Archive for January 2009

Did you see the News at 10 last night? Item 2 was Broadband Britain. It somehow managed to climb in importance above the events in Gaza, in their editors eyes at least. The long and the short of it is this: the government have just produced a report that says that getting everyone in the country onto Superfast Broadband is going to be key to driving forward a strong, low carbon economy. Gordon Brown says that the ‘Information Superhighway’ (yes, he still calls it that) will be the 21st century equivalent of the rail and road network, key to driving prosperity.

What exactly do they mean by ‘superfast’ broadband? Well by 2012 they want every household in the country to have a 12Mbps connection. That’s fast enough to stream and download music and movies. To set that in context, the average broadband speed households currently get is 3.6MBps.

Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Yes it does, but where does that leave those companies already offering broadband services? Because central to the government’s plan to deliver the ‘next generation internet’ is the laying of fibre optic cable into every home. Apparently they’re already well on the way to having done this in many other EU countries.

In the UK, Virgin Media (previously called NTL /Telewest) have already spent £billions laying down fibre to about 40% of UK homes. And due to the pioneering nature of that bold move, and its relatively slow take up, thousands of investors have lost literally £billions in the process.

All the other broadband companies deliver their services over normal copper telephone wires, what we call ADSL. Most of them are basically reselling a BT service for a small margin. Other broadband companies have been frantically ‘unbundling the local loop’. This means they have been installing their equipment in local exchanges so that they no longer have to resell BT, and can take a higher margin. Its not quite on the Virgin scale, but 02, Tiscali, TalkTalk and Sky have spent hundreds of millions on this.

So now the government plan to spend money to give everyone fibre optic broadband, what happens exactly? Do they pay Virgin (who have the engineers and the expertise) to extend their network, and then give a bit of it to the other providers, according to their market share? Seems a bit messy, and I’m sure pretty unworkable. And unfair too, to those pioneers who lost the money in the first place.

And unfair to those companies (well Sky really) who already deliver music and movies through Satellite. If we’re all going to be getting it through fibre, is that the end of dishes on our houses? Once again its a bit unfair of the business pioneers at Sky. If you punish innovation – those who had the idea and delivered the service in the first place – by interfering in the market and not letting innovators realise the full potential of their investments, then guess what: no-one will innovate.

I seem to have got a bit off topic. The original point of this post was to ask what this all mean to those people building websites, people like us.

Well first of all it means that the potential audience for our websites are only going to increase, which is great. More people accessing the Internet means that there are more people that can see your website. And those people who are accessing will be dong so at a low cost and using a better service, so  they’re likely to spend more time online.

Second, the services and features they’re going to be able to use will be much richer, use more bandwidth, and be more interactive. When it comes to you using the Webeden website builder, this means you can add in some of the more advanced widgets and features.

To start with, make use of interactive features such as the Chat module. You can use this to chat in real time to visitors to your website.

Next, make sure you’re getting the most out of the Jukebox widget. Its a whole new way of entertaining your visitors as their check out your website. You can either add your own tracks or choose from the library available.

Make sure too that you use plenty of images on your website. When it comes to site design, a picture really can mean a thousand words. Far better to keep the blurb short and sweet, and show what you mean with an image. Press adverts are almost always 90% image and design, 10% text. Advertising professionals have spent a 100 years coming up with a formula that works, so save yourself a bit of time and copy it!

Lastly but perhaps most importantly, now and in the time of Broadband Britain, make sure you are using video on your site. You can either upload videos into Webeden, or stream them directly from YouTube onto your website. You can resize the video to any size, drag it round the page, change the aspect ratio, anything. Research indicates that users spend 3 to 4 times more time on a page with video.

Broadband Britain. Exciting, yes. Confusing, definitely. An opportunity for website builders? Too right. Leave a comment below.

You’re now an accomplished SEO website builder right? Have you put into place all the previous optimisation suggestions? Well take a deep breath, here are the final few.

5. Your page content: e.g. the text that is on your page

This includes all the contents on your page, particularly text and any ‘alt tags’ (alternative text) you have attached to your images. All this text is represented in the HTML and therefore gets picked up and used by search engines, so make sure it includes some of your keywords. Don’t just dump them on the page so that it becomes a mess of words (remember your site is read by people too!); you have to make sure that they are relevant and appropriate with the message of the page.

For example, on my site I’ve included the following passage on the ‘home’ page:

“Picking up and dropping off 24 hours per day!! If you want a west London Taxi call us now” and “So when you want to book a west London Taxi just think of us and call 0870 23 34 xx”.

Both of these include my “west London taxi” keyword which, with other references to “Taxi bookings” and other services I offer on the page, will support my rankings. But I’ve been careful to make sure it’s still readable and not overly crowded.

Search engines also pay attention to ‘Heading tags’ within your HTML, which are generally used to describe sections of your content. Words that appear within the headings are also deemed to be of greater importance in your site.

We generate three levels of heading tags on your pages based on your content: H1, H2 and H3. H1 is the most important and H3 the least. Any title text boxes that you put on your page are automatically turned into H2 headings in the HTML. The very first of the title text boxes that appears on your page (from top to bottom) is given the H1 status.

In body text boxes, if you use bold headings to separate text, i.e. adding the ‘bold’ style to create a heading within a text box, then these are given H3 status.

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

As well as the menu links on your page (which use the menu name as ‘alt’ text) links in text on your page are a good way of reinforcing your keywords and creating interlinking between your pages.

For example on my home page, I have created a link on the words “book a west london taxi” which links to my ‘taxi booking’ page. To do this in SiteMaker you have to be using a ‘body text box’ which is preset with standard or system fonts as only this type of font permits links (‘graphic fonts’ do not allow links to be set). Select the text box so that you can edit the contents and then highlight the text string by clicking and dragging. Go to the editor, click on the ‘link’ panel, choose ‘link to a page’ and then select your page. Finally, use ‘apply’ to save the page. This link will be correctly represented in your HTML along with the ‘anchor text’ which is the word or words on which the link is set, and will be read and indexed by search engines.

Additionally, on my Taxi Bookings page (and other pages), I have created links in the text back to my Home page using anchor text like “Joes West London taxis”, etc.

Try to make sure that all your pages have 1, 2 or 3 links to other pages using relevant keywords. Don’t get carried away and put in 10 to 20 links as this might be overkill and result in search engines penalising you for link spamming.

7. Images on your page

Your images can also be used to flag keywords as well as provide a text description of the image itself. For example on my home page I have set an ‘alt tag’ on the image to say “London Taxi image – book a west london taxi”. This additional text provides extra information about your site and the text description makes the contents more accessible to users with screen readers i.e. the visually impaired. You can also make these images link to other pages in your site which will further improve the interlinking of pages.

To create an ‘alt tag’ on your image, select the image, click on the ‘Style’ tab in the ‘Editor’ and then use the ‘alt tag’ button. Enter your text and choose whether you want to display the text on rollover (it will always be displayed in the HTML), click ‘Apply’ and you’re done.

8. Referral links to your pages

We used referral links to get the site listed in the first place, but they are also a good tool to improve the keyword relevancy and keep your site high in the rankings. It’s always worth asking other site owners in related fields to put a link back to your site and include some of your keywords in the link text. Not everyone will do this and it’s best not to pester people too much, but if you already have a relationship with another site owner, then this could be a good thing to do.

We’re going to talk about how to get inbound links (referral links) to your website in Part 6, so check back on this series for updates.

At last!

That’s it for optimising your website. How are you getting on? Leave us a comment below.

Here’s a link to our Search Engine Optimisation Guide Part 6.

The Hitwise newsletter is full of interesting information about website traffic, and what people are searching for online. This time around they’ve discussed the continuing growth of social networking websites in the UK.

Now you’d expect social networking websites (like Facebook, Myspace, Bebo) to be booming with traffic in December. Lots of people have more social time on their hands, are arranging nights out, and are generally getting into the festive social atmosphere.

On Christmas Eve, most people go off and spend time with our families, and don’t really emerge until New Years’ Eve. But do we really want to be cooped up with our relations? This research says a most resounding ‘NO!’

Christmas Day 2007 was a high point for traffic on Facebook. By the middle of the year that peak had been eclipsed, but yet again Facebook reached a new high on Christmas Day 2008. An incredible 4.7% off all website visits on Christmas day were for Facebook! So when we should have been drinking sherry, opening presents, gorging on turkey, watching TV and playing charades, we actually wanted to find out what our friends were up to!

Once you add in other social networking sites like YouTube, the numbers are even more amazing: 1 in 10 Internet visits during Christmas week were for social networking sites.

So when it comes to Christmas day, are you a Turkey Traditionalist? Or did you secretly boot up your laptop and check out Facebook? Leave us a comment below.

According to the latest research from ComScore, there are now more than a billion people on the Internet. The magic 1,000,000,000 figure was passed back in December.

In fact the actual number is supposed to be much larger than that, due to the way ComScore record their figures.

So where is everyone logging on from? Well the stats say that the Asia Pacific region boasts the most people online. And China tops the country league, eclipsing the US for the first time.

And as for the highest traffic sites, Google is king, with an incredible 778 million unique visitors. My sums show thats nearly four out of every five of us are using Google every month. What’s interesting is that websites are often well known within a country, but cross over the border and no-one uses them. Google have broken through country borders and been adopted almost everywhere.

Social Networking sites are also marching onwards – Facebook had 222 million visitors in December, up 127% on the previous year. They’re now towering over rival MySpace, who had just 125 million visitors. Why am I saying ‘just’ here? What I would do for that traffic!

Why is all this stuff relevant to us? Well as Website builders its really important to know that our audience is rapidly growing. It underlines the Internet as the most important way to reach people. And its cost effective too, especially with Webeden – which is good considering these credit-less times.

You’ve probably found the stat counter on your Sitemaker control panel. Have you used it yet? Leave us a comment and let us know how many visitors you’re getting.

Here’s another tutorial. Now we’re starting to get into more advanced features -this time its how to buy a domain name. We’ve made our domain registration service easy to use – follow these steps and you won’t go wrong. Don’t forgot that the Standard package and above come with a free domain.

Good luck buying your domains!

If you’ve already bought a domain name from WebEden and want to point it at your WebEden website, then take a look at our video tutorial on how to point your domain name.

Earlier this week I posted some news about Microsoft and the EU coming head to head over anti-competition issues. I also made reference to the question of whether or not Microsoft products are all that good anyway.

Nowhere more so than in online, websites and Search Engines can we see how far Microsoft lags behind. With a measly 4% share of the UK search market, people are voting with their mouse in opting (mostly) for Google instead.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft have just released their trading figures, which have been analysed a great deal in lots of places.

And it appears that not only do we, the users, not like Microsoft’s search products. They’re also costing the company money. Lots of it. In fact, Microsoft have lost $500m in their online business in the last 3 months, and that’s off the back of revenues of more than $850m.

Do you think that they should cut their losses and stick to desktop software? Or do they need to make online work because the next generation of software will be ‘in the cloud’, just like this website builder?

Update 23.01.09: Interestingly, Google have just released their trading figures too. Their revenue is up 18% year on year, at $5.7bn for the quarter. Now there’s a company who knows how to make money online! 

Leave us a comment and let us know.

Now we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of optimising your Webeden website. We’ve broken this section into two because we didn’t want to overwhelm you! Once you’ve learned all these SEO tricks you can apply them to your website, and if you decide to make a website again you can do it from the outset.

Introduction

OK, so you’ve done the work, got your keywords worked out for your different pages, got your site listed (registered) on the major search engines (see previous section), now what do you do? How do you make the changes in SiteMaker? Good question. Here is the ‘how-to’ for SiteMaker…

Now that you’ve got your list of keywords, you’re ready to start making some changes. These keywords (or phrases) are your target words that you want your site to be found with when people use the search engines. Therefore, you will want to make sure that they are used appropriately on your site and that there is consistency in how they appear.

However, this still needs to be done in a sensible fashion. Just dumping a bunch of words on your site that don’t really make sense or fit with your site or page can lead to problems, so this needs to be done carefully.

My keywords

For my site (www.joeslondontaxis.com) I chose a set of keywords which were:

“joes london taxis, london taxi, west london taxi, hammersmith taxi, london minicab, west london minicab, london airport minicab, london airport taxi, london taxis, west london taxis, hammersmith taxis, london minicab, west london minicab, london airport minicab, london airport taxis”

This is the general set that I chose as appropriate for the different markets I am interested in, e.g. mostly in west London and including airport services. I further tailored them to each of my pages to make sure that they were better matched.

For example on my ‘taxi bookings’ page (www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking) I used:

“book a london taxi, london taxi booking, west london taxi, book a minicab, london minicab booking, joes london taxis, london taxi, west london taxi, hammersmith taxi, london minicab, west london minicab”

This contained some overlap with my site keywords, but it also contained more specific words/phrases to do with my bookings page. Using these two pages as an example I entered the keywords onto the pages in such a way that they would be usefully picked up by search engines.

Step By Step

If you remember from the first section, we had 8 different areas to optimise. I’ll go through each of these in turn:

1. The URL (or address) of your page

This can be the URL of your site, or indeed the URL of a particular page. In my case I would use www.joeslondontaxis.com for the site, or  www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking for the Bookings page.

This URL should be relevant to the contents of the page and use (if appropriate) some of your keywords. For example, my company ‘Joe’s London Taxis’ is also my domain name, and my bookings page is named /taxibooking (not page1.htm). If you have a brand name that isn’t specific to your product, e.g. Youtube provides videos online, don’t worry about that, just make sure it’s one of your keywords, as it may be something people search for.

You can change the names of your pages in the ‘pages’ panel within the SiteMaker toolbar.


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…”

The ‘Title’ tag in the HTML is the name you see at the top of the browser bar when you visit the page. The Keywords metadata is also hidden in the HTML and gives the search engine an idea of what your site is about based on particular words and phrases. The Descriptions metadata is again hidden in the HTML and is a short text summary of your site.

All three are important to get correct and consistent as they are used by search engines, though always in context with the rest of your site contents. In SiteMaker there are a couple of ways of setting these things. We let you set a default for all pages (useful if you have hundreds), but we also allow you to set these for individual pages, giving you more control.

If you go to ‘Edit’ -> ‘Admin’ -> ‘Site information’ you’ll see the ‘Site name’, ‘Site keywords’ and ‘Site description’ fields – we can ignore ‘Site email’ here. These will be the default metadata values that are inserted into the HTML for all of your pages, unless other values are added to the individual page settings themselves.

For individual pages, go to ‘Edit’ -> ‘Page settings’ -> ‘Meta data’ and you will see the ‘Page title’, ‘Keywords’ and ‘Description’ fields which insert the values into the HTML for that particular page.

For example, with my site I chose to set the default keywords to:

Keywords – “joes london taxis, london taxi, west london taxi, hammersmith taxi, london minicab, west london minicab, london airport minicab, london airport taxi, london taxis, west london taxis, hammersmith taxis, london minicab, west london minicab, london airport minicab, london airport taxis”

Description – “Joes London Taxis provides taxi services to all central and west London areas. If you want a west London taxi, call us on 0870 23 34 xx”

These appear on every page I created and will remain unless I generate a different set for specific pages using the ‘Page Settings’ panel. For my Taxi Bookings page, I decided to create a different set and changed these to:

Title – “Taxi booking page – book a London taxi”

Keywords – “book a london taxi, london taxi booking, west london taxi, book a minicab, london minicab booking, joes london taxis, london taxi, west london taxi, hammersmith taxi, london minicab, west london minicab”

Description – “Use this page to book a west London taxi with Joes London Taxis. Book by phone or by email.”

You can see how simple it is to make some adjustments to the keywords/description so that it is more specific to the actual page you are on, without having to change them all.

Summary

We’ve shown you lots of ways you can start to optimised your webeden website. Be sure to check back next week for another host of stuff you can do!

Oh, and let us know how you’re getting on so far. Anyone getting great results? If not, what seems to be going wrong? Leave us a comment below. Here’s a link to our Search Engine Optimisation Guide Part 5.

Microsoft is making headlines again, for all the wrong reasons. EU politicians are protesting about the perceived anti-competitive nature of bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with the Windows operating system.

Its not the first time Microsoft and the European have come head to head. Only last year, Microsoft was fined almost £700m by the EU over other competition issues involving desktop PCs.

But is it really anti competitive for Microsoft to try and get you to use their browser over any others? Well not really, except for the way they do it. By making IE the default browser on any PC that runs Windows, Microsoft are guaranteeing them $bns of future revenue generated by you, the user. This is because IE includes certain standard settings which means when you search the web you will probably search using a Microsoft search engine, and they will make money from every ad you click on. And it also means they get a direct line to your PC, making sure that they can market their latest products to you. At its worst case, your computer automatically updates to their latest product, without you necessarily knowing it.

Maybe that would be OK too, if it meant that you were getting the best product. I remember a time in the 80s and maybe even the early 90s when I was glad to get all the Microsoft products by default on my PC. It meant that everything fitted together, and there was only once place to go to get updates or to sort out problems.

But then an operating system came along called Linux. Linux was (and is) a free version of Windows, built by thousands of contributing developers and constantly updated, modified and enhanced. It sounded great, but for a home user it was also a bit scary. What do you do if it breaks? Who can you call?

In the last four or five years, however, Linux or ‘open source’ free products have really hit the mainstream. One of the biggest is the web browser Firefox. Even if you haven’t heard tried it, you’ve probably heard of it. (You can download it for free from Mozilla here). There’s also the open source version of Microsoft Office from OpenOffice.org. It does all the things that MS Office does, only its free.

For probably the first time in the history of the home PC, the general public are using the alternatives to Microsoft. And if my experience is anything to go by, the alternatives are actually a lot better. If you don’t believe me, then let me ask you: which search engine do you use? If you’re using Microsoft’s Live.com, then you’re in the minority. In fact just 4% of UK users opt for a Microsoft search engine. The reason is that the rest of us think that Google and Yahoo’s results are more relevant, easier to read, and are therefore more trustworthy.

The EU’s argument is that “Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.”

There seems little doubt that by controlling the operating system of most PCs, Microsoft have been able to ensure that most of the software that most of us use are Microsoft products too. But seeing as when we use alternatives (Firefox, OpenOffice) they seem much easier, quicker, and crash less, it makes you wonder how much better PCs would be if the EU had got involved 20 years ago.

You’re a website builder, and are therefore by default an ‘influencer’ of Internet opinion. Do you use Microsoft software on you PC? Or are you a Linux diehard? Leave us a comment below.

Here’s tutorial number four: how to create links. Once again its a fairly simple area, but one that is important to get right. The ‘Web’ is really a web of links, and broken links are a real problem. Your website needs to link together logically – its the key to making it easy to use. And if you link to other sites make sure you follow these instructions to the letter!

What do you think? Let us know what you’d like to see next.

Ever wondered about how global warming is going to start to affect your life? Well I bet you didn’t think it would be this! The story first appeared back in November, and it is both amusing and scary, depending on your perspective.

There’s a small Polynesian island nation called Tuvalu, nestled deep and lonely in the south pacific. It has a population of around 10,000, and unless you were a local you probably hadn’t heard of it until 1999, where the country made some headlines in the domain name space.

This is because Tuvalu’s country domain extension is .tv. Verisign saw the money making potential of this domain and they cut a deal with the government there, whereby Verisign marketed and sold .tv domain names, and Tuvalu took a share of the profits. (OK, it wasn’t quite a simple as that, but that’s how things ended up).

Since then thousands have been registered – .tv domains have never been the most popular domain extensions, but are certainly well respected. Well known ones include the official Channel 5 website five.tv.

The thing about Tuvalu is that, well, its not very tall. Just 5 metres above sea level at its highest point. And the thing about sea levels is that, well, they’re set to rise. Maybe just a little, or maybe more. But if the highest point on the island is  5 metres, its easy to see that Tuvalu may not be around forever.

So what happens to .tv if Tuvalu sinks? Well ICANN, (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), who are responsible for all things domain related have a policy on the matter. They say that if a country ceases to exist, then so does its domain extension. Users will be given a reasonable length of time to transition to another domain extension, but ultimately that will be it for .tv domains.

You may think we’re a long way from that point, and of course ICANN policy may change. But if you’ve only got a .tv domain, it might be a good time to buy a domain with a different extension now!

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