The points behind this question include:

• well-established sites have old domain names, so by reverse logics, an old domain should mean that the site is well established;
• spammers register and drop domains quickly, thus logically spamming sites usually have newly registered domain names.

Generally, webmasters agree that domain age isn’t the most important Search Engine ranking factor but opinions vary:

1. it can be no factor at all;
2. it can play only a single minor factor in the millions of other factors (but it still is);
3. it matters a lot.

Google’s patent “Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data” of 31/03/2005 implies that Google does look into domain registration (1) and renewal (2) dates:

1. … the date that a domain with which a document is registered may be used as an indication of the inception date of the document.

2. Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains.
… Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

While the patent does sound rather straightforward (by the way its official version is no longer available online, so it might have been deleted), domain age factor is both overestimated and misinterpreted. The point is simple: domain registration date cannot speak for either quality or trustworthiness of a website as:

• domains can be registered but never used for a long time (parked);
• new domains can be used for highly established companies (with the old domain redirecting to the new one);
• domain name can be used for illegitimate purposes for years and then sold to a “good” person/company without any change of the initial registration date.

Thus our verdict to the whole dispute is as follows:

1. Website age (and its backlink profile age) is what really matters;
2. Domain age can play a minor part only as damping factor – i.e. one of the factors signaling the search engine that this might be a spammy / illegitimate site;
3. Old domains may carry more weight due to their past records (i.e. old backlinks pointing to them) – this can be a good point to consider but then again if you are serious about your brand, keep in mind that an established domain already has associations and history before you own it and they might be hard to conquer.

Conclusion: domain registration date won’t of course hurt but it will hardly help. So we would focus on registering a new short niche-related and catchy domain name instead of trying to buy an old (previously owned by someone) one.

For all the praise that brand advertisers have for social media, they must be aware that it’s very much a double-edged sword. And for all the free marketing, advertising and brand promotion via Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Linked In, and other platforms used to help build an identity and relationship with your customers, it can just as quickly turn on you and your brand.

Social media disasters occur for a number of reasons, the first being that your company probably messed up. It may not have been intentional, but something, somewhere down the line, went wrong enough for someone to complain and it was enough for others to vocalize that complaint en masse. One mistake is all it takes for social media to turn against your brand.

No one is perfect and you can’t expect to please everyone all the time, so the best trick is to be prepared for how to handle things if your company finds itself under attack in the social realm. Here are three examples of companies who were attacked by social media and how they handled, or should have handled the situation. Learn from their mistakes or successes so you can stay on social media’s good side.

Read more …

Not for us I’m glad to say, as the internet gets busier and busier with more online business being done than ever before.

A key part of making any business work is being to measure its performance and make effective decisions on your findings.

The internet is no different.

Using tools such as Google Analytics, it’s possible to see what’s working and more importantly not working with your website.

We continue to get asked more questions about Google Analytics than any other subject, that’s why we’re offering a free training session throughout this August.

Drop us a line or follow this link if you’d like to know more.

As well as building blogs, shops and content managed websites, we’ve been involved with securing a company’s website that wasn’t PCI/DSS compliant. The website stored credit card details in a database that was hacked into and the credit card details were retrieved. Two of them were used fraudulently, and that’s where the story began. The banks got involved with fines and costs to recover the costs of the fraud. Added to this the company has been forced to go through a programme of becoming fully compliant. To-date, adding the costs of consultants, website changes, fines, costs to re-issue cards, and significant amount of off-line processing changes and new equipment, the cost to the business at this current time runs in excess of £170,000!

This particular business is lucky enough to be owned by a much larger parent company that could absorb these costs, but these sorts of costs would easily put most small companies out of business.
It’s been an eye opening project that’s for sure, and based on what we’re learning from it, we’ll certainly be putting together a seminar to help more business understand what PCI/DSS is all about and how to stay on the right side of the banks.

It’s not all been about “the dark side” of the internet though…honest!

Ali’s been settling back in and taking to his new role as designer and project manager like a duck to water.
We’ve also teamed up with some a partner that will help our online stores excel using the shopping and affiliate portals, which has to be a good thing in these challenging times.

More on that next month!

As Google’s superb Analytics package gets better and better, we’re proud to announce some free workshops we’re running throughout the summer holidays. We install it on every single website we build, so if you’d like to know how to see how your website is really working, let us know.

The most important thing to consider, is tools like Google Analytics allow you to discover what’s working, but more importantly what’s not!

If you’d like to book a Google Analytics workshop or want to know more about PCI/DSS, drop us a line or call 01727 739812.

See you next month!

With Google recently releasing some tips for product page conversion, I thought I’d share the most useful advice with you below.

Product Images

Use a minimum of 3-4 images for each product so visitors can see it from different angles and being used in different ways.
Add the functionality for visitors to zoom in and get a closer look at the product.
Make sure to use professional, high quality images.
It’s common practise to place images on the right hand side of pages, but make sure to test alternative placements within your layout.
Product Descriptions

Benefits vs Features – Customers want to buy the benefits of your product, not its features. Tell customers that the grill they are buying will cook tasty and healthy food and save them money rather than having low emissions and four individual burners.
Test writing alternative sales copy instead of using the existing description provided by the manufacturer. This is one way to set you apart from competitors.

Delivery and Stock

Include current stock levels on your page. If your product is running low, tell the customer to order today.
Set expectations around delivery times and be as accurate as possible.

Run free shipping promotions – this can be a great way to boost conversions during major sale periods.
Other Important Elements

Reviews can be a great way to increase conversions, but make sure to only use legitimate reviews.
Give your page a single clear call to action or add to cart button.
Test including cross sells on your pages and see what impact it has on overall conversion/revenue.

Forget the old adage “opposites attract”.
In marketing yourself effectively you want to talk to your target audience in the way they want to be talked to and show them what they want and expect to see (even if they don’t know it yet)

Building rapport is very difficult through a computer screen (although online video is helping) and publication adverts. Therefore you need to ensure that your advertising has one aim, to get those you wish to sell to juiced on you and your business.

Top Tip
Use the words and phrases that your best clients use when talking about how great you and your product are, remember or ask them why they chose you or how they found you. Ask what stops them choosing other companies that offer similar products and services.

Don’t overload each advert or article and get to the point as quickly as possible and remember that point is what you can do for them / what they will have gained from using you. Building rapport is never about how good you are or how long you have been trading.

Visit us at FL1 Group for more assistance in all your internet marketing needs

Our office in St Albans, Hertfordshire is looking for an experienced PHP/MySQL Web developer.

You will be responsible for designing a large range of websites from a small web presence to a large online shop, and work within a fast paced and exciting environment.

The ideal candidate will have excellent communication skills and a strong technical and methodical approach to programming.

Knowledge of PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Wordpress, AJAX, JQuery and SQL are essential, with experience with XML, Classic ASP, SQL Server or ASP.NET a distinct advantage.

All applicants must have at least 2 years demonstrable experience and be prepared to travel.

This is a Permanent, full time role based in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
Salary is highly competitive and comes with a monthly bonus scheme.

Interested?

Please write in the first instance with accompanying CV to recruitment@fl1group.com

Well, we’ve been quite a creative bunch really!

Web designer Alex (Janchi) and his band Brocker got to the finals of the Battle of Bands at the popular St Albans live music venue The Horn.

Jason’s band the Kings of Langley have been busy playing throughout St Albans and Hertfordshire, to see Jason and his bass in action soon visit www.kingsoflangley.com

We’re also proud to support a fantastic local event raising money for Leukaemia and Lymphoma research. The event is called the Bond Ball and is held at Chesfield Downs Golf Club, Gravely on Friday 4th June 2010 and has support and raffle prizes from a host of local businesses including David Lloyd, Ocado, Willows Farm, Woburn Safari park, Morrisons supermarkets and Champneys to name a few. For more details on attending this great night out or becoming a sponsor, visit www.bondball2010.co.uk.

We’ve got a few new seminars lined up too including a half-day follow-on to the workshop we ran at excellent Big Event recently called Monitising your blog. We’ve also put together a new seminar for anyone trading or considering trading online aimed at helping you trade legally, securely and best utilising the major search engines and shopping portals.

For more information on what we’re up to or for further details on any of the above, drop us a line at client@fl1group.com or call us on 01727 739812.

See you next month!

This thinking is perfectly fine, until you need to develop your website further or more importantly find a developer and platform that can take your website to the next level.

A little history?
To generalise you could put website development technologies in to two categories: Microsoft, or non-Microsoft (Betamax or VHS if you will!).

Circa 1996 onwards, Microsoft introduced their well developed Visual Basic technology (VB) to website development in the form of Active Server Pages (ASP).
ASP was quick to learn, and powerful in that it was easy to create a database driven website with very little programming experience. It became popular with entry-level web developers and experienced programmers looking to move to the web. Running on a Microsoft Windows server platform, it also suited most businesses that used Microsoft products as a core part of their business.

For non-Microsoft developers, technologies such as Perl and CGI were also popular however not so widely adopted and in some case more specialist. These technologies require the long serving and well established UNIX/Linux platform.

As things moved on, PHP started to become popular with those not wishing to jump on the Microsoft band-wagon as a well documented, easy to learn, and flexible language, however in the early stages wasn’t as powerful and well developed as many comparable languages.

Fast-track to 2002 and Microsoft announced its new .NET programming platform. This replaced the popular ASP technology, and offered a far more powerful toolset, aimed in part at enabling existing Windows developers to develop for the web with a minimal learning curve.

This was a significant step forward in one sense; however the complexity and power of ASP.NET came at a price. Compared to its predecessor, it was complex and a steep learning curve.

ASP.NET to some became a daunting learning curve, and to many developers new and old, PHP become a better adopted alternative and FREE. At this point, the shift began!

So today?
PHP as a language is well adopted and without question the most popular language for most small to medium scale websites. Microsoft’s ASP.NET is also a strong contender and continues to hold its own.

Why does all this matter?
In our opinion some 70% of most web development agencies will use PHP as their language of choice for small to medium scale websites. It is a language that is productive and easy to learn and well suited too many websites.

For more complex websites with high volumes of transactions or users, consider Microsoft .NET or Java. If you need integration with third party systems, Microsoft products (such as Microsoft Office) or external web services, Microsoft .NET is a good route to consider.

For us at FL1, we’ve got an equally strong footing in ASP, ASP.NET and PHP and dare we say; we’re different for that simple fact. That said; each technology is quite different in its own way and better suited to different types of website.

For more information drop us a line at client@fl1group.com or call us on 01727 739812.

Well, you may have heard the term “Meta Tags” banded around, and possibly heard about Page Titles.

In essence they are two separate things. However have a similar impact on how your website is viewed by
Google and presented to Google’s user in the search results listing.

The other thing to throw in to the mix is the file names of the pages on your website.

So let’s examine each one:

Meta Tags
Many people I speak to think that Meta Tags are all that Search Engine Optimisation is about. Sadly, if that were true, Search Engine Optimisation would be much simpler, or would it?

Meta Tags at one time, were the big deal, however what started to happen was that web site owners and Search specialists would use words and phrases in these tags that often didn’t bear any relevance to what was actually on the pages with these tags. This is where the problems started.

As a user, if you searched for “web design companies in st Albans” you’d naturally expect to find search results for web design companies based in St Albans, however this was often not the case.

Google was the first to take the initiative of ignoring Meta Tag key words, and basing its decision on how to rank a website’s page based predominantly on the words it actually found on the page.

So, are Meta Tags no longer in use?
Not exactly. There are a number of Meta Tags that perform different function, from determining whether a Search Engine should actually view the page, how a page is described to a Search Engine, the frequency that a Search Engine should visit the page and many more.
Typically the key Tag that is still in use is the Meta Tag Description. This is used as the description of your page in Google’s listing. Many people over-look this tag, however do so at your peril.
Descriptions should be well-crafted text that encourage users to visit your page, likened to the text of an advertisement.

Page Titles
What is a page title? A page title is exactly what is says, it is a title for an individual web page.
The Page title determines the very first line of your Google search listing. This should be different for each page on your website, and most importantly be relevant to the page’s content.

File Names
Many people claim that websites that use a Content Management System don’t rank properly in Google.
This sometimes true and for varying reasons, however most commonly it’s because the file name of a page is not descriptive enough and more importantly, not unique to each page.

This is sometimes one of the hardest things to alter in a website, however can make the biggest difference.

Need to know more?

Call us on 01727 739812.