16 August 2006 in Google | Comments (4)

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while will know that I love Google Analytics. I managed to slip in before it went invite only (about six month back) and have been telling people how fantastic it is ever since.

If you haven’t managed to get an invite or haven’t even looked then now is your chance – Google Analytics is open to all.

Click here to go to the Google Analytics site to sign up.

Installation is dead simple, basically just wack a snippet of JavaScript into your page and you’re done. Easy.

 - JD

16 August 2006 in Blogging, Business, Code | Comments (3)

So you’ve got a pretty popular site. Perhaps you have an e-commerce component to your site. Every single person browsing your site is a prospect. You’ve done well – you’ve build a standard compliant site, you invested in making the shopping experience easy and you provide lots of information about your products.

Now what?

It’s not like you’d open a retail store, stock it up, and then have all your staff sit behind the counter waiting for people to bring their products over to purchase. So why do you let people just roam around your site without engaging them? Or making it easier to engage you? This is a huge area and well worth investigating – how can you engage your site visitors more?

You may recall that earlier in the year I started using Meebo to chat online. It allows you to chat using various networks through a unified rich website (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Jabber). Recently they added an addition to their product line up called “Meebo Me” which is a widget that you can integrate into any HTML page and gives you the power to communicate with site visitors and them the power to communicate with you. All this without needing the site visitor sign-in or register. It’s a fantastic way of communicating with your visitors and letting them ask questions.

Users can choose to disable the chat feature if they don’t want it which is useful for those who don’t want to be interrupted. It also shows when the web master is offline and allows end users to give themselves a name. It’s all powered by flash but is slick enough for that not to be a big problem.

On top of this you can also see how long a user has been on a page. Perhaps you might want to interact with users if they have been on a page for more than 10 minutes – perhaps they’re thinking about what you’ve written and have a question? It’s just like a retail shop – “You seem to be interested in that product, can I provide any help?”.

We’ve come a long way from static pages where users couldn’t interact. At the moment the big deal is being able to control content. The next step is certainly going to be owned by companies that are willing to invest in getting to know their customers.

- JD

16 August 2006 in Blogging, Intergen | Comments (4)

My blog feels like it’s just for advertising new blogs lately! Anyway, blogging fever is catching up with more folks from Intergen and Stewart Robertson is the latest to join the fold.

Stu is a developer at Intergen and his blog is a mixture of personal entries as well as his thoughts on development and test driven methodologies (as well as other geek things )

Stu’s Blog

- JD

14 August 2006 in Blogging, Microsoft | Comments (5)

I’ve always preferred a blend of desktop applications and online content when working with anything that uses the Internet. That’s why I’ve usually made my blog posts using tools to W.Blogger, however recently W.Blogger seems to have disappeared (hence the lack of a link) so I haven’t been able to let people know about what a great tool it was for composing new blog entries offline and then pushing them up to my website.

Thankfully a better tool has become available – Windows Live Writer. Now I was as surprised as anyone that the tool was designed not to only support Live Spaces but also many other blogging platforms (WordPress, DasBlog, Community Server Blogs and more). So I’ve wired it up to compose this entry and I’ll keep testing it out for a while. So far it seems much more slick than W.Blogger and it has considerably better preview/style integration.

Even more exciting is that Microsoft have created an API for the publishing tool to allow developers to create their own plugins (which I assume means new blog providers, extra formatting tools etc). It already has support for everything you would expect – spell checking, category support, post management etc.

Overall this tool looks great for a first beta. I really look forward to seeing what people do to extend the capabilities of it to make it truly great.

Windows Live Writer Website

Download Windows Live Writer

- JD

10 August 2006 in Business | Comments (2)

I find the details about the MySpace deals quite extraordinary.

As some of your may recall, Fox acquired MySpace (a social networking site with 33 billion page views per month) for close to $600 million US. In the last few days however, Google has entered a deal to pay $900 million US to be the search and advertising provider on the MySpace site for the next 3 years.

What a fantastic way to cover your purchase price (even if it is over 3 years). That doesn’t take into account any other revenue making systems they have in place.

Not bad if you can get it

Yahoo News has the low down.

– JD

9 August 2006 in Blogging, Intergen | Comments (0)

Another Intergenite has started blogging recently (including being greedy and starting 2 blogs! ) which is great to see. Jeremy specialises in the content management space and has a special interest in EPiServer. Understandably he has a personal blog and an EPiServer blog.

Jeremy’s Personal Blog
Jeremy’s EPiServer Downunder Blog

- JD

25 July 2006 in Business | Comments (2)

It’s now official, AMD & ATI are to merge (as much as a 5.4 billion dollar transaction is a “merger”). The deal is still subject to approval by ATI shareholders, court approval and regulatory approval however this deal has been in the wind for the last few months.

For more information about the deal check out the AMD page about the deal (which is exactly the same as the ATI page). Also there is a slashdot story about the merger.

Following the announcement Intel revoked ATI’s license to make motherboard chipsets etc for Intel chips.

- JD

24 July 2006 in Google, Search Technology | Comments (0)

The challenge
Now that your site has been indexed and is appearing in search engine results you’re finding you are not rating very well. You might be the 10th result, the 20th or the last. You ideally want to be the #1 result for the search terms you deem as important to your organisation.

A solution?
You know a wee bit about how search engines work and think that perhaps you could manipulate your position with a few clever tricks. You know that search engines examine the words on the page and the meta tags. Two very common manipulation tactics that I’ve witnessed are:

• Keyword Stuffing: This is where your title contains about 50 keywords, so does your description and keyword meta tags.
• Invisible Text: This is where you place certain terms in your page but set the font colour to match the colour of the background, effectively making the text invisible. If you notice a large blank space at the bottom of pages and select that region you usually find this type of trick in use and see text gets selected.

What a lot of people who use these tricks don’t realise is that they are widely known about and the big three search engines can identify web pages using these techniques. When you’re identified as somebody who uses these tricks you’ll often find that your search position slowly slips because you’re getting penalised for trying to manipulate your position.

There are many other ways that people try to use to increase their position however these two seem to be the most common.

The real solution
The first thing to do is ensure that you are not utilising the techniques listed above. Following that, some ways to make your content work harder at getting you a good position are:

• Use HTML elements for headings and important content. For example, rather than using <span class=”heading1″> around a heading use <h1>as search engines can identify these tags as meaning the content within them is a heading. This is important because normally the terms in a heading give a strong indication of what the content is about. So if you’re a hotel, having a heading with “The best hotel in Wellington” would result in those terms being weighted more highly than if they appeared in the general content of your site.
• Ensure that the content on your website has a good rate of change. It’s not uncommon for search engines to penalise websites that never change their content or websites that change their content constantly. Having a policy to update 20% of your site content every six months is useful for ensuring your site feels fresh with web users as well as letting the search engines know your site is being updated.
• Use meta tags intelligently. Each meta tag has a specific purpose so if you are setting the Description meta field don’t fill it with 500 keyword terms that are comma delimited. That isn’t a description, a description is a sentence or two about the page. You should ensure that you use the terms that are important to you that are relevant to that page in all fields however. In this example, our Hotel home page may have:
  • Title: hotel_name – The best hotel in Wellington, New Zealand
  • Description: Welcome to the website of hotel_name, the best hotel in Wellington.
  • Keywords: best, hotel, wellington, New Zealand, hotel_name, north island
  These are all just examples but it shows how the meta fields should be used. It is important to remember not to put too much content in your meta tags, they are supposed to be short.
• Update your meta data. A common occurrence is that a content manager changes the body content of a webpage but forgets to update the meta data. This is especially important for Intranet search engines that place much more emphasis on meta tags.
• Don’t use broken HTML. This point item isn’t the most important but you should make sure that your website contains valid HTML. While browsers and search indexers usually handle some broken HTML gracefully I have read several times that some search engines will penalise slightly if HTML isn’t valid (mostly because it doesn’t show much “care” in your website and if you do not care about your site why should others?)

There are many more ways to ensure that your content will work well with search engines which I will go into with future posts on the topic.

Always an exception to the rule
Wow, the second post and I’m already regretting using the word “Always” because the really isn’t an exception to this rule. You should never try and be “clever” in trying to change your search position. It never pays to try and fool the search engines. If you apply the tips listed here you should find that over time your search position closes in on that valuable #1 spot.

- JD