Business 1st

Bespoke Software Development

2008-05-30T07:15:00.000-07:00

Software development is the process of creating a bespoke software application to meet the requirements as set out by the domain expert in a requirements document.

A bespoke software project is tested against requirements analysis documentation and must therefore be detailed and measurable so that the software can be tested against it.

Requirements documentation will typically contain a list of requirements that can then be measured and ticked when completed. This is particularly important for contract based IT outsourcing. It is also important when designing software to identify all the stakeholders of the system, because a new software system can have a knock on effect on other systems.

The requirements specification stage is an important part of bespoke software solutions because it determines what is needed from the new ecommerce system.

A requirements analyst or custom application development team can obtain information from the domain expert by "prototyping" and "use cases".

A 'use case' analysis is used to identify the usage requirements and to identify the functional requirements of a bespoke software system. This will help to define the classes of actors (end user or hardware) and processes to put into a use case diagram. It is the foundation of most bespoke software development solutions.

The interaction between an actor and the system is viewed from the perspective of the actor so that the system itself remains a black box. Actors exist outside this black box but take part in the sequence of events with it in order to achive the result.

To gather the requirements of a new bespoke software solution, a use case analysis starts off by specifying the system's framework such as its actors (online shop customer) and processes (payment), classes of actors and processes (A Sale), and data used by them (product details).

Then the behaviour of the system from the perspective of the actor is described and grouped into classes but without going into the internal workings of the black box.

Once the classes or groups of actors and processes that are needed by the system are identified, the relationships between those classes then need to be identified and the interation between them. Each class (eg customer, product, payment) must have a task to complete that no other class in the system is responsible for so that there is no overlap. Sometimes one class can be related to a class many times such as a customer might buy many products from an ecommerce website. The one to many relationship between the website customer class and the product class need to be specified. Each class' attributes need to be identified, for example a product will have a name, a customer an address. Finally the components such as exception handling and process communication are identified for the overall problem domain.

Each use case is a complete series of events and a system can have many use cases. A UML Diagram can help to graphically model many use cases. Use cases are represented as ovals and the system is encapsulated in a box with the actors located outside it. Actors have no interaction but there are three types of relationships between use cases.

1) A use case can use another use case. The first use case depends on the outcome of the included use case identified by a dashed arrow from the including use case to the included use case with the label <>. For example a customer purchase in an online shop website includes the use case of validating the customer's purchase details.

2) Extending interation between use cases is when one use case extends another use case so that the behaviour of one use case is inserted in another use case such that one use case is a special case of another use case. This is represented with a dashed arrow from the extensible use case to the extended use case with the label <>. For example, the validation include use case of a customer purchase use case can be extended by an exception handling use case that performs error logging.

3) A generalisation relationship between use cases is when a use case is derived from a more generalised use case, identified with a hollow arrow from the specialised sub class use case to the more general use case. For example a customer purchase use case is a generalisation of taking payment from the customer and depositing payment to the online shop website owner.

Use case analysis is not well suited to non functional requirements which are not measurable and describe quality of systems such as the ease of use of the user interface Non functional requirements are determined by presenting the end user with prototype software so that the actor can get an idea of the look and feel of the system and provide the necessary feedback for example.

Bespoke Software

2008-05-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

Bespoke Software design often requires the scalability of the algorithms involved to be determined first on a conceptual finite state machine in order to be sure that the tasks can actually be done prior to the software coding. For example, to determine the maximum number of products on an ecommerce website page for a given amount of bandwidth. The big Oh notation describes how the size of the input affects these sorts of hardware requirements.

Bespoke software solutions can be categorised into complexity classes. The measure is done against a turing machine, which is an infinite tape divided into columns each containing a symbol from an alphabet. A head reads/writes symbols on the tape and can move left/right one column at a time and the state of the system is stored in the state register. A table of instructions is used so that given the state the machine is currently in, and the symbol it is reading on the tape, tells the machine to erase or write a symbol; move the head one step or assume the same state (or new state). A program can belong to one of a number of complexity classes.

A software solution whose run time is no greater than a polynomial function of the size of the input is of the P complexity class and is efficient and tractable. For example, a quicksort program to sort products sort on database by price is a polynomial time algorithm.
An exponential software solution is on the other hand is limited by hardware resources. The time taken to do a task increases as an exponent to the amount of information that needs to be handled. In search engine optimisation, the time it takes for a search engine web crawler to traverse a website increases exponentially for each subpage and subpage thereafter, which is a reason why it is generally bad practice to have directories many layers deep.

Internet Marketing with Froogle

2008-05-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

Froogle is a separate index maintained by Google of ecommerce websites - specifically online shop websites. It allows the shopper to compare prices and to reach e commerce websites that would not otherwise be found. If you list your products in Froogle, it will need the following.

A product title is needed which is the same keyword that you would use on the product's web page. Froogle can also require the product's manufacturer and model number. This is important in order to make a more accurate price comparison. The product will also need a description which includes the use of your website's primary keywords. The description should be original and not copied off another website. You should also upload a photo of the product and include the price of the product.

The product details that you submit to froogle can be updated. However it may be quicker, especially if your site includes hundreds of different products, to include a Froogle Data Feed. The froogle data feed is similar to Google site maps xml feed except that the file is tab delimited in a spreadsheet format rather than in xml format. These data feeds then need to be updated monthly otherwise those pages will expire.

Froogle only supports the listing of products that are sold with a fixed price, although you may update the price as the product price changes during your periodic data feed submission.

The way in which froogle ranks product results pages are similar to the ranking methods employed in organic search engine optimization and therefore similar techniques can be used to get a froogle listing higher on the results pages. However, Froogle's search engine and Google's regular search engine remain separate applications and do not affect each other.

Search engine optimization & spam

2008-05-24T07:28:00.000-07:00

There are a number of spammy practices that are not effective in search engine optimizatio n and should therefore be avoided. This article lists some of the more common spam that fall into the category of black hat SEO.

Redirections:

Web pages that use redirects placed in the meta tag will have their rankings reduced but as yet will not be removed from search engine indexes. Although less easy to detect, a java script redirect is now able to be detected and search engines will remove your website if these redirects are found to be deceptive. However, it does not always involve the search engine spam detection algorithms to find this out and penalize your website, but rather a competitor's website will have the motivation to find and report any deceptive redirects that they find on your website. An exception to this is if you move your website to a new domain name. In this case, you will need to use a "301" redirect from links to your old site to point to their new respective locations. This allows the search engines to update those new locations with the page rank of the previous location. Such redirects may be left on for several months until the new domain is fully indexed, and this will not get your website penalized.

Link exchanges:

Free unrelated link exchanges are usually there solely to manipulate the search engines rather than to provide useful relevant links. It is very easy for a search engine to detect a website that engages in spammy link exchanges. A website that had previously ranked well on the search engines may get itself deleted from their index when they start falling for spammy link exchanges, especially if those link exchanges involve adult websites.

Invisible Text:

Stuffing your web pages with hidden keywords using either the same background and foreground color and/or using cascading style sheets to make the text appear outside the visible area of the screen, will get your website dropped from the search engines. In addition, linking to sites that engage in this practice could get your website devalued by association. If you have harmless java script that hides and unhides text for navigation bar purposes, then it might be a good idea to consider using cascading style sheet based navigation as a precaution against any misinterpretation on the part of spam detection software.

Purchasing Links:

As long as websites are not existing solely to sell links and manipulate search engine rankings, then it is an effective SEO technique to purchase links as long as those links are from websites that are relevant to yours. If you want to purchase several links, then you must make sure that those links are not from the same C Block IP address.

As Google has tightened its belt on many of the black hat SEO practices used in the past, some SEO firms have tried to compensate by employing aggressive SEO practices, such as purchasing many links or engaging in excessive link exchanges and paid inclusion directories. It is important to remember that search engine companies do not owe your website anything and therefore it is best practice to stay away from any tactic that could result in a spam flag placed upon your site.

Link Building

2008-05-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

Link building Practices that can be considered good are as follows...

Submit your online shop website to reputable directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo directory. The former is free and the latter is paid for. Both are human edited and do not accept sites deemed to be of low standard.
Only link exchange with other website which are relevant to your website. Irrelevant link exchanges can be regarded as spam resulting in a lower rating of your website as a whole. You can also link to relevant pages without an exchange. It will not penalise your site or result in 'pagerank leakage' provided that the site that you link to is relevant and does not engage in black hat SEO.
Use links within the content of your site that make use of anchor text made up of keywords that you are trying to promote.

The following are practices which are best left avoided with regards to links...

When you have a link in the content of your page, avoid the use of images or the text "click here" to represent the link. This is because Google uses the anchor text found in links to help determine the keywords that are best associated with a particular webpage.
Keep away from any link farm or link exchange program run by websites that engage in spam or black hat SEO. And do not link to sites which are irrelevant to your website as this will confuse Google's keyword appraisal of your website.
Check your site for broken links and fix them as soon as possible. Google webmaster tools automatically warns you of broken links if your site is too large to check manually. There are also a large variety of free link check tools available to use.
Do not obfuscate any links on your site as, although difficult to detect, once found out will result in a penalty imposition upon your website. Link obfuscation is as serious as hidden text. This includes using a full stop or period to link to a page or a 1 pixel area image.
Do not sell links. As of 2007, the selling of links without nofollow is in breach of Google's webmaster guidelines unless your website is a reputable directory or where the advertising link is declared prominently as such. If you sell links whose purpose is to manipulate rankings then a competitor could report this to Google to ban your site.
Do not buy links from websites that exist only to sell links. This is to prevent website owners from buying many links in order to manipulate their rankings.
Do not insert keywords excessively. If you are worried that your use of your site's keywords may have been overzealous then there is a wide variety of free keyword density tools that give you the percentage of text used on your site that are keywords. Reduce the number of keywords used if it exceeds 30%.

Website Design Tips

2008-05-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

There are many aspects of web design that all search engines take into account and which you should consider when designing a website. The established set of do's and don'ts are listed as follows.

The tasks that you should perform include the following...

Make sure that web host is reliable. Various third party software is available to check periodically for the uptime of your website. If your website is down for any length of time then that can affect your ecommerce website's rankings in Google and if the site is down for many week it may be dropped from the Google's index altogether. Also important is the need to check the dates that the hosting company that you use requires payment. The non payment of commercial web hosting services may result in the deletion of your website from their servers.
Make sure that the content used on your website is timely and relevant so that people are likely to use and link to your website. The content also needs to be updated periodically to maintain its timeliness and relevancy. Google automatically adjusts the frequency in which it crawls your website based on how often you update your website and the more frequently you update your website, the more frequently Google will spider your website. Each page should contain at least 300 words and should not be more than two or three pages in length. If the content is large then it would be more effective to split the content into separate shorter pages than to have all the content in one page. Smaller pages are faster to lead and easier to read, plus the longer it take for a webpage to load, the more visitors will clock back away from that webpage before it loads.
Keywords that each webpage represents should be found in the title, paragraphs, headings and anchor text where appropriate, and each page's title and meta data should not be duplicated. Duplicate meta data and titles will come up as a warning on webmaster tools.
If your site uses PDF documents, then those PDF documents must not be in any way proprietarily optimized or compressed because Google needs to be able to access the pdf document in a standard format if it is to be able to index to words in the document.
A resources or links page should be created that contains references to related websites that would be of use to your customers. However, such a page should contain content such as a description of each of the websites listed. A page that contains hundreds of links will be ignored by google as spam.
Javascript code should be exported to a separate external file in order to help reduce the time it takes to crawl the website and to reduce the time it takes to load a page. Similarly CSS styles should be exported to an external file. This also makes it much easier to change the look and feel of the website quickly by changing just the one CSS file rather than having to change multiple embedded CSS statements.

The following are a list of examples that you should avoid while performing website design

Avoid the use of page redirects which are often associated with dubious sites.
Do not use free servers which are usually blocked by the search engines due to abuse.
A keyword density above 30% will increase the chance that your site will be marked for spam. Therefore use keywords only where they are appropriate.
Do not stuff the webpage with keywords by using hidden text such as setting the position attribute of the text in CSS to be off the screen. Avoid using font colors that are very similar to the background color. Hidden text or text mistaken as hidden can easily result in the website in question being delisted from Google.
Avoid the use of frames and flash. Frames make it difficult for a search engine to accurately crawl your website. Flash simply does not provide search engines with the text needed to categorize your webpages.

Web hosting - Multiple Domain Names

2008-05-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

If your ecommerce website contains different distinct subjects, then you may want to consider asking your web host about splitting your site into multiple domains where each domain deals with each specific area of your site. In cases where the site cannot be split, then the navigation and category structure should be organized to take that into account.

It is important, if you choose to split your site into multiple domains, to make sure that there is no duplication of content. Google is known to drop duplicate pages from its index. It may also be beneficial to use separate ecommerce hosting providers for each site so that Google will not mistake similar sites on the same server as an attempt at making duplicate sites. When you use a different web host to server your separate websites you should make sure that each web hosting provider uses a different class of C Block number. The class C block is the number shown on the third section of an IP address such as 123.456.789.012 where 789 is the C block. Separate web hosting companies should have a different Class C block value in their hosted webpage's IP address.

Some internet marketing companies may try to use multiple sites each small in size containing content that is either junk or duplicate in order to increase the number of inbound links to the parent ecommerce website. Since this technique has been abused by spammers, it is considered a 'black hat' SEO technique and is likely to get the associated website banned from Google's index.

A similar method is to use multiple domains each pointing to the parent site. Each of these multiple domains will be one of the website's primary keywords. Domain forwarding to redirect visitors from those pointer domains to the parent domain is considered a safe method. It is also useful to make sure that a competitor does not end up owning one of your primary keywords which you would want to be associated to your website.

The use of subdomains is also considered ethical practice. Subdomains are prefixed to the domain name of your site such that for the ecommerce webpage of b-1st.com, you may use the subdomain "ecommerce" to produce the full domain of "ecommerce.b-1st.com". Since search engines including Google treats subdomains as separate domains, it may work out more cost effective than purchasing whole separate domain names if your website targets a large number of keywords.

Sometimes it may be necessary to change a domain name such as would be the case if the name of the company changes or if you simply choose a bad domain name. An important factor to remember in this case is that Google will interpret a new domain name to be a new site and therefore you will need to use a 301 redirect (available through .htaccess files on unix servers) in order to maintain the validity of inbound links to your new domain name. The failure to do so will mean that all the inbound links from your old domain name will be lost and your website will eventually fall out of Google's index. You must have at least one incoming link in order to be included into Google's index at all.

Finally, avoid the use of Flash homepage animations which then redirect to the site's homepage. The use of Flash on homepages is considered bad practice both in terms of SEO and web design. In the context of SEO, a flash animation does not contain textual data and therefore does not provide Google with the opportunity to associate text to the most important page of your site - the homepage. Secondly, many users do not have flash software incorporated into their browsers and are therefore unable to see flash animations. In such an instance, a flash animation would frustrate a potential customer into leaving the site prematurely.

Ecommerce Website Stats

2008-05-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

The site traffic is an important statistic to measure. If you are just interested in where your website appears on the search engine rankings for a given keyword without considering the visitors coming into your website as a result of those keyword rankings then you will be flying blind.

Most ecommerce hosting providers such as business 1st (www.b-1st.com) will offer webstats to their customers, usually at no extra charge. There are two types of website monitoring to choose from.

First, a log file analyzer such as "Urchin" which is paid or the free "AWStats" used by business first can be considered. These are installed on the server that is hosting your ecommerce website. If the referrer option is turned on then you will be able to see from which website the visitor had come from. Log file analysers process visitor statistics in batch rather than in real time which leads to the next option.

A real time browser based tracking such as "WebStat" can be used which involves inserting a javascript tracking code or image on each page of the site that is to be monitored. Each time a page is loaded then that code will be able to update the statistics of that page and thereby providing real time information. Real time statistics tend to be more expensive than log file analysers.

The important metrics to measure when monitoring your website are as follows.

1) Keywords that visitors have typed into search engines to find your site should be checked regularly. You may be able to find unexpected keyword combinations that people have used to find your site which you could then focus on. If most visitors are using keywords that you are trying to promote, then that is a measure of success of your internet marketing campaign. If most visitors are using keywords that you are not trying to promote then you have chosen the wrong keywords and need to modify your campaign accordingly.

2) The search engine that people use to find your site can be tracked. Google will be the top of the list but you may find users that make use of specialist search engines that you may not have considered previously.

3) Referrals are the tracking of the actual websites that brought traffic to your site. From this you will be able to see the amount of traffic that you get from websites that refer to your site. Sometimes people type in your address directly into the address bar and these visitors are registered as "no referral" or "direct" entries. A technique to determine which visitors are typing in your address into the address bar, and which visitors have bookmarked your site is to use an icon file with your site which is displayed in the bookmarks menu as an image. Favicons are also useful for branding your business. You will then be able to check your server logs for fetches to this icon file which indicates approximately how many people have bookmarked your site.

3)The number of page views can be used to determine the most popular pages of your site. You will then be able to focus more effort to the pages that are less popular.

4) Visitor path is the route your visitors take when navigating your site. This can be helpful to show what visitors are usually looking for when they enter your site and can help diagnose navigational deficiencies.

5) Exit pages are the pages that people are looking at before they leave your website. Usually this will be the shopping cart software on your ecommerce website after they have made a purchase, assuming that your site has high conversion rate.

6) The length of time people spend on your site and on individual pages can be used to check if people are actually reading what is on a page or if that page's content is deficient so that people do not spend time reading the content. A short length of session should be addressed by improving the content of your site.

The importance of monitoring your website is to increase the chance of visitors purchasing a product from your ecommerce website. If you spend all your time making sure your website ranks on the first page of goggle without considering the above metrics, then you may end up with a good ranking but low conversion ratio. Nevertheless, rankings are important because if a customer cannot find your site. If you use the services of an SEO company, they must provide you with regular reports on your keyword rankings. You may also want to manually check the pagerank of your site. Webstatistics software do not usually provide pagerank information although you can download the Google toolbar to view pagerank information or you can download the Alexa toolbar to view your Alexa rankings.

You can also use Google to check how many pages Google has indexed off your site. It is important to check that all the important pages of your site have been indexed and if not then address the issue by checking on whether or not the page contravenes Google's webmaster code of conduct or if there are no links that point to that page such that Google cannot crawl into that page.

Probably most importantly is the need to check who links to your site which you can check by typing in your site's url prefixed with the link operator. You should compare who links to your site and who links to your competitors' websites and address any shortfalls on your site.

Ecommerce Website and ROI

2008-05-22T03:18:00.000-07:00

The end objective of an ecommerce website internet marketing campaign is sales conversions. It is important to make sure that your return on investment (ROI) in sales conversions not only pays for the investment put in but also offers profit. The investment that you put in to an ecommerce website includes SEO consultancy fees, webpage development, hosting and the time spent creating your online shop website.

Evaluating sales conversions and return on investments is a difficult task as you need to know at what point a sale takes place. Correlating sales with visitor tracking and webpage monitoring is a time consuming process.

Internet marketing takes a few months for the effectiveness of search engine optimization to become apparent. Pay per click campaigns can however offer a more immediate measure since they do not require a long period of delay. To determine the effectiveness of your website marketing you need to track visitors individually from their entry to your website to their exit and the page on which they actioned a purchase (or any other action you want the visitor to take).

Directory Submissions

2008-05-22T03:09:00.000-07:00

It is important to submit your site to good quality directories such as the Open Directory Project for online marketing. Search directories contain website listings that are ordered alphabetically and ordered by categories. Unlike organic search results, the websites that are placed into directories are put there by humans. It may help to point to the category on which your website is listed in these directories on your resources links pages because the websites in the same category as yours will also be of interest to visitors to your site.

Google's directory takes its data from the open directory project and then ranks them according to pagerank. The open directory project provides directory listings to many other directories aswell such as AOL, AltaVista and smaller specialist directores. It is staffed by volunteers and therefore very slow to respond to submissions, therefore it is important to add your site to ODP as soon as it is complete.

Google often uses what you have submitted to the open directory project in the snippet information on SERPS. If your website is location specific then it should be submitted to the geographic location.

Running a successful ecommerce website

2008-05-06T04:41:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization is helpful to get your website found - on search engines. This is only one part of running a successful e-commerce website. In order to convert visits to purchases, and to maintain a good business reputation, the online shop website owner has to work hard and creatively to develop the business and the products that it has to offer.

When choosing what products to sell you should consider whether or not you are interested in the product range yourself. If you are not interested then you should probably change the products that you have to offer. An online shop business will be more likely to succeed if its employees are interested in what they are selling. It is also easier to sell people what they want rather than to try to convince them that they want your product.

Also important is the supply and demand situation of the market. If the market is already oversupplied, then it is less easy to succeed. Saturated markets include mobile phone retailers and computer hardware stores.

You also need to be creative enough to offer new and original ideas that make people want to link to your website without you having to ask them to. Blogs are a good place to start.

Some niche businesses have little competition and these will typically rank well once other websites start to link to them. If your website is in a competitive field and your SEO company is effectively promoting your site then you should keep with the same company. Some SEO companies may also change a premium on more competitive key phrases.

SEO Code of Ethics and Associations

2008-04-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

"SEO consultants" is a reputable and difficult to get into reviews of UK search engine optimisation companies. General SEO forums, especially paid ones, contain mostly self promoting seo consultants trying to promote their own interest so is probrably a waste of time to entertain such forums.

"Honest SEO" provides the most unbiased view of seo consultants and search engine optimisation companies in the UK and is even licenced under creative commons. The link to this page can be found on the Business 1st resources page on seo.

Bruce Clay offers the Bruce Clay code of ethics standards in seo. Unfortunately one notices that this code of ethics has the company's name on it and is actually just another seo marketing scam that tries to promote one group of people. Included in this code of ethics are the following...

No SEO practitioner will intentionally do harm to a client

No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any specifically published and enforced rules of search engines or directories

No SEO practitioner will intentionally mislead, harm, or offend a consumer

No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any laws

No SEO practitioner will falsely represent the content of the client site

No SEO practitioner will falsely represent others work as their own

No SEO practitioner will misrepresent their own abilities, education, training, standards of performance, certifications, trade group affiliations, technical inventory, or experiences to others.

No SEO practitioner will participate in a conflict of interest without prior notice to all parties involved. T

No SEO practitioner will set unreasonable client expectations.

All SEO practitioners will offer their clients both internal and external dispute resolution procedures.

All SEO practitioners will protect the confidentiality and anonymity of their clients with regards to privileged information and items implying testimonial support for the SEO practitioner.

All SEO practitioners will work to their best ability to increase or retain the rankings of client sites.

Limits to onpage optimisation

2008-04-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

There is a limit asto how far you can optimise the text on a page. While good quality inbound links to a webpage has no upper range limit, the number of text you have on a page and the number of keywords you place on a page can only go so far before it stops helping and starts harming your search engine rank and spoiling the look of the page.

The spam probability of a page's keyword density is determined using statistical functions by finding the normal distribution of the keyword on webpages. The normal distribution of a particular set of keywords amongst all webpages that use those keywords will determine the webpages that are flagged as spam and webpages that are not. The number of keywords that appear on a page has to be approximately normal against all webpages with that keyword. However, the distribution of the keyword in the same website does not need to be of that same normal. In other words, it has to correspond to a bell curve.

But using valid markup, and using common sence on page optimisation such as correct usage of meta data is still important in SEM. Some people practice search engine optimisation without regard to aesthetics and thier content pages, products pages and static pages are mostly just lists of keywords. In the extreme cases it will eventually result in a spam flag if it falls significantly out of the range of normal distribution. Sometimes clients who are unable to produce content for content pages send in a list of keywords and join them together into non sensical but grammatical sentences. Even if such textual content passes a spam test, a customer that sees such a page will be less likely to buy a product from such a site if they enter that site through such a page becuase no one likes websites that spam. Traffic generated from spammy seo will not convert into sales.

Classic and safe on page improvements for internet marketing include...

* Heading tags: Use headings in the right places for primary keywords. You can improve the appearence of headings using CSS to blend it more gracefully to the rest of the page.

* Title and meta tags: Use title and meta tags to place the webpage's primary keywords. The navigation should also have keywords used in anchor text. However the meta tags need to be different for every page otherwise, by the very definition of meta, pages with exactly the same meta data will be flagged duplicate.

* In long pages, break the page up into groups and subgroups using a corresponding heading level such as 1, 1.1, and 1.1.1. Make sure to use paragraph tags instead of line breaks or divisions. If the paragraph is very short then that is the only situation when it is OK to bold or italic the entire paragraph.

* Placing all content within heading tags is spam. Only use headings where appropriate. Headings should also not be bolded because they are already bold by default. This is similarly so for keywords used throughout the page.

* Some SEO companies like to divide the page in such a way that the body text appears before the navigation links so that all the content appears before the navigation at the top of the page. However the effect of this is small and it is more important in practice to make sure that keywords appear normally in the order of the words used in actual content of the page instead of spending time on the visual layout of the page.

Future Search Engines

2008-04-25T02:38:00.000-07:00

The current trend of search engines, especially google, is to provide a more localised search with improved context awareness provided through through the semantic web framework. The affect this has on search engine optimisation will be to offer more techniques in which to provide such information to those search engines.

Localisation and context improvments in search engine rankings involves trying to better anticipate the person's needs. Google currently does this by offering the option to save search history and then offers up suggestions based on the statistics you have provided through google history. The semanitc web involves using a number of languages to improve the quality of indexing websites more accurately and quickly. Currently Yahoo is the only major search engine that uses Semantic Web protocols.
The ability of google to provide local search information based on the user's location settings is also an attempt to improve the localisation of SERPS. Google maps is the best example of this with
Business 1st appearing on the Lancaster, UK map together with business-1st address, website and telephone number information. This type of geotargeting is also possible without use intervention by the search engine performing an IP lookup and prioritising websites based in the UK for searchs originating from the UK. This is also used to serve PPC (pay per click) internet marketing that is targeted at specific locations.

Google prefers the use of IP lookups to determine the location of a website because many websites (such as business 1st) use ".com" TLDs. But even IP lookups are not effective if the webpage is also hosted in a foreign country.

Context and personalisation of the search engine results was started by google with its personalised homepage and web history options. It means that a different set of results will appear in SERPS if you use the service compared to if you do not use the service. Microsoft also made a similar copy of google's Web History and Google Desktop Search in what was called "What I've Seen" which was then integrated into Windows Desktop Search and now evolved to PHLAT.

The semantic web is an attempt to add an extra layer of protocols to provide more data about webpages. Yahoo was the first to read RDF Site Summery (RSS) files and Yahoo Pipes uses XML based RSS feeds from websites. Atom is the google version of RSS feeds which is intended to provide structured data about websites. This is useful for keeping up to date with new products available on ecommerce online shop websites for example.

A setback to personalised search engine results is the privacy concerns, especially with regards to the recent cases of the UK government loosing sensitive personal information stored electronically. But as more people start using personalised search, search engine optimization companies will have to start offering products such as RSS and RDS Site Summaries.

Article Submissions and Website Reviews

2008-04-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

Becomming an authority on the type of product that you are selling is an excellent way to gain traffic to your site. This is especially so if the area that you are in is relatively new and not much competition alrady exists for it.

The type of content that can turn your site into an authority on the subject include giving away tips and tricks, news, resources directories and articles.

Articles can be submitted at a number of sites includeing buzzle, ideamarketers, ebooksnbytes, thewhir and ezinearticles. Blogs are also good places to submit articles although they are not as highly weighted by search engines due to their infiltration by spammers in the past. This is particularly true of wordpress.

Writing reviews and testimonals for other similar webpages is also a good way in which to become authoritative. But only promote sites that are of good quality. Another twist that is used by some seo companies is to write only about negative aspects about other sites. Its probrably much more difficult to say good things about people who do a good job than it is to say bad things about people who do a poor job at their profession. Testimonals and reviews are better regarded if they are promoting rather than discrediting as the former is more useful to their respective industries.

SEO Meta Tags

2008-04-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

In search engine optimisation, the meta tags are the meta description and meta keyword tags. The meta tags look like as follows...

meta name="keywords" content=""

meta name="Description" content=""

The meta keywords tag can be useful for misspelling and similar words not otherwise seen in the main text of the webpage. The meta description tag is used by some search engines including google to display a summary of information about the website in SERPs.

The keywords and description meta tags should be unique according to the page. The description tag should read well to the human and not be too keyword promotional. At the end of the day, a web user will not click to your site if the description on the snippet is stuffed with spam.

There are also other meta tag that tell the search engine what language the page is written in and how many times it should revisit the page. These tags are ignored by most search engines. The only other meta tag that is taken into account by all major search engines is the robots exclusion protocol...

meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"

Meta tags are less important that the webpage title, text, and link quality pointing to it and many search engine optimisation consultants do not use them at all.

Internet Marketing Keyword Selection

2008-04-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

Keywords should define a product when used in search engine optimisation. Therefore it is inadvisible to use generic keywords usch as "cheap" or "free" in your search engine optimisation campaign. Keywords are usually two or five word phrases which people are likely to use to serach for your website. In choosing keywords you should also consider the type of problems that your product solves, and those will make good candidates.

A longer search phrase is also more targeted than single keyword search queries. The more targeted the visitors to your ecommerce website are, then the more likely it is that they will buy something from your online shop site.

Keyword density is not too important. Many search engine optimisation specialists focus so much on keyword density that they end up making their content pages look like spam. More important are the areas that they keyword appears (such as top of page) and the amound of text that exists between each occurrence of each keyword, plus how they relate to the the theme of the page and the pages that link to it.

It is also a good idea to look at the keywords used in competitor websites. Google Suggest offers a related keyword tool that can be used to find new keywords not otherwise considered for the primary keywords of your website. Keywords should bring targetted traffic to your website. Each page of your website should contain one or two primary keywords followed by one or two secondary keywords. You cannot optimise for more than this number of keywords otherwise the page will start to look like spam. It can sometimes help to use common mis-spellings of the keyword in the keywords meta tag of the page.

Some of the less sophisticated search engines will display different results for plural and singular versions of keywords. Therefore it can be helpful to optimise your keywords for both singular and plural forms of your keywords if they are both likely to be used by customers. However, most search engines are not case sensitive. Therefore you do not need to optimise of words that begin with uppercase and lower case.

If your keyword uses a hyphen, it is important to note that search engines will treat hyphens as a space. Therefore "ecommerce websites" will be interpreted differently form "e-commerce websites".

The important thing to remember is that your words must be able to both describe the product that the webpage is trying to sell and to be something that is frequenty searched for.

Digital Point has a free keywords suggestion tool located at "www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion" which is an alternative to Yahoo's overture keywords tool.

Website Branding and Domain Names

2008-04-19T05:19:00.000-07:00

Your domain name is important for branding purposes. It should contain keywords that reinforce the branding that your site wants to convey.

Another reason to choose they keywords that you use in your domain name carefully is so that it is easier to remember. For example, it is much easier to remember a site "healthstore.uk.com" rather than a site "healthstore-herbal-remedies-vitamin-pills-supplements-uk.com".

Some search engine optimisation companies buy multiple domain names, some which contain less important keywords and to prevent competitors from purchasing that domain. However, it is important not to buy multiple domain names for deceptive purposes. You could for example separate distinct areas of your business across multiple domain names each of which describe that specific area better than your primary domin name. A good example is to buy domain names specific for each country in which your business operates. It makes sence to have multiple similar websites covering different topics so that you can create topically relevant and high quality inbound links to the different sites in your business, and give you a multi branded internet marketing approach.

But, in spite of this, it is important not to fall into black hat search engine optimisation practices whereby you create multiple websites and domain names purely to deceive search engines. Doing so will guarantee that your sites get removed from the major search engines. Black hat seo practices are best avoided if you want to protect your brand and domain name. Make sure that each site is unique enough and only cross link the sites where it is relevant. Use various hosts so that if one of your sites go down then not all of your sites go down. Some search engines devalue links that ocme from sites hosted on the same set of IP addresses. Do not link hundreds of domain names together or else you will be banned for creating a link farm.

When you register your domain name, make sure that you register with an ICANN accredited registrar. Some low quality hosts may place all their domains on a single IP address which normally causes slow speed. That said, it is not usually detremental to seo internet marketing to use shared hosting. Search engines usually place spam flags on domain names and not on IP addresses, except in exceptional circumstances of black hat seo companies such as Search King.

Google Adwords

2008-04-18T02:42:00.000-07:00

PPC internet marketing campaigns can give you targeted traffic and allow you to test new business models. The pay per click market is competitive and therefore can be more expensive than alternative forms of webpage marketing. A lot of time would need to be spent learning how to create pay per click ads.

Pay per click applications provide tracking software. This is important in order to find out how much each click is worth. If a pay per click campaign is properly targeted and appealing then it can have a high conversion rate. The price that is paid for a click should be based on the profit per order. Therefore it is not worth paying £1 per click for a keyword that will make you only a small profit per order. Some companies pay an extreme premium for branding without actually caring about click through rates.

You can test if the market is available for your product by creating a single webpage about that product, and then count the number of clickthroughs. If you cannot achive a decent amount of click throughs then there is probrably no market for that product or you are choosing the wrong keywords and target audience.

Google adwords is the largest pay per click search engine marketing provider alghough yahoo trails close behind. They offer many tracking and targeting features, plus google and yahoo have recently formed a partnership as of 2008 whereby they display each other's ads on each other's homepages. Many smaller pay per click companies will deliver the same product but with a very high bounce rate so that most people who click a link to your site will immedately click the back button on the browser.

With google adwords you pick a maximum bid price and competitors do not have access to your highest bid price. Adverts can be targeted geographically so that they only appear in the country in which your online shop website is located. The price for google adwords is related to the price per click multiplied by click throughs. The google advertising professional program is a program which allows marketers to be certified with adwords. You need to spend a certain amount of money on adwords to be able to get a google advertising certificate logo. Google also offers a service called jumpstart where they will help set up your account for you for a fee.

Link Exchanges

2008-04-18T01:08:00.000-07:00

Popular websites tend to be regiestered in reputable directories such as Yahoo Directory or Yell. To determine if a site is really worthy of a link you should evluate their content. In addition you may want to do a backlink check and see how they aquired their inbound links.

It is good from a web optimisation point of view to link to other websites that are relevant to yours if they link back but only if done legitimately. Stay away from credit, loans, medicine, gambling and adult content sites as they will damage your pagerank score and your credibility. If the site you are linking to has nothing to do with the topic of your site and no relation to what may interest your viewers then you should not link to them. And also, if you link to many irrelevant and low quality websites, then it will be unlikely that other good quality websites will want to link to yours. If you send junk link exchange requests they will usually be deleted as spam. You should also delete any email that looks similar to the following...

Dear Webmaster,

We are marketing *** and we feel that reciprocating it with your site should help increase traffic and also search engine rankings to a certain extent.

We have placed a link to your website over here:-

***
Kindly check the link details and if you need any modifications, please let me know.

I would also appreciate if you link back to my website using this code:-
Plavix is used to prevent blood clots which causes arteries to harden or become narrow. It is an anti-platelet agent used to reduce the risk of heart attacks. 
I will keep the link active for 7 days. If you are not interested in linking back then we will remove this reciprocal link (to be fair to our other link partners).

Thanks.

The above invitation has the following hallmarks of spam...

They are mass emails not addressed properly to the site owner but rather taking parts generated from an automated program.
It requests a link to an offshore drug store
It provides a link to you from an obscure website which has been banned from google with no pagerank
The quality of their website is very poor
They pressure you with a time limit

The best link exchanges are performed with sites whom you already do business with. In this way, it benefits both your business dealings with them and can help with page rank and keyword rankings.

Directory Submissions

2008-04-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

An important part of search engine optimization and internet marketing is to add your website into as many directories as possible. This is a safe, cheap and effective white hat SEO technique that has been around since the SEM industry began.

B-1st is listed in Yahoo Directory. Yahoo directory is particularly worth submitting a link into in order to get listed on the yahoo search engine. Since yahoo will obviously place higher weight on sites listed in their directory, so it would be expected that a site placed in yahoo directory will improve its ranking on the yahoo search engine.

There are many other directories on the internet. If submitting your website to many directories, it is important to use different text on each directory otherwise the text will be detected as a duplicate and may therefore not be displayed in search results.

If you list your site in many directories then that can be a cheap way to build up links from other sites that point to your site. However, some directories have been removed from google's cache. Many directories show signs of being updated much less frequently in google cache's than before.

Directories that are especially targeted are those that sell paid links purely for link spamming. Yahoo directory and similarly reputable directories remain unaffected by this purge. Another measure of the quality of a directory is its pagerank and if its homepage has a pagerank of zero or is unranked, it would be best avoided.

Nevertheless, even if a link ceases to be counted in google, it may still be worth the time and effort if it means that your website can still be marketed in other search engines like yahoo.

Do not use link exchange directories or directories that require a 3 way link exchange as this can be seen as black hat seo by google and could get your site banned.

Sitemaps

2008-04-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

There are two main ways to link to pages from within your site.

Hierarchical linking is used when some pages are more important than others and the important pages are linked to from all other pages on the site. This has the effect of concentrating pagerank only on the most important pages of the site and in some situations this is desirable.

Non Hierarchical linking is when all pages are linked to each other and are therefore considered of equal importance. Pagerank would therefore be distributed equally among all pages of the site therefore giving more pages a pagerank but of a lower score. While pagerank does not necessarily determine the page's position on an SERP, it is something that customers may consider when evaluating the reputation of your site.

Very large sites can use a sitemap page from which all the pages of your site can be accessed, and an xml sitemap from which all the pages of your site can be accessed. Google sitemaps and yahoo sitemaps are the best examples of xml sitemaps.

SEO Titles

2008-04-17T07:17:00.000-07:00

The use of keyword based webpage titles is very important in search engine optimisation and the modification of your ecommerce website titles may sometimes be all that is needed to improve its internet marketing significantly...

• Titles must not be left blank as that wastes a useful marketing component of your online shop.

• Any welcome messages, branding or other salutations should be placed at the end of the title rather than at the beginning or omitted alltogether. This is because only the initial words are taken into account by search engines when ranking.

• The title should describe its webpage. Avoid placing unrelated keywords in the title as this confuses the customer and can be interpreted as spam.

• Title's should not be duplicated on every page. Each page should have its own specific title describing what that page is about.

• If the domain contains the title's keywords, provided that it is not too long, will assist in the association of that page with that keyword.

• It is sometimes a good idea to mix competitve and non competitive keywords for each page where appropriate.

• It is also a good idea to overlap keywords for example a page that markets search engine optimisation should also have the keywords "Internet Marketing", "seo", and "optimization".

It is always important to make your title and webpage names sensible to the customer. A customer visiting your online shop website will probrably be put off by the presence of irrelevent keywords and excessive keywords used in page titles and page names.

Keyword Popularity

2008-04-05T09:10:00.000-07:00

Choosing keywords are the foundations of your search engine optimsiation effort and you should take time to choose the most important and relevant keywords for your website. A keyword is a word that a search engine user would enter to find your website. Most people enter search phrases that are between 2 to 5 words.

Good keyword phrases are specific and it is better to have a smaller number of targeted keywords rather than have many irrelevant users find your site listed under generic search terms, who will be unlikely to spend much time on your site. Your ultimate objective is to get targeted traffic to your site. There is no reward in being on the first page on google unless those vistors become paying customers.

The more targeted and specific your keywords are, the greater the chance that visitors to your site will find what they are looking for.

This tool will also give an indication asto the popularity of a keyword so that you may know how difficult it will be to rank for it. Less expensive keywords on pay per click will tend to be easier to rank in an organic search.

One way to go about choosing your site's keywords is to make a list of all the possible words that your customer may use to find the products and services on your site remembering to think like your customers and avoid using words that your customer are unlikely to use.

Then use google's keyword suggestion tool to help identify the keywords that you should be able to optimise which are not too popular or unpopular. Avoid generic keywords or keywords that are just a single word. So, for example to get a top ranking for "bracelet" you would be competing with millions of other webpages.

After you have narrowed down your keywords to around 20, choose one that will be your most important keyword. Typically this will tend to be your company name. You should ensure that your most important keyword appears on most of the pages of your site. You should also have a number of variations of your primary keyword such as synonyms and alternate spellings and include these in your keywords list. So a primary keyphrase for the bshop site "Health Store UK" should have the primary keywords "Health store UK". Variations of this would be "UK Health Store", "Healthstoreuk", "healthstore UK" etc. Notice how the primary keyword is still present in the more specific pages.

The more specialised and targeting your keyword is, the more targeted your visitors will be and thus the more likelihood that they will purchase a product from your ecommerce website.

2 to 5 word phrases are much easier to rank well for because your competition are unlikely to use the same combination.

It is often a good idea to put a geographic modifier to your keyword such that "health store" becomes "health store uk", provided that your ecommerce website focuses on a particular region or country.

Each page of your website should then contain your primary keyword. Where appropriate, your products pages should contain variations of your primary keyword or the remainder of your choosen keywords. To avoid being marked for spam, you should also use keywords that are appropriate in each individual page. So a page that contains contact details should not contain the keyword "Silver Bangles" for example but more appropriately includ your shop's full name and variations of it where appropriate. It is also important not to stuff webpages with keywords as keyword stuffing is also considered in contravention of google's increasingly strict webmaster guidelines.

Link Building

2008-04-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

There are two link building strategies to link to pages from within your site. Hierarchical linking is used when some pages are more important than others and the important pages are linked to from all other pages on the site. This has the effect of concentrating pagerank only on the most important pages of the site and in some situations this is desirable.

Non Hierarchical linking is when all pages are linked to each other and are therefore considered of equal importance. Pagerank would therefore be distributed equally among all pages of the site therefore giving more pages a pagerank but of a lower score. While pagerank building does not necessarily determine the page's position on an SERP, it is something that customers may consider when evaluating the reputation of your site.

When performing internal site linking, you need to make sure that you use text links rather than image based or javscript based links. The anchor text should also contain the keyword relevant to that page. Large sites should incorporate a sitemap page from which all the main pages of your site can be accessed, and an xml sitemap from which all the pages of your site can be accessed.

Outsourcing

2008-04-04T08:02:00.000-07:00

Many large services oriented businesses outsource to India, where there is a competitive supply of educated workers who are skilled in IT and fluent in English. The advantage of this approach is that the client company can save costs by freeing up resources such as office space for other activities and leave the personnel department of the third party company to handle recruitment costs. Similarly many manufacturing businesses outsource to the Far East and East Europe which has heavy industries and factories but where English is perhaps not so widely used.

In many cases, the supply of suitably skilled workers is unavailable in the client's host location and therefore the option to outsource to India where there is a more readily available supply of skilled workers would save costs by removing the need to provide training from scratch. In this context, software outsourcing such as web design outsourcing and IT outsourcing is an increasingly popular trend within the software industry in the UK where there is a skills shortage making the cost of hiring an IT professional unaffordable.

IT outsourcing can involve the turning over of responsibility to an outside firm the company's entire IT department such as hosting, maintenance, software development and technical support. However, many companies choose to partially outsource IT functions. The client company may at a later stage choose to have more or fewer departments outsourced.

IT outsourcing can significantly lower the costs to the client's company while matching and often increasing the end product quality, leaving the company better able to anticipate future costs and focus on other key functions. On aggregate, the cost savings made allows the company to expand their services and therefore benefit the economy as a whole.

Online Shop Websites

2008-04-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

Any website needs a good navigation structure. Whenever a user is navigating inside a store with more than one sub-level of navigation, it's important to show them where in the site structure they are by using appropriate navigation menus. A site with many items, such as ebay, needs a sort feature. You should at least have a sort option based on price on product pages and search results. Other sort options which can be incorporated include popularity, newness (date of manufacture) and whether or not the item(s) are in stock.

All ecommerce websites should have search functionality. Google offers a paid for service whereby shops can include a search bar into their webpages, without advertisments, for an annual fee. A search feature will save the end user a lot of time when searching for products in a large ecommerce website. Sometimes a person may want to see everything that you sell. A wildcard search function on your website would allow the user the option of seeing every product on one page. This can also be achieved using RSS feeds which people can subscribe to in order to be notified of new products.

It's particularly important for internet shop sites to show pricing and cost savings clearly, but nearly every website can benefit from providing that extra bit of detail before the customer clicks to a product page. The cost of a product is usually the most important factor in deciding whether or not a customer makes a purchase from your site. Customers must also be able to see clearly what the costs of delivery are and what the delivery options are from your online shop website. It is important to be able to offer track and trace and insurance in case something unexpected happens to the package. The UK post office has a no facility for finding lost articles that have not been sent by recorded delivery and you wiill proprably not get a refund for lost items unless it is insured. Keep the customer informed by email or phone when the payment has been received and when the item has been shipped. When you send out an order confirmation, make sure to include all of the product details to reassure the buyer that they've selected the right item and to give the customer the option to fix an incorrect order before the item is shipped.

In addition, the following hardware and software considerations should be adherered to...

Web hosts needs to be able to store website files on secure servers. Unix based website hosting tends to be more secure than Windows based servers as all version of Windows are more susceptible to viruses than any version of Linux.

Protection of credit card details from eavesdroppers is needed as the data passes through the internet between the client and the server as indicated by a padlock logo that appears on the browser window. Double click on the padlock and it will give you the website security certificate details.

Use of a regularly updated anti virus program, spyware program, security updates and patches. Never run a program from a recipient who you do not know and never devulge your password information to anyone claiming to be from business first unless they can be verified.

The webserver and the network that it is on needs to maintain logs of all activity. This produces an audit trail that can be used to find the source of any attempt to steal sensitive information.

Fail safe technology such as off site backups is required in case of a catastrophe such as virus or damage to servers and uninterruptible power supply to prevent power cuts from corrupting a transaction in progress.

Finally, it is important to market your website so that people can find it. The following is a list of techniques for marketing an online shop website...

Search Engine Optimisation (Improving natural search engine listings)

Display-Advertising (Buying web banner ads)

Email-Marketing (Newsletters and Junk Mail)

Affiliate Marketing (A parent business rewards another affiliate business for each customer brought about by the affiliate-company)

Interactive advertising (Viral marketing techniques to engage the consumer in a personal way)

Online reputation management (Similar to webpage marketing except it is for a name or brand, and the optimisation is not a single web site but rather any site that contains only positive references to that name or brand.)

Social Marketing (blogs, social bookmarking).

Succesful ecommerce website marketing can be measured by higher search engine placement for your ecommerce websites main keywords than before your internet marketing campaign commenced and it is easy to set up yourself or to pay another company to do it for you.