to play with. I'm entering "for a laugh".

If your site is accessible over ipv6 or you simply want to find other ipv6 enabled sites then a new web directory called Sixy might be of interest.

Unlike a lot of more traditional directories Sixy uses tags to categorise sites and as a site owner you can specify which ones you'd like associated with your site. Of course if you have tags, then naturally you'll end up with a tag cloud, so you can easily see which tags are the most popular etc.

It's an interesting idea and if your site is available over ipv6 it might be worth your while getting listed now.

If you're going to focus all your energies and money on developing your online presence then there are some really simple things that you need to get right.

If you were to rent a small shop in the centre of any town or city you would have to pay "top dollar", but if your main activity is centred around your website you don't need to worry about that particular expense.

However you do need to make some small investment in your actual online brand, as it's far too easy for someone else to grab it if you're not careful.

I'm always amazed at how little attention companies pay to basic online brand protection and, speaking from personal experience, it's an expensive lesson to learn after the fact!

When I first setup Blacknight I made a number of rather silly mistakes with our online branding. I didn't check that all the domains were available to register - hindsight's a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Acquiring domains when they've already been registered by someone else can be awkward if not impossible. And even if it's not awkward it can be expensive.

If you're going to start from scratch then you need to check if the name you've chosen fits some basic criteria:

• Is it short?


• Is it memorable?


• Can people spell it easily?

How many times have you heard an advert on the radio for some "cool" product or service and then not been able to find the company's website?

It's happened to me far too often. In some cases it's because the company name is odd and forgettable.
In other cases it's not clear how the domain name is spelt.

When it comes to registering the domain names a bit of common sense goes a long way. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to register a couple of extra domain names NOW than get into litigation about them later.

How much does a legal letter cost?
How much does a WIPO dispute cost?

If you compare those costs against the costs of registering a couple of extra domain names it's obvious which option to go for.

If you're an EU company I'd strongly urge you to get the following extensions:
com,net,org,info,biz,eu and co.uk
If your company is based in Ireland, then getting the .ie domain won't hurt!

Of course if you need to expand your brand into other markets in the EU then you probably need to get a few more extensions, but if you get the ones I mentioned now you'll save yourself a lot of headaches and MONEY !!

Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be doing an occasional series of posts on making the most of your dotmobi domain.

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas that they'd like to share please let me know!

The topics I intend to cover will include things like building a site, checking it, making money from it and any other topics that people suggest to me.

I mentioned not so long ago that we were going to be doing some rebranding.

You'll see this happening slowly until the new site launches, then it will be a little bit faster.

The kind of things that are going to change on the outside are:

• Email signatures


• Web addresses


• The logo's colour scheme


• Email addresses (not sure about that yet!)


• Print ads


• Online ads


• Links back from other sites

We're not dumb. In fact we always try to hire the best and the brightest, so we're not going to be doing away with anything. If you are used to going to a particular URL to access a service of some kind it will still work. It might redirect to a new one, but the old links will still work.

If we do change email addresses over to the .eu domain, which we will probably have to do at some point, all the old ones will still work (I still get mail on about 5 variations of our main domains as it is!).

The thing that is going to be the most painful is how the search engines handle matters.

When we launched our current website about 3 years ago (can it really be that old?) we changed all the URLs and pages around completely. We didn't have any choice, as we were changing the site's backend completely.

The earlier iterations of the Blacknight company site didn't have a "backend" per se, unless you call notepad / dreamweaver / editplus / vim backends. (If you want to see them they're on archive.org - though you'll need to do some detective work to guess the domain!)

When we moved to using Typo3 as our CMS all the inbound links were lost except to directories eg pages that were accessible via a "/".

We had to work hard with the developers (2Bscene) who were also assisting us with SEO to get things sorted out. Thankfully Tom Doyle knows his stuff and we were able to maintain our pagerank and get reindexed quite quickly.

This time round we will have to be very careful, but we have learnt from our past experiences and our past mistakes.

Taking a hit in terms of SEO is something we won't be able to avoid entirely, though we will be trying our best to minimise the impact!

If your site can't be found easily, then it might as well not exist.

A couple of months ago I posted a couple of tips on search engine optimisation (SEO) which you may have found useful.

To supplement this we've now added a set of SEO tools to our linux hosting control panel:

Simply click on the link and it will take you to the seo tools page.

The tools available include a range of features to help you and include a "spider check" which will give you a search engine's view of your site, submission tools and rank checking.

Feedback, as always, is welcome.

Choosing your domain name can be a daunting task.

If you get it wrong you may spend a lot of your time wondering why people can't find your site, send you email or buy your products.

A lot of businesses seem to think that they have to use their company name, regardless of how long or difficult to type that may be.

A couple of simple rules of thumb can help make it all that easier for you in the long run:

There's not much point in having a website if nobody can find it.

So what can you do to improve your chances of being "indexed" by the search engines?
How can you get your site to appear in the search engines when someone does a search for a particular phrase?

There are no magical solutions, but if you take into account how search engines "view" your site you can certainly make improvements.

Seo tools

All sites hosted on our linux servers now have access to some free SEO (search engine marketing) tools directly from within your control panel.

Text is your friend

Although Google et al may be able to index most content these days plain text is always easier.

If you can include the keywords and phrases you are interested in promoting in your site's text in a natural and readable manner it will help.

Page titles

Make sure that every page has a unique and descriptive title.

Avoid Frames

Using frames in your website is a bad idea. It makes it very hard for a search engine to index your content.
If you want to preserve the effect of frames you can use other methods

Include a sitemap

If you have a page on your site with links to every other page on your site it can help indexing.

Use descriptive filenames

Instead of calling your files 123.php or page12.html (or something similar) use a descriptive name which reflects their content. For example if you sell bicycle parts then a product page might be better called bicycle-spare-parts.html instead of products.html

Keep your site content fresh

Fresh content is always a good thing and search engine spiders love it, so keeping your site up to date will help.

Get your site listed

Get your site listed in relevant directories and resource sites.

If you are targetting the Irish market, for example, you could submit your site to search.ie or browse.ie (or both)

Swapping Links

Swapping links with other webmasters can help build up both traffic and inbound links, however do not use automated software to request links, as this may be considered as spam.

Useful Resources

Seo Cookbook - blog about search engines and search engine marketing
SelfPromotion - DIY search engine promotion resource offering submission service
Irish webmaster forum - forum