Archive for March 2009

You might think that here at WebEden we bang on too much about search engines. But as the recent Hitwise data shows, if you’re building a website then you need to know about search engines too. Search engines will probably be the biggest single source of traffic to your website. So they are a fundamental part of any website project.

We’ve previously talked about the Google keyword tool, where you can enter a keyword and find all the other words that are similar to that keyword. It will also give you a rough idea of how many searches per month there are for that keyword. This is a really useful tool to use when deciding what keywords you want to use for your Search Engine Optimisation programme.

A few months ago Google released another tool which has been seen as an enhancement of the keyword tool above. Google Insights for Search is designed to help website owners understand even more about which keywords are right for their website.

It calculates total searches for keywords, looks at the data historically, and produces graphs to show how a particular search term has trended over the last few years.

It then allows you to categorise the search trend by industry sector (called ‘verticals’) and geographical region.

Here’s a good illustration of how useful that can be, by looking at the search term ‘apple’. The vast majority of searches using the word ‘apple’ will be related to the computing brand ‘Apple’, as in ‘apple mac’. Lets say you’re a fruit seller, you obviously don’t want your website to appear high up for searches related to ‘apple mac’, but you still want a clear idea of the number of searches that are relevant to apples the fruit. You can use Google insights allows you to filter the results to just those that fall within the Food & Drink category. The result is the search trends, and related search terms, for just those searches about apple the fruit.

Lets say too that you’re hoping to sell apples online, but just to your local area or region. You can filter by geography to get just those apple related searches that are specifically about apples the fruit, in your area.

Seeing search volume trends can be really useful if you sell a seasonal product. If you sell valentines cards, then type ‘valentines cards’ into Google Insights and you can get a historical guide to the peaks and troughs of that search term. As you can see from the screen grab below, searches for valentines cards actually peak on the 11th February, so anyone looking to maximise sales of valentines cards need to make sure they’re maximising their marketing efforts before this time, and holding plenty of stock on this day.

Google Insights is also really useful if you’re thinking about stocking a new product on your website, or choosing to no longer sell another. Before you make any decisions, type the product name into Google Insights and see whether searches for it are going up or down. Anything that is climbing fast is clearly rising in demand, so its probably a good idea to sell it. If the trend is downward, then you might not want to restock that item when your current stock runs down.

The draw back of this product is that Google won’t actually put a figure on the number of searches for each term, but rather expresses the trend line as a percentage of the total number of searches. And bear in mind, search volumes are gong ever upwards, so if the number of searches for a using a particular keyword is remaining static, this is actually represented as a decreasing trend line.

Despite this, Google Insights will still show you a clear and accurate guide to the level of interest in your products, and the related search terms. You get all this data historically, and it’s all free.

Have a go at using the tool, and then leave your feedback below.

HitWise UK, the online website traffic measurement company, have just published some great website statistics for 2008. Its all about the top websites, with the highest traffic, the ones with the most visitors; and all that kind of thing.

Its useful to see who is being really successful at generating traffic to their website, since you can try and emulate the way they’ve generated success.

First off, its clothes shops. UK internet traffic to online clothes shops went up almost 18% between February 2008 and February 2009. This website category now makes up 1 in every 10 visits on online shops.

Here’s the top 10

1. www.next.co.uk
2. www.asos.com
3. www.topshop.com
4. www.riverisland.com
5. www.newlook.com
6. www.mandmdirect.com
7. www.dorothyperkins.co.uk
8. www.mothercare.com
9. www.monsoon.co.uk
10. www.jdsports.co.uk

Food and drink websites are also booming in the UK, due to the economic climate, since more people are looking to entertain at home.

Here’s the top ones:

1. www.bbc.co.uk/food
2. uktv.co.uk/food
3. www.deliaonline.com
4. www.waitrose.com
5. www.bbcgoodfood.com
6. www.channel4.com/food
7. www.qype.co.uk
8. www.jamieoliver.com
9. www.laithwaites.co.uk
10. www.sugarvine.com

The economic downturn and improved online services has also resulted in a 13% increase in traffic to Government websites.

Again, here’s the top 10:

1. www.metoffice.gov.uk
2. www.direct.gov.uk
3. www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk
4. www.hmrc.gov.uk
5. www.nhs.uk
6. www.dvla.gov.uk
7. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
8. www.opsi.gov.uk
9. www.dsa.gov.uk
10. www.standards.dfes.gov.uk

Is your website one of the the top 10 in your market? Even if you already are, take a look at the keywords your most successful competitors are targeting, and make sure you are using them too. As we showed you in our Search Engine Optimisation guide, its really easy to use the WebEden Sitebuilder to change your keywords. Any comments, please leave them below.

Another great tool to add to your WebEden website is a calendar. Its a neat Web 2.0 feature that lets your users interact with your website. This ‘humanises’ the relationship between you and your website visitors, and means that they will spend more time on your website, and are more likely to return too. Watch the tutorial and then try using the website creator to add a calendar to your site.

Leave a comment and lets know how you get on!

Bit of an unusual post for the blog this one, but we’ve had a few enquiries so we thought we’d make it easier for all of you.

What’s happening?

In short, we have a small bug in the Sitemaker system which sometimes results in your website menu disappearing. This is called a ‘bad save’. If this happens don’t worry: your menu hasn’t disappeared, it has just been placed off the visual part of the website.

What do I do to get my menu back?

1. From your control panel click the ‘design’ menu. Then click ‘Menu’. You’ll then get a dialogue box that looks like this:

2. Click on the ‘Reposition and Scale’ button. You then get another dialogue box that looks like this:

Can you see how the ‘X’ value in this box has been set at -17654? What’s happening is that your menu has been placed 17,654 pixels off the left hand side of your website.

To get it back, just change the ‘x’ value to ‘20’. Boom – your menu is back!

You can now move the menu around as normal.

This bug will be fixed with the next update of our website builder system.

What is the biggest story in the world? The most well known, the one we’re all interested in, one that will be handed down from parent to child throughout the ages?

Is it the birth of Jesus? Or a biblical classic such as Noah’s Ark? What about something a bit closer to home: 1066 and all that? The battle of Britain? The story of England winning the world cup?

If you let Internet traffic answer this question, you’ll get an answer you didn’t expect.

The financial crisis has sparked an unprecedented interest in financial news. The Financial Times website FT.com has reported a 300 per cent growth in page views since the start of 2008.

And the BBC’s business pages recorded an all time peak after reports of the collapse of Lehman Brothers broke. The story headed ‘Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy got more than 1.9 million page views, which makes it the most popular story since the launch of the website.

OK, maybe not the greatest story ever told, but one thing is for sure: If you want more traffic on your site, makes sure you build a website that includes the latest financial bad news!

When you register a domain name, it’s an exciting time. You’re more than likely to be buying the domain for a new website you’re building. You’ve got a new project, a new direction, and you’re full of ideas. But its really important to remember that when you register a domain, you do so for only a certain period of time. The standard registration period for a .co.uk is 2 years, and for .com, .net and .org its often just 1 year.

Once you’ve registered your domain, you can do whatever you want with it: use it for your website address; point it at your website; use it for your email address. Whatever you want.

So what happens at the end of that registration period? Well if you do nothing, then the domain name falls out of your ownership and is returned to the ‘pool’ of unregistered domain names at the registry. So it’s really important to remember: if you continue to want that domain name, then you have to make sure you renew it before the registration period is over.

If the registration period finishes and you don’t remember to renew it, but decide you still want your domain, it’s not the end of the world. You can always re-register the domain, and – providing no-one else has registered it in the meantime – you get the domain back.  However there is a risk that someone might have jumped in there and registered it, especially if the domain name has a value. A domain name builds up value over time if you do certain things with it. For example, if your website starts to appear high in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), your domain name will have value simply due to the number of people who visit it. Or if your domain name is a close match to your brand or business name, it has a value because potential customers may type it directly into their address bar when trying to find your website. Visitors arriving through this method are called direct ‘type in’ traffic.

If a competitor gets hold of your domain name, they would benefit from getting all the visitors that would have arrived at your website though both the search engines and the direct ‘type in’ traffic. All of a sudden, the people who would have bought from you have the opportunity to buy from them instead.

So you can see that it’s important to make sure your domains are renewed so that no-one else gets a chance to register them. It can be so lucrative to register a domain that someone forgets to renew, that there’s even an industry sprung up around it. Its called ‘dropcatching’.

You might expect people with personal websites, or small businesses to not always renew their domain names. First of all, there’s the expense. There area large number of frequently used domain extensions (apart from .com, .net, .org there’s others like .info. me, and a whole bunch of popular country extensions too). And there’s also the variety of ways in which most company names can be written, as we discussed recently with the expensive domain ToysRus forked out for. It can therefore be an expensive business buying all your relevant domain names. And once you own quite a few, it can be hard to stay organised. The chances are your domains were registered at different times, maybe with different registrars, and for different periods of times. So its not surprising that occasionally domain names lapse without getting renewed.

But what about if you’re a big company? You’re organised, you have spreadsheets, you have budgets, and you have systems, so that your domains stay up to date, don’t you?

Well not in the recent case of Texas based ‘Silicon labs’, As first reported over on domain name wire, despite being a billion dollar company, they recently forgot to renew their domain ‘siliconlabs.com’. As soon as it became available, it was ‘dropcatched’ by an individual in Utah who registered it and then pointed the domain at a website full of adverts. This is another version of cyber squatting that we blogged about recently.

The company is now going through a domain arbitration process to recover the domain, but each day that goes by they lose money. And someone in Utah is making money out of that!

This shows the importance to having a ‘domain name management’ policy in place. For individuals and small business, make sure you have written down all the domains that you own; their renewal date; where you registered them. Make sure also that all of the emails from each registrar are set to go to you, rather than a variety of people in your business. Don’t rely on the domain registration company to remind you to renew.

One of the easiest way to manage your domains is to have them all in once place. You could choose WebEden for that, and transfer your domains to us. Don’t forget you get free email services with every domain.

So have you had any experiences of losing a domain name, or have you done some dropcatchng yourself? Leave us a comment below.

On average, almost half of all traffic that arrives on a website comes through search engines. This is according to recent research published by Internet traffic measurement company Hitwise UK.

Whilst in January 2008 search engines contributed 37.1% of total traffic to websites, by January 2009 this had climbed to a whopping 40.5%.

Here’s a graph from HitWise:

Apart from anything, this shows that if you want more visitors to your website, you need to make sure that your website appears high up in the search engine results page (SERPs). Read our guide to search engine optimisation to boost your website up the SERPs.

The dominance of search engines in website traffic is a huge opportunity for small businesses. Big brands used to be able to dominate the media landscape. What small company has the money to buy advertising on television, in national newspapers or in glossy magazines? But when it comes to search engines the game has changed. You don’t need big  budgets to reach out to potential customers, just an understanding of how search works, and a product or service that people want.

The flip side is that search has made it harder for large companies to ‘own’ consumer interest. Just because you’re a big brand it doesn’t mean you’re going to appear high in the search results. And spending lots of money on search doesn’t necessarily mean lots of traffic. A well optimised website of a small business or an individual will beat a poorly optimised big company website every time.

Just search for a common household product and you’ll see that the results page is full of unknown websites and unknown brands. None of these could afford to buy airtime of on TV. Before search engines, how would these brands have been able to reach potential customers?

The other interesting information arising from this research is the way in which we are now using search engines. 90% of the top 1,500 terms were brand specific. This means that people are using search engines to navigate the web, rather than typing a website’s address directly into the address bar. That’s the same sort of user behviour as seen in Japan, where people almost always use search engines rather than type in a domain name.

Do you a have a big budget competitor that you’ve managed to beat in the SERPs, using the WebEden website making tool? Leave us a comment below.

Google Street View, the street mapping service we talked about last month, has now finally launched in the UK.

And as expected, it has already caused controversy amongst some privacy campaigners.

Google Street View is a street level database of 360 degree images from 25,000 miles of UK roads. The images were taken from a camera on the top of a specially adapted car, and show many streets from 25 UK towns and cities.

Since the Google Steet View car simply drives past taking photos of everything visible from the road, privacy groups have suggested that this is an invasion of privacy since Google are not asking anyone’s permission.

To overcome these concerns, Google have made it possible for images to be removed from the database. What remains instead is just a blank space, with the message ‘this image is no longer available’. However, canny users can just move down the street and look back on the scene instead – in order to see what has been deleted.

Google have already removed hundreds of photos following complaints from individuals. It is thought the images that have been deleted so far contain revealing images of people’s homes, and someone being arrested.

Google have said that anyone can have their images removed if they ask. In an attempt to minimise removal from the database, they have already deployed face blurring technology.

Google for its part says that it is merely showing what is visible from a public road, and that any person there might see the same.

Street View is already live in the US and 8 other countries too.

Have you found your street or yourself on Streetview yet? Leave us a comment below.

For a while now we’ve been giving away a free domain name with website builder packages. We’ve also made it possible for you to buy a domain name too.

It’s not always easy to find the right domain name for your website. If you’re a company, or a brand, or even a club for that matter, you want a domain name that’s close to your company name. For example, if you’re running a taxi company called Joe’s Taxis, then your ideal domain name would probably be:
joestaxis.co.uk
joestaxis.com

But what if when you’re looking for your domain, you find that someone has already registered it? If you suspect that they have registered it for financial gain at your expense, then you’re having an encounter with a ‘Cyber Squatter’.

Cyber squatting is the registering of domain names that would otherwise be used by companies or brands, that are a close match to that company’s name or brand. Cyber Squatters do this for financial gain. They can make money by placing adverts on the domain name’s website, or by directing visitors to that domain name towards a competitor website of the brand owner – for money of course!

There have been some high profile cases of cyber squatting over the years. Most recently, when Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch, cyber squatters quickly moved in and registered the domain bankofamericamerrilllynch.com before either bank could do so.

The domain name registries – the organisations that administer domain names – have policies in place to make sure that brand owners can legally recover their brand’s domain names. If brand owners can prove that the domain name has been registered by someone else in order for that person to gain financially from the brand value of that domain name, then they are legally able to recover it. However, the domain reconciliation processes take time and costs money. And due to the sheer number of ways you can write a domain name, and the number of domain extensions available (.com, .net, .org,. info, .biz, .me.uk; there are around 40 major ones), this can be a costly process for any brand owner.

The bad news is that Cyber squatting is on the up. As reported on the BBC, cyber-squatting went up last year by 18%. There were apparently 1,722,133 reported incidents. And the bad news for brand owners is that the study – by brand specialists MarkMonitor – also found that 80% of websites identified 12 months previously as “abusive” were still in existence today

Whilst this probably reflects poorly on the domain ownership resolution process of the registries, it also indicates that brands should get a lot tougher against people who are abusing their brand by buying and developing domain names that trade on their brand name.

And with so many ongoing cases – which are on the increase – it also shows that cyber squatting is obviously a lucrative business for those involved.

So what should you do if you are the victim of Cyber Squatting? Your first and best bet is to contact the current owner of the domain name and to politely ask them if they would sell you the domain name. If they don’t want to, or agree but want to charge more than a nominal fee (say £50), then you need to contact the relevant domain name registry and follow their domain ownership dispute process. The registry for .uk domain names is called Nominet, and here’s a link to their domain name ownership dispute forms.

Have any of you website builders been victims of cyber squatting? Or have you cheekily bought a domain name that you knew was benefiting from someone else’s brand equity? Leave us a comment below.

We first let you know back in December that Google Maps was fully integrated with Webeden. Since then, lots of you website makers have got in touch to say that you love this feature! Having a map on your website is really important – people like to know where you are as it makes you more real. For those of you yet to find out how to do so, here’s a short video showing you how.

Let us know how you get on!