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Links for 2009-03-10 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Kenya Safari Holidays - Freeman Safaris - Experience the culture, the animals, the landscape and adventure of crossing Kenya

Links for 2008-08-27 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 PDT

Hudson Photography

Why am I not getting UK listings?

enquiries@searchfirst.co.uk (Search First) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:20:20 +0000 GMT

Making sure that you get listings in the UK search engines

The most important thing to consider is, ‘how does a search engine know what country my website is aimed at?’

Search engines like Google and Yahoo index an inordinate amount of data every day. Determining the actual location of a website is something that needs efficient handling. There are 2 simple ways to determine geo-location of a website.

Country Specific Domain Name (ccTLD)

ccTLDs are Country Code Top Level Domains that are regulated by their respective nations.

If your domain ends in .co.uk then search engines instantly know that the domain is a UK website. Respectively .fr, .es, .de would indicate a French, Spanish, and German website.

I’ve not got a .co.uk

If you have a Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) such as .com .net .mobi .org .name .biz then search engines will have difficulty in determining your location without one further check. They need to discover where you are hosted. Once they extract your hosting IP address they can determine the geographic location of the hosting and therefore determine which national listings to place your website in.

But I’ve got a .com and it’s hosted in Canada!

I’m sorry but you won’t get any UK listings that way. You need to consider moving your hosting to a UK server. You could purchase the .co.uk version of your domain name and set it as the primary gateway to your website (and make the .com redirect to the .co.uk) but you risk losing listings because could be seen as a new website.

Consolation

There is one potential consolation provided by Google but it doesn’t solve all your problems. Google allows webmasters to log in to Google’s Webmaster Tools area and set the location. But this will only affect your Google listings and other search engines will still use the traditional methods.

What can I do?

[Shameless self-plug] We provide UK hosting and domain registration services. If you wanted to host with us then contact us for more info. Alternatively you can look to other companies and find out if their servers are based in the UK. If you have a .co.uk domain name then you needn’t do anything as you’ve met the criteria.

Transferring Hosting (and Their Associated Issues)

enquiries@searchfirst.co.uk (Search First) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:24:46 +0000 GMT

How to make sure your Website is transferred successfully and without hitch

2 Types of Domain You Need to Know About?��Ǩ��

There are gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains) that are global domain names such as:

.com
.net
.org
.info
.tv
.biz
.mobi

Then there are ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domains) that are country specific. The ones you need to recognise are:

.co.uk
.org.uk
.net.uk
.plc.uk
.ltd.uk

Registrars and Hosts - What Are the Differences?

Domain Registrars: These are the people who take care of the domain for you. They effectively ‘own’ the domain for the purposes of allowing you to manage it.
Hosting Companies: These are the people who provide the services for your domain. A hosting company may provide Web hosting, email hosting; they may provide one or both
Hybrid Companies: Some companies provide both services as a Domain Registrar and also as a Hosting Company. These tend to be larger firms who are well established.

Before Starting ANY Transfer

Have you ensured that we have backed-up the website(s)? Are you sure? Check again before commencing with any transfer processes through your existing hosting company/domain registrar.

How to Handle UK ccTLDs

Firstly you need to understand that the UK registrars identify each other by an IPS tag. The IPS tag tells a company who is permitted to control and modify a domain.

With larger firms, managing and updating a domain is done via control panel. Companies such as Fasthosts, Iomart, UKReg, 123-Reg, 1&1, etc will all provide an online management system to allow you to do things like change the hosting company or transfer to another registrar.

Other firms may require you to send Fax/Phone/Letter to confirm changes of hosting and domain registrar.

When a customer wishes to transfer domain registration and also hosting over to us they need to provide the domain registrar with our IPS tag and nameservers; it is the domain owner?��Ǩ�Ѣs responsibility to initiate this transfer. If you have a control panel then you may find that it is within the control panel. If you don’t have a control panel, or don’t know how to access it, you need to contact your hosting and domain registration company for support in transferring. All they need to provide is our IPS tag and nameservers.

Once you are ready to transfer, you must ensure that we are ready for you and that the nameservers will be changed prior to the changing of the IPS tag. This will ensure that we can manage the hosting for you while the domain is being transferred over.

How to Handle the Rest

Transferring a domain in this situation clinches on the Administrative Contact of a domain. The person and email address listed under this title is the owner of the domain. The email address for the admin contact must be an active email account or the transfer can?��Ǩ�Ѣt complete.

Once again it is your responsibility to ensure that the email account (if it is yours) is operational and that you are receiving email for that account. You must then inform the domain registrar that you 1. wish to change the nameservers and 2. leave the company to join us. Provided we have set-up the site in our control panel and uploaded it, you can give the nameservers to your current registrar and they will be updated. Once this is done you should then initiate the transfer.

IMPORTANT. YOU must tell us the moment that you have initiated the transfer. There is usually a 72 hour window to initiate a transfer before a domain registrar will close its doors so that the process has to start again. Once you have told us, we will then initiate the transfer from our end.

As soon as this has happened the Admin Contact of the domain will start receiving emails from several companies wishing to confirm the transfer of the domain. If the Admin contact is actually the hosting company (this is often the case with Iomart and Legend) then they will likely handle this themselves. If it isn?��Ǩ�Ѣt, then it is your responsibility to follow the instructions on the emails. If you don?��Ǩ�Ѣt do this, you will cause the transfer to fail and it will be several days before the process can start again.

Checklist

Have you had us make a backup of your website(s)?
Have you given us a list of email accounts that you wants for their newly transferred domain(s)?
Have you given the existing host/registrar the IPS Tag and Nameservers (for a UK domain)?
If it is a global domain, have you ensured that, if applicable, the Admin Contact email address is active and able to receive emails?
Have you contacted the registrar, changed the nameservers and then informed them of a desire to transfer away?

If you are unsure of any of these issues then you should contact us immediately for advice.

Problems

If you haven’t had the nameservers changed prior to transferring, you increase the chance of extended downtime. In the case of .uk domains it is unfortunate that downtime is likely for a short period where as gTLDs are comparably quick to recognise a change of DNS or nameserver.
If you haven’t notified either host/registrar promptly then you may find that the transfer will fail. Transfers are relatively easy to complete provided you ensure that both hosts are prepared for the transfer.
Website losses are likely to happen if you initiate a transfer with the other company without confirming that your website is backed up. Never initiate a transfer without an affirmative confirmation that your website is copied and uploaded to the new hosting.

6 Reasons Why My Site Won't Appear Under "Red Lorry"

enquiries@searchfirst.co.uk (Search First) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:30:03 +0000 GMT

Choosing the right keywords is vital to the success of your search engine optimisation campaign and ultimately the success of your website itself. One of the most common questions we get asked is one related to why a website doesn’t get listed under certain search terms. In order to help shed some light on this issue here are some reasons why this might be the case. In this example I am assuming the identity of a someone who sells lorries online (amazing what you can do with mail order these days!).

Why my site won’t appear under “red lorry”

The first issue is slightly different to the rest so we will look at this separately:

1. I didn’t specify “red lorry” as a keyword when I signed up for the service.

This situation sometimes occurs where a customer calls us with their monthly search engine report asking why they don’t have any search engine rankings with a particular keyword. After further investigation it transpires that the keyword in question wasn’t specified when the customer signed up. This will mean 2 things; firstly no optimisation work will have been performed around this keyword and secondly the keyword won’t have been added to the reports, so the software won’t have been looking for the site under this term anyway, no matter how many times you appear with it. It is possible to amend your keywords during your optimisation service, so don’t hesitate to speak to your sales contact if this is something you want to do.

OK, so assuming I specified “red lorry” as a keyword, why does my site still not appear with this keyword?

2. I don’t sell red lorries.

This is the most obvious reason but worth a mention nonetheless. Unless red lorries are a part of my business a search engine is not going to consider me among the top 10 resources on the web under this keyword.

3. I sell red lorries but I don’t bother to mention it on my site.

A search engine only has the information my website provides on which to make it’s judgement. I might be the world’s most renowned red lorry stockist, but if I fail to mention it on my website then a search engine won’t know anything about it.

4. I sell red lorries, I mention it, but I don’t explain anything about my red lorry service.

It is not enough to simply mention in passing that I sell red lorries if I want to rank well with keywords related to it. A quick search on Google tells me that there are 285,000 results returned for “red lorry”. Why would I appear in the top 10 if I only mention in passing that I deal with it?

5. I sell red lorries, I mention it on my home page, I have a page dedicated to my red lorries with lots of relevant content, but my site isn’t optimised.

Having good keyword-related content is the first part of the battle, but putting some content online and waiting for the search engines to rank me is not going to work. Search engine optimisation requires experience and research in order to make sure my site follows current ranking strategy.

6. I sell red lorries, I mention it throughout my site, my site is optimised, but the keyword is just too vague.

OK, it looks like I have to concede defeat and realise that “red lorry” is just not specific enough to get me those top rankings. All is not lost however because a simple re-assessment of my keywords will help. Perhaps I need to specify what exactly I do with red lorries. Do I sell them, do I service them, do I only deal with a specific brand, or in a specific location? All of these factors can be used to manipulate my rankings. In this example I sell red lorries so I should cater my keywords to match this; “red lorry retailer”, “buy red lorry”, “red lorry stockists”. My red lorries are all secondhand, articulated lorries so I could specify that too; “articulated red lorry”, “buy secondhand red lorry” etc.

If you have any questions about how to improve your search engine rankings please contact us on 01524 423 135 to discuss your requirements.

Links for 2007-10-16 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Brighton House

Tools for Webmasters

enquiries@searchfirst.co.uk (Search First) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:00:04 +0000 GMT

Webmaster tools: more specifically, the tools provided by the big three guys.

Google Webmaster Tools
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Live Search Webmaster Portal [Beta]

Google Webmaster Tools

Main features include:

Site index

A list of all the sites that you own

Verification

Allowing you to take ownership of the websites. This allows Google to give you access to the rest of the tools and information about the site that nobody else can access

Statistics

This gives you a list of useful information. The most important 3, in my eyes, are:

Top search queries
What Googlebot sees
Crawl stats

What Googlebot sees is a summary of relevant phrases and information that it has extracted from your site. You can use it to discover what may need optimising on your site.

Links

View a summary of your inbound links in more detail than link:example.com will give you. You can also discover the number of internal links that your own pages are being linked from. This can be useful in finding out how easily people can find your content.

Diagnostics

This gives you an overview of any crawl problems that Google encountered.

Sitemaps

Self explanatory really. If your site truly requires it then registering your sitemap through this area is where you need to be

Tools

Analyse robots.txt
Manage site verification
Set crawl rate
Set preferred domain
Enable enhanced image search
Remove URLs

Great tools here. Analyse robots.txt does what it says on the tin really - site verification also. Set crawl rate is great if you don’t change the site much and you feel that certain areas are getting a lot of attention. Set preferred domain gives you the power to specify www or non-www in the listings. Remove URLs allows you to expedite the removal of areas of a website

Yahoo! Site Explorer

The interface of the Site Explorer differs significantly from Google. In the Yahoo interface, the list of domains contains buttons associated with the main actions:

Authenticate
Manage
Explore

Explore

This takes you to the interface giving you information on indexed page count (referred to by ‘Pages’) and IBL count (referred to as ‘Inlinks’). It’s very basic but quick to get to and informative with the Pages and Inlinks counts displayed in parentheses to the right of their respective links.

Authenticate

The authentication file here is unique to the individual website with a unique string inside it. Alternatively you can add a meta HTML element to your website’s homepage that is also unique. The authentication process can take several hours before you get access to your newly added site.

Manage

You get four tools in this area:

Feeds
Dynamic URLs
Authentication
Actions

We’ve already covered authentication and the feeds section allows you to register site feeds to help it discover content faster. Dynamic URLs assists you in telling Yahoo’s spiders about certain non-essential query parameters that aren’t necessary (because they may actually be some form of session ID). Actions gives you a summary of actions you have applied.

To remove a URL from your site in the Site Explorer you simply Explore the domain in question and locate the URL. An authenticated site will give you extra buttons in the Explore area allowing you to remove the URLs.

Live Search Webmaster Portal

Coming soon I guess. We’re registered for the beta program but as yet haven’t received our invite. Here is the last email:

From: *****@microsoft.com
Subject: Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta
Date: 2 October 2007 18:03:59 BDT

Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta

Thank you for filling out the survey for the Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta program!

In order to provide the highest level of service to our Beta Partners, we have started off the beta program with our first group of participants. As the program is rolled out in phases, we will incrementally increase the number of participants until all applicants have been accepted by late November. The information you provided us thru the registration survey will help us determine when the right timeframe is to bring you into the beta program and ensure that our participants represent the widest range of industries and company sizes.

Sit tight and we’ll report on it as soon as we can.

Comparison of the two active portals

To be honest, they both have their merits, and they both are an essential tool to a webmaster. Yahoo! Site Explorer offers a quick-and-easy interface that helps you to get to the necessary tools fast. The Google Webmaster Tools are more structured and segregated. You have a lot of information at your disposal but while it is certainly a KISS interface, it is also potentially slower to perform an action.

Two great tools, I hope that the third is as useful and powerful.

Links for 2007-10-09 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 PDT

At Hallstar Stationery we supply office stationery to customers throughout London and the UK

Links for 2007-10-01 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Richard Austin Alloys Ltd

Links for 2007-09-27 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Trojan Crates

Links for 2007-09-20 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Blooming Pet Products

SEO and Web Site Design

enquiries@searchfirst.co.uk (Search First) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:02:40 +0000 GMT

Many firms offer SEO as a bolt-on extra to their website design services but the underpinning principles of SEO should be factored into all design projects. Factoring in these things during the design phase makes for a more efficient website and ensures that it remains consistent rather than adding hodge-podge changes after the design is completed.

Good Site Structure

Excluding four page sites, a good website should have a sensible structure with an intuitive navigation. Behind the scenes you should look to create a sensible URI structure also.

Analysing your site structure means examining how to best segregate all the different areas of a website. An engineering website with a range of products and services would likely segregate their site like so:

/
/products
/products/lathes
/products/lathes/model-xyz
/products/milling-machines
/services
/services/technical-support
/services/installation

By organising your site in such a way, you ensure that Web spiders can accurately assess the purpose of your content; an additional boon is that you also assist your human visitors with a sensible URI scheme that they can easily comprehend if they wish to return to your site at a later date.

Using a CMS that uses URI slugs as opposed to ID based query strings (access the Model XYZ page through http://example.com/products/lathes/model-xyz instead of http://example.com/products.php?cat_id=02&prod_id=3) is a system Search First Ltd employs for all sites designed - both CMS and static.

Titles and Metadata

The title and meta elements should be as important as the rest of the content when building a website from the start. If you can factor a good title and description to each page from the “get go” then you are saving yourself trouble later on. The title is the primary concern and then afterwards you should consider whether there is anything that you can to the page via the <meta content="description"> that isn’t already included in the existing content then adding it here can be beneficial.

The title of each web page is the text that forms the link text in the SERPS and is a major indicator of the context and purpose of the page itself. Ensure that the title is brief yet descriptive. The title of the web page located at /products/lathes/model-xyz could possibly be “Model XYZ - Lathes: Example Engineers Inc”

Make use of attributes

Apart from the obvious alt attribute that you must use when images are being used to replace what you would otherwise convey through words. If you are linking to a page, ensure that you aren’t using “click here” as link text. If a page on our Example Engineers Inc is about Model ABC in the Milling Machines product category then the link text should be Model ABC. If you wish to go further then the title attribute on the anchor element can be used to give additional information about the link (that visual browsers will render via tooltip); the title attribute text would possibly contain “Model ABC - Milling Machines”.

Using “click here”, “here”, and other short snippets of that nature not only hinders your progress on the search engines but also reduces the usability and accessibility of your website; users of non-visual or non-computer browsers that use link text to provide alternate measures of navigating a site will have a lesser experience because they will see lots of “click here” links and may not be able to know where they lead.

Social Networking

enquiries@searchfirst.co.uk (Search First) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:17:36 +0000 GMT

Why is social networking important and why should I be interested in it? Social networking has begun playing a greater role on the Web as more people discover it. What is a social network?

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes.

Social network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia

Through the last two decades, social networking websites have evolved to become something new. Social networking has diverged and expanded into sites that provide tools and applications for social link sharing, blogging, reuniting with old acquaintances, and making new friends. More importantly, there are a plethora of online applications that empower the web user giving the ordinary web user the chance to make their own mark on the Web.

Social Bookmarking

Digg.com, while not traditionally being a social networking site, has all the hallmarks of a website empowering members with the ability to share information and opinions; it is the social networking world’s Slashdot. Where Google has been well known for accepting IBLs as a vote of confidence, other sites now exist such as Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia that give users the power to not only save their own personal bookmarks, with tags¹ for easy finding later, but have additional features enabling users to search other bookmarks saved by other users. Thus, you don’t need a website to contribute and vote for websites any longer; registering to use a social bookmarking site, and using it to save your favourite sites has started to shape and influence the way we find content.

Blogging

My first entrance into the blogosphere² was through Livejournal on the 7th January 2001. Livejournal may not have been the first but it was one of the pioneers. Blogging is more than just a web-based diary; blogging gives people the chance to communicate and archive their thoughts. For many bloggers, their blogs are a place to handle social bookmarking; their blogs are full of posts³ that link to other interesting web resources.

Livejournal isn’t the only service. Wordpress, Moveable Type, Textpattern, and Blogger are other blogging tools. Blogger and Wordpress are even more special because they provide blogging tools without needing a domain or any knowledge of how to manage anything but the control panel that manages the posts.

Blogs have already begun shaping the Web. Blogs are notoriously rich in content and search engines have no problems slurping it up. Bloggers and social networkers are creating their own Web of recommendations through their activities online; in the simplest sense, Web novices now have the power to radically shape search engine results.

These days, I use Moonlight to manage my own website. Many bloggers either create their own systems or make use of existing tools like Moveable Type and Textpattern to manage their own websites.

Either way, blogging, social bookmarking is very much here to stay and change the way the Web works.

Tagging is the method of using short descriptive words to give brief description to some content ↩
A collective term to represent all blogs as a global social network. ↩
A post is an entry in a blog. It represents one passage/excerpt that may or may not be an individual webpage on a blog ↩

Link Farms

enquiries@searchfirst.co.uk (Search First) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:48:04 +0000 GMT

If you have ever looked into the possibility of increasing your website’s link popularity you may have come across the term “link farm”. This article will provide you with more detail on what a link farm is, why they exist, why you should avoid them, and some good practices in relation to improving your website’s link popularity.

What is a Link Farm?

In simple terms a link farm is a site whose sole existence or purpose is to provide links to other sites. The aim of adding a web page to a link farm is to skew search engine results in their favour by increasing the link popularity of the web page. More often than not the websites found in a link farm all hyperlink to one another.

Why do Link Farms exist?

The rise of the link farm began when the Inktomi search engine first identified link popularity as an important factor in their ranking criteria. Inktomi later struck up a relationship with Yahoo in providing supplementary results for their directory search, which, with Yahoo being the most popular search engine at the time, added extra emphasis on the need for websites to have good link strategy in place.

What is the problem with Link Farms?

We have previously discussed why a search engine views link popularity as a factor in it’s website ranking. That being the case, many web designers and search engine optimisers decided to set up link farms specifically for the purpose of increasing their page rank, and this is where the problem arises. Link popularity is based on the theory that like-minded websites create online communities, directing their audience to other useful sources of information or compatible products/services. This is in stark contrast to a link farm, which, because of the nature of it’s creation, is simply a collection of random and unrelated web pages which have been grouped together in a contrived attempt to fool the search engines. The search engines are not static however, and once these link farming or link stuffing tactics were observed measures were put into place to ensure they no longer worked. In many cases a website found to be a part of a link farm can often be penalised by being expelled from the rankings altogether.

Good Linking Strategy

OK, so we’ve established that increasing your website’s link popularity can have positive effects on your search engine rankings, but that by using improper methods you can end up doing more harm than good. So what are the good practices in increasing link popularity?

Quality over quantity - The number of links is important, but you should consider the quality of the links you are requesting. It is better to have a few good links, than lots of links from spam-heavy neighbourhoods. Be patient and aim to get the right links, not simply the most links.
Links should be related to the theme of your site. Directory inclusion should be done manually and carefully to ensure that your website link appears in the relevant category, with descriptive and correctly chosen keywords.
Automated Link Generating programs have a poor conversion rate and providers may often rely on link farms to boost the number of places your site appears.

At SearchFirst our Link Connections Service is fully compliant with the latest guidelines on link popularity strategy. All submissions made are managed and maintained manually, ensuring your site is only submitted to relevant directories in theme-specific categories.