Archive for December 2008

We’re back again for probably the last post of the year. Before we get weighed down by the expectations of the New Year celebrations, we wanted to let you know about a couple of updates to the Webeden.co.uk website builder.

First off, we’ve carried out an upgrade to the video player: we’re now using YouTube’s own API. What exactly does that mean? Well its all about how YouTube delivers data to your webeden website, and the long and the short of it is that its a huge boost to reliability. Basically, if YouTube change how they serve videos or upgrade how their system works, you don’t need to worry about the video on your website failing. We will automatically find any changes and make sure the video feed is kept live.

The one thing you need to be on top of is whether the video owner has marked the video as “private” or “embed only”. If they’ve done that, the video won’t be available via our player, and will not therefore run on your site.
Second off, we’ve added four new templates to choose from. Check them out, we hope you like them.

And lastly, and perhaps more boringly, we’ve reorganised the file manager a little bit, which including an ‘all’ folder. This should make finding things a bit easier.

Have a play with these updates and let us know what you think, using the form below.

OK, that’s it. Have a great New Year, and we wish you happy Website Building in 2009!

27.1.09 Update. If you want to find out how to add YouTube videos to your own website, then watch our how to add YouTube Video tutorial now!

Getting to the top of the search engines is one of the most cost effective ways to market your website. The ‘organic listings’  or the left and side of the the search engine results page can drive thousands of visitors to your site. However, getting your website listed there has always thought to have been somthing of a ‘dark art’. But it doesn’t have to be a mystery! We’ve put together a 5 part guide to show you how to do it with your webeden.co.uk website builder.

Part 1 – The ground rules

Search Engine Optimisation with SiteMaker is much like Search Engine Optimisation with any website. The key is to make sure that your site contents are focused and relevant to the keywords that you wish to rank highly on. This means making a real effort in a number of places to make sure the terms you use are consistent. And don’t be too ambitious, you’re never going to beat the big guys if your words are too general and competitive.

This guide is based on our experience and generally accepted guidelines on how to improve website search rankings. It doesn’t guarantee results, but will point you in the right direction ;-). If you want more specialist help, employ an SEO consultant, or read the huge range of SEO articles available online.

Throughout this guide we make reference to a website www.joeslondontaxis.com which was built using SiteMaker to test the theories in the articles and show how to get practical results. All results were correct at the time this guide was written.

Ground rules!

Firstly nobody can guarantee you positions in the search rankings. Search engines keep their search algorithms very secret and update them regularly to make sure they produce true and accurate results.

The second thing to know is that SEO takes real work. You’re going to have to give it some thought and make changes to all the pages in your site. This will take time and you may want to adjust things after a few months as you start to see results. The Internet is a great potential market but you need to invest time and effort in marketing your site if you want it to be successful. SEO is a good way of doing this but like most things it doesn’t always come easy.

Next, it’s going to take time for your rankings to improve. Search engines can take months to even list your site and then further time to assign you a rank. They will then review your site periodically and check for updates but the frequency of this can vary. So don’t expect too much too soon. Be patient, build your credibility and presence, and good things will come. Many sites that rank highly have been around a long, long time.

And finally, SEO isn’t everything. There’s never an excuse for not marketing your site in other ways if you’re serious about getting it noticed. Traditional offline marketing, online marketing (banners or AdWords), putting your URL on letterheads, posting it on industry specific directories/message boards, etc., can all help and these actions will also support your SEO efforts too. So don’t forget to look at other forms of marketing too.

First things first

So now the ground rules are out of the way, here are the basics. If you are building a new site, you have two challenges: getting your site listed, and improving its rankings. Even getting your site listed is a subject surrounded in controversy but it also closely relates to how you get it optimised.

In terms of optimisation it’s important to know that search engines look for consistency and relevancy within a number of different areas of your in-page content and within your referral links. These include:

1.    The URL (or web address) of your page, e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, or www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking, etc.

2.    Your Page title in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company”, or “London taxi bookings page”

3.    Your Keywords metadata in the HTML, e.g. “London taxis, London taxi, Joes taxis, West London taxi, etc.”

4.    Your Description metadata in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company provides taxi services…”

5.    Your page content, e.g. the text that is on your page, including headings (or section titles) which are treated differently from body text

6.    Links on your page, including the anchor text, e.g. the text on which the link is set

7.    Images on your page, including the name of the image file, and the link (if any) set on the image

8.    Referral links to your pages, including the anchor text of the referral link, e.g. a link on another site referring to your site

9.    Points 1-7 are easily within your control as they all relate to the contents of your site. Point 8 requires linking to your site from other external sites, which is less easy to achieve, though there are a number of ways in which you can go about doing this.

Remember, while search engines are mechanical they are not stupid! They are in a constant battle with link spammers who attempt to manipulate ranking results for profit. Optimising your pages and encouraging genuine link backs from other relevant sites will help but getting involved in link spamming and other dodgy techniques such as spamming keywords or content can get your site black listed. So more isn’t always best, make sure links, content and keywords are all genuine.

This guide will go through each of these points in turn and discuss how they are relevant to SiteMaker as well as how to go about achieving each one of them.

Like I said, none of this is solid fact, but it is based on perceived wisdom and what little guidance search engines give out. However, we also want to encourage debate. So if you know something useful or have found a good resource please let us know using the form below.

What’s next? Here’s a link to our Search Engine Optimisation Guide Part 2, which is all about choosing keywords.

We thought we’d let you know about a couple of exciting developments that we’ve just made to our Sitemaker platform. The first is one that lots of you have been asking for so we’re really pleased to be able to get it out the door.

The news is: we’ve just added Google Maps to the Webeden.co.uk website builder. This means that you can easily add a Google Map to your website, and make it easy for your website visitors to find your physical location.

Maps are one of the Internet’s ‘pillar’ applications – its often the favoured way for people to get location based information. Up to now, when you’ve wanted to show your location, we’ve made you link to an outside map website. Now you can add Google maps directly into the pages of your webeden.co.uk website. There’s no need to send your visitors off to an external resource.

Apart from having a map, you can also add a location beacon that shows your exact location. And website visitors can manipulate the map by either zooming or dragging it around, to help them work out where they are.

Have a go – log into your control panel, its in the functional folder and is called ‘Google Maps’. Once you’ve done so we’d love to see the result, so post a comment below to let us know what you think.

6.4.09 Update: We’ve now produced a video tutorial to show you how to add a Google Map to your website.

Here’s our second tuturial, we’re keeping things basic at the moment but don’t worry we’ll get on to some more complicated stuff soon! This one is all about how to edit text:

What do you think? Leave us a comment and let us know what you’d like to see next.

Back in September we had the exciting launch of our domain name registration service. As you probably know, all websites built using the webeden.co.uk system are automatically given a sub-domain of webeden.co.uk. Something like yourname.webeden.co.uk.

Before September, if you wanted to personalise your webeden.co.uk website with your own domain name, we sent you off to buy one from a domain name registrar. You then had to register your domain, and either point it or forward it to you webeden.co.uk website.

In September our domain name registration service launched, which meant that you could now register a domain name with Webeden.co.uk and automatically set it up with your webeden.co.uk website. In actual fact we gave your a free domain name with our Standard website builder packages, and upwards.

Since then, thousands of you have taken advantage of our domain name service. Which is great of course! But we’re wondering how many of you are getting the full benefit of what you get with your domain name? One of the great things about webeden.co.uk domain names is that they come with free email services for up to 5 people!

This means you can use the domain name you registered with Webeden.co.uk to send and receive email for free. So you can be you@yourdomain.co.uk rather than you@hotmail.com or you@yahoo.co.uk.

And what’s better, is that we enable you to do this for up to 5 people. So you can give away personalised email addresses to the other people involved with your website, or anyone else you choose. That might be colleagues or employees, friends, or family.

The best thing about using your free email service on your own domain is that it is entirely personalised and unique to you. You’re no longer one of the homogenous millions who are using the well known free email services, but you stand out from the crowd with your email address. By the way, its entirely free to use too!

And of course if you’re running a business, it makes it really easy for any customers or suppliers to remember your email address – its just you@yourdomain.co.uk, which of course is exactly the same domain name that you’re using for your website address.

If you’ve already registered your domain name elsewhere and want to take advantage of our free email service, you just need to transfer-in the domain to webeden.co.uk. Just go to our domain names page, type in your domain name and press ‘transfer’. You will also need to log into the control panel of the domain registrar where your domain is currently registered and change the IPSTAG to GANDI.

If you haven’t yet got a domain, then register a domain name now. Just click on the ‘domains’ tab and type in the domain name that you’d like to buy. You’ll then be able to use it as the web address of your webeden.co.uk website, and of course use it for the free email services.

The free email service can be set up and used via Webmail (where you access the email service through your webeden.co.uk control panel, similar to hotmail). This means you can send or receive your personal email from literally any computer connected to the Internet. In order to set up and access your webmail just go to webeden.co.uk, click on the domain name page, click ‘manage domains’ and you will see a list of your domains, along with a link to ‘set up and access your email’.

Or you can use a desktop client such as Outlook or Outlook express to send and receive email from your desktop. This is referred to as POP email. Here are all the details you need when setting up a new email account using your webeden domain name:

POP/IMAP Account
Server name : mail.gandi.net
Port : leave the default setting (110 for POP, 143 for IMAP, 995 for POP SSL, or 993 for IMAP SSL).
TLS or SSL : Yes
Username : your full e-mail address (including @yourdomain.tld)
Password : provide the password you had defined when creating your e-mail account

SMTP Account
Name server : mail.gandi.net
Port : 25, 465 (with SSL) or 587 (try one or the other)
TLS or SSL : yes
SMTP Authentication : yes, using the same settings as for the POP / IMAP account

For advanced users: each mailbox can have an unlimited number of names that go to the same mailbox, often called ‘aliases’. You can also set up email forwarding to another email address such as a hotmail or gmail account.

If all this makes sense to you, then start taking advantage of the free email service with your domain name. If you’d like any further help or advice, or just want to let us know how you’re using your free domain and free email services, then leave us a comment below.

Some people learn best through trial and error, others prefer to read a book. But one things for sure, a video tutorial is without doubt a handy way to find out about something new. We’ve put together a series of video tutorials to help you get started with our free website builder. Here’s the first one:

What do you think? Let us know what else you’d like to see a tutorial on, and we’ll make it!

Why did you build a website? OK, there’s lots of different reasons, I know. Some of you want to show photos of you, your friends and family, your club or your band. For others its a chance to have some fun, let go creatively, express yourself. And lots of others have a website for their business, a chance to showcase their company, their products, or to sell something.

But all websites have a critical need, something without which they have no purpose. Any guesses? That’s right, its visitors. Without visitors, your website is just a light on in an empty room – if no one sees it then there’s little point.

Now lots of people will see your website because you tell them about it, by word of mouth. Or maybe you put your web address on your email signature, on your business card or your offline advertising. But the way that people usually find websites for the first time is through a search engine.

The search engine (and we’re talking Google here, since in the UK Google is behind 80% of all searches on the web) is the starting point for over 65% of all journeys on the Internet. So all those times someone sits down at a computer without a definite idea of which website they want to visit, in most cases they will start by carrying out a search. If they’re looking to buy something, there’s an even greater likelihood of starting with a search engine: four out of five journeys on the web that end with a transaction have started with a search. So if you want to drive potential customers to your website you absolutely have to appear in the Search Engine Results page.

Those users will decide what website to visit based on the results they get when the have put their search terms into the search field and press ’search’. Therefore, its in this page of results that you want your website to appear.

(By the way, I’m not talking about the sponsored listings here, which usually appear on the right hand side. Its the left hand side or ‘organic results’ that I’m on about. We’ll let you know in a subsequent post about how to use the sponsored listings to drive quality traffic to your website).

And here (at last I’m getting round to the point) is where your Webeden.co.uk website can really excel. A few of the more advanced of your may know that that your website is produced in a programming language called ‘flash’. Flash is fantastic for producing really compelling, engaging and great looking websites. But its traditional shortcoming is that the search engines have been unable to ‘read’ it. The way that search engines find out what your website is all about, and therefore which searches to make you appear for, is by sending out little robot programmes called ‘Spiders’ to your website. These spiders ‘read’ your text and the meta information (an invisible bit of code that sits at the top of your website) on your site and tells the search engine what your website is all about.

Well the problem has always been that these ’spiders’ were unable to ‘read’ flash. They couldn’t tell what your website was all about, so there they didn’t know what searches you might be relevant for.

The types of website that spiders do really like are built in a language called HTML.

Here’s what we think is quite cool about Webeden.co.uk. We let you build a website in flash, so you can produce something exciting and great looking. And we then, behind the scenes, copy the flash and build the same thing in HTML. We make this HTML version sit behind the flash. So whilst you concentrate on producing a great looking website, we make sure that website is really easy for the search engines to ‘read’.

In fact its even better than that. On the Internet there is an independent group of people who set down the standards of website programming. They write a code of conduct of what is and is not acceptable for websites. Its a voluntary code, and if you subscribe to it and if you follow its rules, makes sure that a website is fully accessible to any person using any browser.

This organisation is called the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C for short – you may well have seen their logo before, it certainly appears on millions of websites.

What I’m coming round to is the fact that every Webeden.co.uk website is fully W3C compliant, so it meets the highest standards for an HTML website, even though all you ever see is the funky looking flash one.

All this means that when it comes to getting ’spidered’ or read by the search engines, a webeden,co.uk website is very very good, and your website stands a stronger than average chance of appearing. There’s lots of ways in which you can boost your position in the search engines, and we’ll be giving you a whole guide to this is 2009.

Well that’s it from me. If you having any great successes or failures in the search engines why not share them with us – afterall we may have a tip that can help you to the top…

One for the geography students out there. By far the greatest majority of webeden’s site visits come from the US, UK and Europe, there’s no surprise there, because that’s where we tend to spend our advertising dollars/pounds/euros.

Some of the more remote (to us anyway) website visitors this month have come from

Tehran, Iran, 2 visits. Kathmandu, Nepal, 2 visits, and from Porto Velho, Brazil 3 visits.

How do we know this? We run a stats package (Google analytics) which gives us data on almost everyone who visits our site. Why do we do this? We want to know where the interest in products is coming from and adjust our ad targeting accordingly.

There’s nothing difficult about this at all. If you want to see who’s visiting your site, we think the best free stats package on the market is found at www.google.com/analytics. And Yes. You can use it with your webeden website.

So go on, give it a go. Just go to ‘admin’ on your sitemaker toolbar, choose ’statistics’ from the drop down menu and you’ll find a ’sign up to google analytics’ button in the toolbox.

Tara X.