tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24810410168514541212024-03-17T00:16:16.755-07:00Towers IT Professional Services BlogPaul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-68043137542104278582012-07-22T03:57:00.001-07:002012-07-22T03:59:52.870-07:00Google Penguin Recovery Strategies<b>The World of Google and SEO</b><br />
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Google has created a business economy all of its own. Through developing arguably the best search engine they have been able to attract a phenomenal amount of interest form computer users an businesses who relay on internet presence of more significantly eCommerce for their business survival. This has in turn created a secondary industry, the SEO companies, who provide services to help business owners get their websites to the search rankings. Google want everything to look natural as if the links to peoples site came from other webmasters thinking that is a great site so I will link to it. The reality of the situation is that only around 2% of links are natural and the rest are created to fool the Google search engines. This means that the SEO companies are constantly fighting for business to see who can create the most natural looking links so businesses can improve their website search positions.<br />
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<b>Google Panda and Penguin</b><br />
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Now from 2011 Google have started to introduce new algorithms to target Webspam which will look at a sites content and the backlinks and make an algorithmic analysis of whether they think the Google guidelines have been violated and whether in fact the website is actually high quality or just made to look good in the eyes of search engines. Panda was primarily focuses om factors like duplicated content and excessive adverts on site and Penguin more on off site issues like the link profile. Here we will just look at Penguin which hit on the 24th April 2012 with a refresh on 25th May 2012 and what strategies can be employed to recover.<br />
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<b>Penguin Recover Checklist</b><br />
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1. Check out your backlink profile and remove and non PR ranked links and ones linking back from sites which are obviously set up for SEO purposes.<br />
2. Check your back link anchor text profile at the page level and check to see that you have no more than 50% of the links with exact match keyword anchor text to the keywords that that page optimised for.If you are over 50% then delete the links or better changed the links to branded terms which involves variants of your business name or generic terms link , click here, more info and it is fine to just use page URL's.<br />
3. Accrue some good quality hand written links for decent quality sites which either have manual article checking like Ezine or have a mechanism for user validation like Hubpages.<br />
4. Complement these with some straight text links from sites with good PR and relevant content.<br />
5. Remove site wide links like blog rolls or multiple links from the same domain.<br />
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These are the big hitters so now sit back and wait for the next refresh and monitor your recovery. If nothing happens then you can move the domain to a similar domain, hopefully of a similar age, and then 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones. Then take any good links you have control over and link those to the new site. This process has recovered many sites but some then get the penality back after a few weeks when it is passed from the old penalised domain.<br />
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.... and if you want some help contact Paul at Towers IT Professional Services<b> </b><a href="http://www.towersitservices.co.uk/">http://www.towersitservices.co.uk</a><b><br /></b><br />
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<br />Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-46677460293135225702011-07-06T09:18:00.000-07:002011-07-06T09:38:56.306-07:00Google Adwords- some basic advice<span style="font-weight: bold;">Fast Track to Google <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Presense</span></span><br />If you have a new site and want to get noticed on <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Google</span> then <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">AdWords</span> is certainly the fast start option. Within seconds you can be there on the front page of google for your chosen search terms and get some traffic to your site. However there is a price to pay as <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">AdWords</span> is not cheap. Now dependant on the competition for the search term you would typically pay between 20p and £1 per click through. Now this might be very acceptable for <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">an </span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">ecommerce</span> site which is selling products at high margin but for the majority of websites this is for sure a large overhead. Here I am not going to provide every answer for each circumstance but simply to provide some guidelines to get started. If you need more details you will need to use an <a title=" IT Services" href="http://www.towersitservices.co.uk/"> <b> IT Services</b> </a> company or specialist google <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">AdWords</span> consultancy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The basis steps:-</span><br />The first step is to perform some basic keyword research assisted by the google <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">AdWords</span> tool to identify which are the right keywords for your site. The focus here needs to be around relevancy as the prime factor and then go for the keywords with the least competition. The basic principle behind the operation of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">AdWords</span> is that you bid for places on the right hand side of the google window and then the top 3 places above the natural search listings. In simple terns the more you bid the higher you will appear on the listings.<br />The next step is to set up <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">your</span> google <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">AdWords</span> account.<br />From here I will just provide some top tips on things to do so you get value for money.<br />1. Restrict the hours of use to the periods when your real customers are actually going to be browsing. You do not want someone from the USA to be browsing your site if you only ship products in Europe and this will be costing you money.<br />2. Set you budget and then adjust your bids for each keyword to get a good usage of that keyword across the day and ideally just finish the day below your budget. Avoid bidding too high as this will mean that you will get a few top listings but consume your budget in an accelerated fashion.<br />3. Regularly check the keyword traffic and compare the keyword traffic to the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">eCommerce</span> conversions to check that you are not just getting browsing but actually securing sales.<br />4. Run your <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">AdWords</span> campaign in tandem with your <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">SEO</span> activities and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">progressively</span> swap in and out keywords as the natural listing results move higher and lower to ensure that you have <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">the</span> keyword visibility for the right search terms.<br />5. Keep a close watch on <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">AdWords</span> activity to check where you are getting traffic from with conversions and then <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">dynamically</span> adjust your bids to focus on the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">search</span> terms right for your site.<br />So that's the basics so now is the time to give it a go. monitor and continuously improve.Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-46957063674373862022011-03-04T13:55:00.000-08:002011-03-04T14:40:24.200-08:00SEO Stage 2 - The off-site work<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> 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unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>The Rationale behind Off-site <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">SEO</span> </b><br /><br />Once the on-site work has been completed, that is, the site is populated with <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">original</span> content and the keyword density, meta tags and descriptions are complete it is time to focus on link popularity. Google takes the view that if lots of sites are linking to your content then it must be good and accordingly will move the site up the search rankings. However, the Google algorithms are far more sophisticated than just looking at how many links. It is all about the quality and the relevance of the links. If you have 1000 links from non-indexed pages from websites that have no correlation to yours then these are verging on being of no value.<br /><br /><span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Conversely</span> if you have a single link from a website which has a similar theme and the link is from a page with a page rank of 4, then this link will <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">positively</span> help your search position rankings. This link will give you a 2 fold benefit. Firstly it will show that your site is valued and this will give a small boost to any search terms, Secondly and more significantly it will give a tremendous boost to the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">search</span> term used in the anchor text to the link which means that you need to ensure that the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">anchor </span> text is matched to your target keywords.<br /><br />Now that's the basic <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">philosophy</span> behind link popularity but the question is how do you achieve this?<br /><b><br />Off-site Linking Campaign</b><br /><br />The ideal way to get high quality links is to create great content and this will naturally encourage other sites to link to yours. This is certainly the Google thought plan and there is no doubt about it this certainly will happen. The issue for most webmasters is that this process is normally too slow and it may take years for the website to naturally attract these great links.<br /><br />Without a shadow of doubt the best way to complement this is to target sites with comparable content and get in touch with the webmasters and look towards enticing them to link to your site <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">potentially</span> with a 3 way <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">reciprocal</span> links plan if you can find 2 potential partners. This ring of links will give a more natural linking than a straight exchange program between 2 websites which google is viewed not to favour as much.<br /><br />This strategy of linking certainly is optimal but is best boosted by <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">complementary</span> techniques.<br />The first one of these is to use article sites. Write some original articles to <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">promote</span> your site or products ensuring that you use a keyword density of between 2% and 5% for the keyword you wish to target. Then ensure that you have a link back with this keyword in the anchor text within the article. Articles need to be say 300-600 words in length and of original content. You can then publish to a range of article sites starting with most highly regarded, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Ezine</span> Articles and then utilising the vast array of others like Article Dashboard to promote your site. Once the articles are approved and indexed you should see and improvement in the search listing position for the chosen keywords.<br /><br />The next complementary technique is to create short videos with a link back and publish these to the main video sites like You Tube. Google loves these sites and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Will</span> index really fast which will give you a good link back. The other key benefit here is if you create a good video it is also a great advertisement for your site and products.<br /><br />The next part is to use social bookmarking to find people that have a common interest in your website objectives and then through Twitter, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Facebook</span> etc. start to create a community of people have common interests.<br /><br />Another <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">technique</span> which is used is Profile Pages which are the pages on Web 2,0 sites where you can register. By <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">careful</span> selection of these sites you can then create profile pages with relevant content and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">linkbacks</span> to your website.<br /><br />So there we have a brief overview of some of the major techniques which are used by the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">SEO</span> companies or ones which you can use yourself. Now the success of your plan is all down to the care, thought and dedication that you put into the process and a well devised <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">SEO</span> plan should give lasting results. But make sure that your approach is not <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">spammy</span> or <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">un</span>natural because you will definitely be penalised for that so if you are unsure then it is <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">probably</span> best to leave it to an expert <a title="IT Services" href=" http://www.towersitservices.co.uk"><b> IT Services </b> </a> company.</p>Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-16119466840725161182010-08-06T12:11:00.000-07:002017-05-29T14:26:24.640-07:00A Good SEO ApproachIf you are going to do your own SEO then you will need to follow a fairly disciplined approach. I will outline the basic steps here which are a simplistic summary of the approach used at Towers <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://www.towersitservices.co.uk" title="IT Professional Services"><b> IT Professional Services </b> </a>. These can then be adapted based on your specific goals. In this first post I will just cover the first 2 activities of keyword analysis and linking those into page URL's and title and leave the next steps for another day.<br />
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<h3>
Keyword and Market Analysis</h3>
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The first thing to do is to assess your market and from this decide on which keywords you want to target. It is important to do this work up front and then all the following SEO activities can be clearly focused on these keywords to achieve a tangible goal. It is also important to select a realistic amount of keywords so your optimisation can be concentrated appropriately and not spread too thin. I would suggest starting with around 20 keywords. <br />
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There are 2 factors that need considering when selecting keywords. The first one is how accurately do they represent your market area, which is important so you can get good quality traffic to your site. There is no point in having masses of traffic if the quality is poor and in the case of eCommerce, you are not seeing any conversions.<br />
The second consideration is how achievable it is to get a good search listing position with these keywords. It is important to pitch this right so you select keywords which see a good number of google searches but are not too competitive so you can realistically get a page 1 listing.<br />
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In order to undertake your market and keyword analysis it is best to use the google tools to assess search volumes and also to identify keyword ideas for your research. Another good practise is to try some searches and if applicable check that they are picking up important aspects like google images.<br />
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<h3>
Page Titles, Page URLS's, Meta Descriptions and Tags </h3>
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Ideally you should do your keyword research before you have created your site. In this way you can check that page URL's give a good mapping to the keywords. These are probably the most important factor. Often you can change them later but if you do this be sure to delete the old ones from google and do a 301 page redirect from the old to the new page.<br />
The next critical aspect is the page tiles. Try to get your keywords in to these and they should also correlate well with the content on the page so you have a consistent theme and mapping. <br />
From here you can put together some nice succinct meta tag descriptions and tags, but don't just take some of the page content for your meta descriptions, make sure they are original yet representative. These first 2 steps are fundamental and will give you a good basis for the entire SEO activity. One new site I have done recently is Saving Light Bulbs which is based on a fairly optimised family of around 30 keywords. The energy saving light bulb market is fairly competitive with a range of suppliers offering light bulbs of CFL, LED and halogen technology and making the important analogy to the environment. I have chosen in this case to target some fairly competitive terms like 'energy saving light bulbs', 'halogen bulbs', 'LED bulbs' and most importantly 'light bulbs' which whilst being tricky to get good rankings on are fundamental to this market. However the choice is complemented with less competitive terms like 'LED G4 Capsule' which are far easier to get a good search ranking position in the early stages of SEO.Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-11170167518796444402010-06-10T07:50:00.000-07:002010-06-10T08:15:05.352-07:00Blogging Tips for SEONow once you have made your standalone blog or integrated WordPress into your website so you have an integrated blog you need to get started. Blogging is generally done for different reasons, that is:-<br/><br /><br />1. To create a community forum stimulating interest and increasing the awareness of the blog as a brand<br/><br />2. To increase the ranking of a site in the view of search engines to improve positioning in search listings <br/><br />If your sole objective is the former then you have far more scope in the way you write posts and so long as they are informative and interesting then that is fine.<br />If your objective is the latter and it is SOE performance that you are looking for then you will need to adhere to some good practice guidelines.<br />Firstly, make your posts 250-500 words in length and keep them informative and use original content.<br/><br />Secondly, for an on site link back to pages on your site and ensure that you use link text and title attributes as part of the link. Then check your landing page for your link and ensure that you have relevant content for your link on the landing page. This is important as the search engine will check the relevance of the link and associate value to it accordingly. I demonstrate here by using the phrase <a href="http://www.towersitservices.co.uk/" title= “IT leadership and transformation” ><strong>IT leadership and transformation</strong> </a> which is on the landing page for this link.<br/><br />Thirdly, in the day in the life of a professional blogger, you will want to make a post a day of original interesting content.<br/><br />Fourthly, there are the 3 P's. Make it Personal so people know they have the views of a real person. Work in Partnership to other bloggers putting replies on their blogs and in return they should develop an interest in your blog and reciprocate the gesture. And finally, make it passionate to get the interest of people so they are engaged in your views and want to read on.Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com176tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-57049194268975365742010-06-05T14:02:00.000-07:002013-07-03T13:11:50.230-07:00Blogger or WordPress ?If you want a free standalone blog then the 2 major contenders are Blogger and Wordpress. Each have there pros and cons but for a standalone blog then the pendulum does swing towards Blogger. Using Blogger template layouts are editable and you can map domain names for free which you need an upgrade for on WordPress. The other advantage on using Blogger is that your posts will be indexed faster. Whether the faster indexing is due to the sheer size of Blogger or because of the fact that it is owner by Google is up for debate, but it certainly seems to be the fact that indexing is faster on Blogger.<br />
However if you want to integrate a Blog into your website then the tides have turned.<br />
Previously then Blogger had an excellent FTP facility which automatically published comments to your own domain but due to excessive resource for support Google have now stopped this!! As an example this blog used to use FTP publishing but the blog has now been migrated to be hosted by Blogger.<br />
Conversely with WordPress you can install WordPress on your domain and integrate it into your site <b>www.classicalchandeliers.co.uk t</b>o see an example.<br />
So if you want a Blog integrated with your site I would recommend using Wordpress.Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-76509763514054919202010-04-25T08:18:00.001-07:002010-04-26T01:28:47.027-07:00This blog has moved<br /> This blog is now located at http://blog.towersitservices.co.uk/.<br /> You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds or you may click <a href='http://blog.towersitservices.co.uk/'>here</a>.<br /><br /> For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to<br /> http://blog.towersitservices.co.uk/feeds/posts/default.<br /> Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-38007837012414785492010-04-25T03:58:00.000-07:002010-04-25T04:27:45.026-07:00SEO and user friendly URL's for zencartIf you want a good open-source eCommerce shopping cart solution then zencart is definitely a good choice. It is relatively easy to use for someone with basic development skills and for experts the sky is the limit.<br />So find your market opportunity and get going. The next areas Towers IT is moving into from an eCommerce market perspective is energy saving light bulbs. We se this as a good opportunity with the new environmental focus and also the incandescent light bulb ban.<br />However, straight out the box the installation is quite primitive and you will certainly want to use improved templates and image handling tools. Also the URL's are really messy containing parameters and other characters which are neither meaningful to the user or comprehensible by search engines.<br />The solution is to load one of the SOE friendly URL modules.<br />The most basis and easy to load one is "Ultimate SEO URL's" but although this is a good step forward it does not offer a high degree of sophistication.<br />The one I would recommend which I have used on <a href="http://www.saving-light-bulbs.co.uk/">Energy Saving Light Bulb Shop created by Towers IT PS.</a> is CEON URL's which gives you control to format the URL's exactly as you want them. Just take care to have meaningful and clear navigaction.<br />This is a great feature both from a user and search engine perspective.Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-35170746418732127112009-10-21T01:08:00.000-07:002013-06-02T00:29:36.804-07:00More angles on fast Google IndexingNow if you're still not indexed on Google and Yahoo there are a couple more tricks.<br />
The first one is again using the popularity of the social networking sites and the interest taken in them from the search engines.<br />
So quite simpler create yourself a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Digg</span> account, if you haven't got one already and put on a post which is referenced back to your URL. This will <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">at attract</span> the robots to follow the link and start the indexing process for your site. Also if you post your <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Digg</span> in a good category you might get some traffic for free!!<br />
I'll demonstrate the next one live with one of my new sites Classical Chandeliers.<br />
So first make <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">reference</span> to some key words and provide a brief marketing reference as below:-<br />
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Classical Chandeliers sell exquisite chandeliers to the public and trade offering outstanding value.<br />
Add some Keywords: Chandeliers, Crystal, Bohemian, Lighting.<br />
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Put in the URL in XHTML code and then you are there.<br />
<br />Then go to 'subcribe to posts Atoms'. If you are using firefox you can simply subscibe to this feed using Yahoo. If you are using IE then click and pick up the Atoms URL. In this case:<br />
http://www.towersitservices.co.uk/blog/atom.xml<br />
Go to My Yahoo and add RSS feed and add the atom URL.<br />
You now have the connection from Yahoo to your blog and back to the website you are launching and a made another step along the SEO yourney.Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-21410676018361838722009-10-19T14:32:00.000-07:002013-06-02T00:28:04.732-07:00Google Indexing... Is it a science or black art?As all webmasters know it is important to get a new website indexed on Google quickly. You can focus on a multitude of other search engines as well but as Google dictates the majority of the traffic then you should concentrate there.<br />
So step 1. Create the site and submit the URL to Google.<br />
Step 2. Create yourself a Google account. In here get the site verified by adding the required meta tag into the header and create a sitemap. Google and the other search engines love sitemaps as they give a precise structure and inform the robots where to look.<br />
Step 3. If possible get yourself an inbound link from a well respected site with a google page rank. This site will be hit by the robots regularly and redirect the robots down the link to yours.<br />
Step 4. Utilise the social networking sites like twitter which bet crawled regularly by Google and put a link back to your URL. You can use tiny URL here so as an example the Towers IT eCommerce site http://www.classicalchandeliers.co.uk is reduced to http://tinyurl.com/yge5e7v. Just search on google for Tiny URL and go. Also you can create a blog on a well respected site with a link back to your URL which gives a high probability that the robots will venture down that link.<br />
So now you are complete and depending on the success of your actions the indexing can take anywhere between a few hours and several months.<br />
Right so when you are indexed you can then focus on the SOE activities to imporove your rankings. In summary this entails:-<br />
1. Authoring good and unique content.<br />
2. Good use of keywords in tags and content.,<br />
3. Acquire good quality inbound links from sites with a good page rank and similar content to yours. This not only increase page rank but also will result in inbound traffic through the links. provide a good net.<br />
4. Get listed on quality directories.<br />
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<a href="http://www.classicalchandeliers.co.uk/"><br /></a>Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-22783736502362127212009-10-04T04:22:00.000-07:002009-10-04T05:09:41.117-07:00The Future of the Web.We've been through the Web 1.0 era where web sites were newspapers and magazines displayed on the computer screen to market companies products or as useful information sources for organisations products.<br />Things have now advanced and with Web2.0 we now have rich sites facilitating information sharing across communities which provide attraction to users to contribute and therefore there future is secure. There are a multitude of examples across wikis, blogs and social networking sites where the new technological advancement has been matched to a business need or burning desire.<br />The enabling technologies provide improved user experience through client side tools ( eg. Ajax, Adobe Flash, Flex and Javascript) combined with server side tools (eg. ASP.NET, PHP and Java)<br />But where is it all going now?<br />Well, certainly the advancements in artificial intelligence and the semantic web will contribute significantly to improved search engines and improved aggregation of data. But this will not be constrained to the search engines. Currently job board aggregators and price comparison sites need to develop contractual business relationships with companies to aggregate offer rings and provide them to the consumer in a single portal. These advancement will negate the need for these contractual business relationships and enable anyone to set up price comparison or a job board aggregation capability!<br />This openness will be further enabled by a transformation in the way companies offer their products on the web. We have seen a successful transformation to open source software with great tools like linux,PHP and mySQL and this is likely to be followed by companies not just providing web sites but actual web services that consumers can use on demand. Through this transformation which is a part of cloud computing we will see far more accurate and real time aggregation of data into forms in consumers personalised formats.<br />The web is a mine of useful information but clouded with overload. Consumers time is at a premium and this is where the ' Attention Economy' concept comes in. Consumers will agree to opt in to services in exchange for their attention. This is a complex issue to be grasped and managed by service operators who need to strike the balance between offering too many services and not getting enough attention , which can be transformed to business advantage, and offering too few services and missing out on potential business opportunities. It will also place a high demand on service providers giving high quality and wanted services otherwise consumers will opt out. For sure the successful jugglers in this business equation will be the winners.<br />One great vision is to integrate services closely with the most rel event device. Obvious examples are to have your navigation computer in your car. But to extend this concept why not have a larder which orders new food supplies when empty, a fridge which re-orders milk and your medicine cabinet that puts in repeat prescriptions to your doctor!Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-20479321569426065142009-10-04T03:57:00.000-07:002009-10-04T04:19:34.859-07:00The Semantic Web - fact or fiction?The web is a vast repository of information, some useful, some invaluable and some incorrect. This information is generally retrieved through search engine or aggregated by applications to provide information pertinent to the task in hand. The issue is that the whole process of interpreting information from a multitude of sources needs human intelligence to accurately interpret and aggregate data to provide concise and useful information. This is where the computer based searches fall down! The vision of the Semantic Web is to provide the capability for computers to understand information in similar ways to the human brain. The steps towards this typically involve using Resource Description Framework (RDF) to classify data and then utilises networking formats eg. (RDFXML, N3, Turtle etc.) to assimilate the information.<br />The approach is not new but uses principles from Artificial Intelligence (AI) work to understand data, based on the science of neurology and how the human brain thinks. Now there have been some significant advances here, for example, Numenta have developed Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) algorithms to interpret the way the brain works to solve complex problems and 'Fuzzy Logic' techniques to accurately interpret information.<br />So the science is there and there are leading practitioners, but it still requires significant advancement for mainstream adoption.<br />...... But the for the successful integrators the rewards will be high.Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2481041016851454121.post-22786982520389948012009-08-16T09:27:00.000-07:002009-08-16T10:53:38.328-07:00Social Networking TechnologyWill social networking technology ever benefit corporate business? There are certainly a lot of corporate intranets out there which need to be brought to life and the dynamics of web2.0 technology could be the answer.Paul Thttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17023413522999519826noreply@blogger.com9