How Does Google Work

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Build a great website and the visitors will come - correct? Unfortunately not - building a great website is only half the picture it is important to have a clear strategy for marketing it form the start. Your online marketing strategy might include any of the following; search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), affiliate marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, banner advertising and linking up with other website to drive traffic.

SEO is first on the list for a reason, getting it right will usually mean that the search engines become your main source of traffic, and in the UK getting it right means getting on the first page of Google (Google currently accounts for 87% of the UK search market). My advice is not to rule out any marketing activity, but assign apriory to each and focus on the highest priorty first. Your priorities will depend on what you are trying to achieve, customer retention or attracting new bsuiness.

So how do you get it reight with Google? There are three main areas when it comes to search engine optimisation, you need to make sure you address each onein order to get reasults:

Technical Aspects: Semantic HTML, separate content from style, keyword rich URLs and ensuring the site is indexed properly by the search engines.
Content: Produce great content and use key word research to identfiy relevent ket phrase.
Links: Both internal (how your site links to internal pages) and external (who links to you ad who you link to) links are vital, not all links are equal a small number of high quality contextual links are better than lots of low quality links. Remember that context is key.

There is lots of information available online that will provide you with all you need to know about search engine optimisation, I have listed a few good sources of information below:

How Does Google Work from freshbusinessthink.com - This interview with David White CEO of Weboptimser gives an overview of the key issues.
The Anatomy of a Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawenrce Page - this paper by the founders of Google outlines the foundations of how Google works.
How Does Google Work and Google in China YouTube video featuring David Vise, the author of the Google Story.

Controlling Site Links on Google

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Google Site Links are the sub link sshown for some sites on the search engine results page. There is no way of forcing Google to link to certain pages, because the links are selected by an automated process.

There are occassion were you may want to block some pages being shown, Google allows you to do this through Google Webmaster Tools. Follow this link if you need help setting up websmaster tools.

Once set-up you can block unwanted site links by selecting 'Links' and then 'Site Links', this tool shos you the current site links and allows you to block unwanted ones.

Dimdim Web Conferencing

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

I've just come across a free web conferencing service that looks set to become very popular, Dimdim Web Conferencing is a well built, easy to use, open source web conferencing solution. That means that is's free to use and includes all the features you'd expect (video, chat, white board, scrren sharing).

We will certainly be giving it a try!

10 Javascript Accordion Scripts

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

JavaScript accordions are a great way to add content to site that is short on space. We have used them in various ways many times.

I found a great article on tutorialblog.org called 10 Javascript Accordian Scripts that show cases 10 scripts.

Web Safe Fonts

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Strong typography together with strong photography play an important role in any websites' design.

The introduction of CSS to web design allowed designers to use typography in a way that previously could only have been achieved by rendering the text as a graphic. This has casued typography to become an important facet of the web designs toolkit.

There are, however, still limitations. Fonts can only be used if they are installed on the web browsers computer, this means that to use a font reliably it must be either one of the standard fonts installed with windows or on the mac.

A list of web safe fonts can be seen here: Fonts Common to all versions of Windows & Mac equivalents

Microsoft U-Turn on IE 8 Rendering

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There has been alot of discussion recently over Microsofts proposed stance on browser version targetting for IE 8. Developers have been very vocal against plans to make IE 8 redener in IE 7 standards mode by default.

I was very pleased to read that Microsoft has decided to do a u-turn on the policy and make IE 8 render websites in the most standards compliant way it can.

This is significant because Microsoft has rarely listed to developers before and becuase IE is the most popular brwoser currently in use, its support of the latest standards (by default) is vital for the progression of web standards.

Traffic to the Potato Council Consumer Website Doubles in 5 months

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Since we launched the new consumer website for the Potato Council traffic has doubled, with the increase down mainly to traffic from Google. The graphic below shows traffic to the website between 01st September 2007 and 12th March 2008, the new site was launched in October 2007 and during that month there were 11,826 visitors (7,918 from Google), during February 2008 there were 24,428 visitors (17,428 from Google).

Mark did a Search Engine Optimisation strategy in September which allowed us to review the old website in detail and use key phrase research to identify suitable new content. The main contributing factors were as follows:

Standards based semantic HTML
Clean URLs
Use of key phrase research to identify suitable new content
Use of Google Analytics to identify important areas of the website
Use of Google Webmaster Tools to ensure the website in indexed properly
Set up of XML sitemap and corresponding robots.txt entry

So whats next? We are currently looking into further improvements which will probably include:

More linking out to 3rd party websites
Further key phrase research to identify seasonal phrases
Better internal linking
Working on increasing the number of inbound links

Splash Pages

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Our clients often ask for splash pages, an intial graphic or animation that is played on a websites' home page.

Traditionally splash pages were disastrous from both a usablility perspective, users generally hate them - they want to get the information fast, and from a search engine perspective, at worst written in flash hiding the sites' content and at best presenting very little information on your homepage is a sure way not to get ranked highly.

Thankfully the use of splash pages is declining, but if you have to implement one there are a number of ways to do so in a search engine friendly manor. I usually use a javascript overlay that hides the conent of the website and shows the splash page over the top, the trick is not to have a 'flash' of the underlying page beforehand. But this doesn't solve the usability issues.

My advice - don't have one - show the users a good intro to your websites'content and purpose together with clear navigation so that they can get to the information they are interested in fast. Of course if your website is built in HTML and correctly indexed by the search engines users can arrive at your site on any page so the splash page is pointless anyway.

That said there are some occassions when a splash page can be used, for creative companies they can present impact and sell their creative strengths, for me this can be done in others ways that dosen't compromise the usability of the website, but each to their own - if your client wants one give it to them!

Tools we use everyday

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Over the years I have come to rely on a number of different tools, I'm always on the look out for new and interesting tools and will add any I find in the future:

Mind Mapping www.mindmeister.com (web based and excellent for collaboration) and www.mindjet.com (desktop application). These tools are particulary usful for site mapping and information architecture.

Time Tracking I used to use Timesheet Xpress which was a desktop application but have now switched to www.harvestapp.com, which is web based and offers realtime reporting

For project planning and collboration Basecamp from 37signals is an easy to use tool.

Contact Management and basic (CRM) I've just started using another 37signals product Highrise.

Debian on Dell PowerEdge R200

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We're retiring some of the older equipment in our rack at the moment, and replacing it with a couple of shiny new Dell PowerEdge R200 servers. Being fairly new there isn't that much information out there on these boxes, and even less about running Debian on them, so I thought I'd post my impressions and results.

Our boxes have the following spec:

Dual Core Intel Xeon 3065 (2.33GHz / 4MB Cache /1333MHz FSB)
4GB 800MHz ECC Memory
2 * 250GB WD RE HDD (7200rpm / SATA2 / 16MB Cache)

The drives are from Dell, but the memory is third party (Transcend) as Dell still seem to charge a small fortune for 800MHz ECC RAM. Chassis seems to be very similar to the SC1425 boxes (which make up the majority of our servers), but with a few little improvements like snap fit drive cages and bigger cpu fans.

My first attempt at installing Debian Etch (4.0r2) failed pretty quickly when the installer couldn't see the DVD drive - it booted from it fine, it just couldn't find a driver. This turned out to be a lack of support in the standard Etch kernel for the new Intel ICH9 chipset. I thought about installing Lenny instead, but as these boxes were for production use it wasn't something I really wanted to risk yet. So I had a look around to see if anyone had an Etch installer patched with a newer kernel, and as luck would have it Kenshi Muto had exactly what I was after: Debian Etch d-i images with 2.6.24 kernel, designed to support the hardware in the Asus Eee. Install was very straightforward, booting of USB flash instead of DVD this time (although I expect DVD would have worked fine), hard disks, DVD and NICs all detected without problems. I partitioned the disks into two RAID1 sets: one for /boot and the other as an LVM volume for the other partitions. Once installed I tried downgrading the kernel to 2.6.22 from backports, and this appears to work just as well as 2.6.24, so hopefully there won't be any problems moving to Lenny when it's released.

Haven't done any real stress testing yet, but everything seems pretty stable with no unexplained crashes or odd syslog messages. Benchmark disk performance is not quite as good as I hoped, here's the results from bonnie++:

Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP 
ganymede      6576M 36955  69 36940   8 24299   4 56920  94 57667   6 370.8   1
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++
ganymede,6576M,36955,69,36940,8,24299,4,56920,94,57667,6,370.8,1,16,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++

Hopefully real world performance will be better. The second box will have different drives, and maybe a PCI-E controller card, so I'll have to see how much difference that makes.

How Does Google Work

Controlling Site Links on Google

Further Reading:

Dimdim Web Conferencing

10 Javascript Accordion Scripts

Web Safe Fonts

Further Reading

Microsoft U-Turn on IE 8 Rendering

Further Reading

Traffic to the Potato Council Consumer Website Doubles in 5 months

Splash Pages

Further Reading

Tools we use everyday

Debian on Dell PowerEdge R200