This is an excellent way to gain a good listing for your site without hours of SEO or spending loads on PPC. It’s certainly not hard to do, costs absolutely nothing and the results are really quick in most cases (as long as you choose to register with phone verification).

Of the businesses I’ve signed up most have received targeted visitors from their listing. If they hadn’t been listed they wouldn’t have received those visitors.

Fill in all the boxes on the signup and ensure a few of your key search terms are scattered around in the description and then go through the verification process. Before you know it you could be dominating the top of the search results pages for your business type in your town.

Add your site to Google Local here.

The thing is, normally when I recommend a path like that, the good intention is there but the site doesn’t get updated that often. As a result most sites do OK in search engines but are never firing on all cylinders.

What happens when the plan goes the other way? What when you start writing screeds and screeds of content, or worse yet, cut’n'pasting thousands of pages of old Powerpoint presentations, proposals, case studies, technical documents etc?

Does your customer really need or want it? Sure search engines will lap it up and it will probably bring more one-time visitors into your site, but do you really want to be feeding all this stuff into your loyal readers RSS feed or email newsletter?

So how do you get it right?

If you are planning on adding tons of less-than interesting content, do it in a way that places it in an archive or knowledge base. Try not to throw it down the throats of your repeat visitors or readers. Keep it out of the RSS feed and don’t tell people in your newsletter that you’ve just uploaded a technical document from 2001.

Or better yet, why not pick and choose the best of the content and leave the rest out? The stuff that you do put in could be introduced in such a way that it lets your reader know the relevance of putting it in now.

Do it that way and introduce it to your readers in the right way and they might just end up lapping it up. If you simply deluge people with crap they will unsubscribe. If you’re serious about adding content there’s definitely a balance that has to be achieved. Get it right and you’ll reap the rewards of loads of visitors from search engines AND loads of repeat visitors.

1. The version of Wordpress is rarely the most up to date

2. There is what seems a throwaway question that is actually very important in the installation process

It’s the second point I want to refer to here. When installing Wordpress there is a question that asks whether you want to allow search engines (Google, Technorati) etc to access your blog. Many internet users trained to say NO to any privacy questions (Do you want to sign-up for our newsletter? Can we give your email address to anyone we please?) will automatically say no to this question too.

Those budding site builders then go on to create a fine site and great content but they’re just not getting anywhere in Google. There’s a reason. Saying no to the installation question about search engines inserts a Noindex, Nofollow tag into the website source code. This means that no matter how hard you try to get into Google it’s just not going to index you.

Thankfully though there’s a quick fix. If you go to the Settings > Privacy section of your blog admin menu you can find the setting in there and give access to the spiders who really want to index your site. Then, providing you’ve got a few links pointing at your site, the spiders should be around to visit soon and your listings should appear shortly after that.

- Make sure your site contains the right keywords in the right places. If you run a B&B in Crieff, make sure that B&B Crieff is in the Title, in an H1 heading, and mentioned a few times in the content of your home page any other pages where it is appropriate.

- Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find other similar search terms that people use to find accommodation in Crieff too. Incorporate those search terms into appropriate pages in your site, again putting them in the Title, H1 and body content positions.

- Signup to Google Webmaster Tools and create and submit a sitemap for your website. Register the same sitemap with Yahoo through Yahoo Site Explorer.

There are loads of other on-site SEO tips to get stuck into but those basics will at least help get your site found. In addition there are loads of off-site actions you can undertake to help boost your search rankings.

- Claim your listing on Google Local. Google Local results are showing up at the top of searches for loads of geographical searches. If I do a search for B&B Crieff in Google the first 10 listings are those who have claimed their Google Local listing for their B&B.

- Make sure your B&B is listed on Trip Advisor and encourage all your visitors to leave a review there (perhaps by emailing them a day or two after they’ve gone home with a link to your tripadvisor page). The Trip Advisor reviews are being displayed with the Google Local results mentioned above so it would be worth pursuing even if Trip Advisor wasn’t already one of the biggest travel sites to get listed on.

- If you’re not bad at writing, you might consider running a blog on your B&B site. News of what’s happening in the B&B is bound to be of interest to your repeat visitors and may attract new ones. A blog is also an easy way to update a site regularly to keep search engine spiders coming to your site.

- Get into social media. Twitter and Facebook are great ways to connect with guests who’ve already stayed with you and possibly find new guests. A full run-down on social media networking is outside the remit of this article but I’ll try and follow up with some tips in a later article.

- Find some travel forums, join and take part. Put your website link in your profile and signature where allowed and then get active. Try and give useful information to as many people as you can and use the forum regularly. Aardvark Travel forums are a good place to get started with this.

Those are just a few hints to help a B&B get listed a bit better on Google. Obviously a full SEO strategy will go into more depth and address more areas than this but hopefully it will help a few people get started down the path to better rankings.

However this week when I thought it had all gone smoothly, it appeared that secondary and additional product images were not showing up when enlarged. It turns out they were still being referenced in the old directory.

A look at the database told me that the full URL for the large version of secondary images/files had been coded into the database for every image meaning that when I moved the site, the URL’s were then pointing at empty locations.

There were two ways I could think of to solve this:

1. Use a redirect on the images directory. I just added this line at the end of the .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /temp_dir/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/ http://www.domain.com/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/

2. Use phpMyAdmin on your server and go through each row in the jos_vm_product_files table and edit to put the new location in the file_url field. If you’ve got a lot of images, this can take a while.

For the moment, both ways seem to work.

It’s not a big deal to strip it out if you’ve only got one or two numbers on a page, but if you have a page full of worldwide agents and each of their phone numbers get the Skype code treatment it’s a real headache to get rid of. So before editing any pages containing phone numbers, switch off the Skype browser button.

Personally it find the idea of an application taking control of web pages and inserting it’s own code before displaying them to be a bit intrusive. Surely web pages should be displayed the way the site owner wants them to be shown.

1. Bookmark your most interesting, outrageous or funny content in Stumbleupon. You can get literally thousands of visitors from doing this, however not many will go further than the landing page.

2. Build up a profile on Digg. Make contacts and digg plenty of their articles before dropping in one or two of your own pages and asking your contacts to digg it.

3. As 2 above except do it on Sphinn. Sphinn works mostly for marketing related content so if you’re selling vacuum cleaners you might struggle to get content up there.

4. Blog comments. Unless you are in the most obscure niche there is, you’ll probably be able to find loads of blogs related to your site. Get active in the comments section, give valuable quality feedback on posts and include your web address in the appropriate location, not in the comment itself.

5. Twitter. Setup your account and get active. Make sure you put your web address in your profile and consider making a custom background with your web address on it. Use the search function or a third party app such as Tweetdeck to find people to follow and interact with who might be interested in the content of your site. Get your blog to automatically update your twitter account via Twitterfeed.

6. Contact other sites and swap links with them.

7. Forums – while you can’t go spamming forums with your sales message you can take part as a real member in forums and many of them allow a signature link which is displayed after every post.

8. Pay-per-click. It’s an expensive way to get visitors but it does work. If you want to avoid Google’s Adwords, give Yahoo Search Marketing a whirl.

9. Email signatures/Email Newsletters. Including your web address in every email you send to anyone will get you a few visitors. Running an email newsletter with software like Aweber or ConstantContact will get you lots of return visitors.

10. Give away content. Contact other website owners and offer to do a guest post on their blog or give them a page of content for their site in return for attribution and a link back to your own site.

There are plenty more ways to get visitors from sources other than Google but these are a few to get started with.

They could have got away with calling it a mistake until I saw the accompanying letter that told me they had run out of stock of the item I had ordered so had taken the liberty of sending the one that arrived instead. They stated that this was a more expensive item with all these features so it must be better and they would absorb the cost difference. They stated this as if they were doing me a favour. Their suggestion was that the product they had supplied was much better than the one I ordered.

The problem with this practice is that they are assuming the customer has just ordered on a whim and that they know better than the customer. It’s cocky and arrogant. In my case, as with all products I buy I researched carefully to find just the product I wanted. I put time and effort into making sure I was selecting the right one. I read over a hundred reviews. I was pretty certain that I wanted the product that I ordered. In double-guessing me they are insulting my ability to choose wisely when buying. They are calling me stupid.

It wouldn’t have taken them more than a few minutes to send me an email to ask if I wanted the alternative. Certainly it would have taken less time than packaging the wrong item and posting it. I would have been able to get my item quickly elsewhere and would have been happy in the end. As it is I’m still waiting for a response from their customer service email address. My time has been wasted. Their time has been wasted. Their money in sending, refunding and processing is wasted, and the packaging materials are wasted. Oh, not to mention the negative feedback that is imminent and the resulting loss in future business to them from potential buyers who check out their seller rating.

For now I have decided not to name the seller here. With a bit of quick talking customer service they might get away with this, but the longer it takes to get a refund the higher the chances that the negative feedback will come with some really negative comments.

I guess the moral here is – don’t assume your customer is stupid, communicate with them and let them choose to be stupid if they so wish.

Update: This was resolved quickly and the seller did have good reason for acting the way they did. In the end though I went to Argos to get my product – something I usually try to avoid.

Often it’s easiest to just use an offline browser or a website downloader. I’ve tried a lot of these and most run for 30 days or so before you need to pay for them. The thing is, I use one maybe twice a year and I wasn’t happy shelling out for that.

Recently though I found HTTrack which does exactly the same as all the other ones I’ve tried but it’s free. I’ve used it for a few sites now and it seems pretty solid.

Just thought I’d share.

When you add a new article to your site you want it to build up some presence quickly. You probably post it to the homepage, maybe mention in on your blog (unless homepage and blog are one and the same) and it probably goes in the sidebar navigation somewhere too.

Indeed in the writing process for the article you’ve probably thought about other articles on your site and linked out to them from the new article. You then publish the article and hope that it gets listed quickly. You might even submit to Digg and Stumbleupon to get some traffic to it.

The next and crucial part is often missed though. It’s time to go through your backlog of articles on your site. They’re already indexed and getting spidered regularly (hopefully). Search through the body content of these articles for any references that could be linked to the new page, and link them up. Indeed, if it’s close enough but doesn’t quite meet your criteria, make up an extra sentence or paragraph to include your preferred keywords for the new page and link them up. Do this in a sympathetic way though, only picking the pages that are most relevant rather than adding keywords to every page of your site.

It’s not a complicated thing to do this and it shouldn’t take long in most cases but it will help with SEO and with getting your new articles the kudos they deserve.