Dating Site Blog & SEO

Will website_technology

There is often confusion about the difference between SEO and SEM, so let us clarify what they both are.  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) does exactly what it says, i.e. it is all about optimising a site (or more specifically a page on a site) to rank well in the various search engines for a select few keywords, i.e. words which people type into the search engine to find a page.  SEO involves techniques which can be broadly categorised as either on-page or off-page.  The former means optimisation which deals with the actual page being optimised, such as the title, headings, image optimisation etc.  Whereas the latter deals with other sites and how they interact with the page you are optimising, i.e. inbound links.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a superset of SEO; what this means is that SEM involves many techniques to market your site,  one of which is SEO. SEM (leaving out SEO for the moment) concentrates on branding, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising (such as Google Adwords), affiliate subscribers and other such marketing ploys.

A big difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO is largely free (unless you pay for SEO services through a consulting company) whereas SEM, like any form of marketing requires financial investment.  Another difference is that SEM is totally legitimate, whereas the search engines do not like SEO all that much as they consider it an artificial way to manipulate their algorithmic search result pages (SERP’s).

Will website_technology affiliate marketing, pay per click, PPC, search engine, SEM, seo, SEO and SEM, SERPS

SQL stands for Structured Query Language (some people call is Sequential Query Language) and is a language used to interrogate and save data to a database.  MySQL is a more lightweight version of Oracle, but both are based on SQL.  Websites developers tend to use MySQL as it is the most popularly supported tool for dababase manipulation amongst hosting providers.  

As a web developer, you may wish to learn MySQL, but I would advise taking it one step further and also learning Oracle.  Both are based on SQL and similar in syntax, but Oracle is used by major corporations and is a very powerful tool to help you develop your career.  Combining Oracle and PHP leaves you with a skillset which is much in demand and which pays very well.  It is worth adding Oracle to your arsenal of languages not only for the improved job opportunites, but also because it is more flexible than MySQL and can achieve things which are hard to achieve otherwise.

Irrespective of which dababase language you use, try to learn some language to complement it.  I find PHP to be the best language I have used.  It is object-orientated and very well supported in terms of documentation, updates and a helpful large user community.

Will website_technology MySQl, Oracle, SQL

Software which allows non-techie people to publish online content is referred to as a Content Management System (CMS).  These systems, like Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress make it easy to put up a website and get your content out on the Net.  As well as being relatively easy to use, they usually employ the latest techniques in security and anti-spam measures, which allows the site owner to have a certain level of confidence that they could survive a hack attempt.  The crux of this is keeping your CMS software updated and hence staying abreast of the latest security patches.

Of course the alternative is to completely design the site yourself, which is the case for Clickinlove.  However this does involve a lot of effort and knowledge of how to protect your code from exploitable vulnerabilities.  Sometimes it is best to grab a CMS and learn how to use that.  The downside is that these CMS sites are hacking targets, as the hackers do indeed have access to the source code and if they see a flaw, will likely know how to attack it.  So patching your site is really an important task when you use CMS’s.

Whatever you choose and however you design your site, stay abreast of hacking techniques and try to keep your site secure.

Will website_technology clickinlove, CMS, joomla, security vulnerability

If you are short of ideas for link bait, then perhaps it is time to target the online social networking audience.  Sites such as Facebook, MySpace etc, offer developers the chance to create small web applications which their users can install on their customised pages.  For instance, if you run a site selling DVD’s, then you could create an app which showcases your latest DVD’s and even run competitions from this app to allow users to win prizes.  

The benefit of targeting the social networking user base is that you can reach a far larger market than if you simply ignore it.  There are millions of people registered on these sites and providing a presence for your business there is quite important for both exposure and building your brand.

Will website_technology Applications, Social Networking, traffic

Are you the type to get stressed when you have many things to do and consequently fail to complete your tasks?  I find it is a good idea to break everything down into small bite-sized chunks of work and then to spend a little amount of time every day chipping away at the work.  The problem is to organise the many small tasks into something manageable and easy to follow.

One such tool I use is TiddlyWiki (download it free from tiddlywiki.com).  This is basically a single web page which allows you to write entries, update your journal, create a ‘to do’ list etc.  It is very easy to use and self-contained.  You can create your page and save it to a memory stick to carry around with you.  You view and edit your page on a web browser and the functionality it provides is very impressive, considering how small it is.

For my Wiki I have a few menu items which I use regularly: Todo list, Favourite links, Journal, Appointments, and others.  The page loads quickly and you only view on the page the things you are currently interested in looking at.  It is a great portable tool that is intuitive to use and perfect for organising your small projects.

Will website_technology TiddlyWiki, wiki

Following on from earlier articles about graphic design, today I want to touch upon a concept that most people may feel is beyond them: designing the artwork for your own site.

Art is, well… an art!  However, even naturally-gifted artists need to learn the tools of their trade and this is where science plays a part.  I am assuming that, as a webmaster and hopefully a competent programmer, you have a decent ability to logically approach any subject you set your mind to learning.  Well art is no different. By learning the science behind the art, you can develop skill in knowing what colours work well with other colours; how to utilise negative space; when to use gradients; how to shade and create contours of shapes, to name but a few. By learning these techniques and teaching yourself the basics of sketching, it should soon become apparent to you that creating web images/designs is actually not beyond your ability.

Instead of searching for hours online for an image you can use (with permission from the owner of course), would it not be more fulfilling to create your own.  If you practice your art skills, you can even create the image you wish just as fast as googling and then photoshoping it.  Furthermore, by becoming proficient at Photoshop, you can scan your image and then vectorise it, allowing you to manipulate it to your heart’s content.  This is often easier than taken an exisiting image and trying to change it to fit in with what you want.

Drawing and creating artwork for your own site can be an engaging and enjoyable way to create your site and give it a unique feel.  Of course you need to practise your art and to pay attention to the subtle techniques employed by graphic designers to give your work a polished look.  Yet, by doing it, you will get better and better and eventually you will have created a great level of freedom for yourself and your web design abilities. Be brave, do some online tutorials and utilise any talent you may or may not have known you had.  Do not despair or give up if you find you lack artistic ability… as I said, a fair portion of ‘art’ is actually a science and for this you only need dedication and perseverance.  Give it a try and see if you get the taste for doing your own graphic design – just be patient.

Will website_technology art, graphic design, photoshop

It is becoming more apparent in SEO circles that site bounce rates are increasingly being used to help rank a site.  For those in the dark, the bounce rate refers to the action of visitors landing on a site’s page and effectively bouncing straight back off into the ether, without having explored the rest of your site.  If 100 visitors within a certain time-frame, e.g. one hour, viewed a page on your site and 10 of them left that page without viewing others, then your page would have a bounce rate of 10% (which is excellent).

You can see why Google might treat site bounce rate with a certain level of importance.  If your visitors can’t be bothered to stay, then this is effectively a big thumbs-down on your site… they are voting with their feet, or in this case, fingers.  Google can use this knowledge to compare how people view your site and your competitors.  The more relevant and useful your site is, the lower the bounce rate and this is exactly what Google wants to promote.  Hence, if you can maintain a lower bounce rate than your competitors, then you stand a better chance of achieving a higher Page Rank as your site is considered more relevant than that of the competition.

Will website_technology bounce rate

If you plan to pay someone to design your site for you, then there are certain questions you should ask to protect yourself.  But how do you know what questions to ask and if their responses are correct?  That is a little more tricky.  You can use forums to explain your situation and seek the solutions.  Also, feel free to comment on this entry with your question and I will answer it.

The one question I would ask, is to see the web designers oldest and latest works.  Then I would look at ‘wayback machine’ to verify her/his claims to the dates.  Check the PR of the old site.  Verify XHTML compliance.  Email the owner of the site via their contact page and ask them to verify the designer was involved in creating their site.

These steps are important and become more so with the intended complexity of your site.  If you intend on having a payment system or a database, then making sure the web designer/programmer is competent is critical.  If they are not then they may take a lot longer, leave the site open to attack and charge more to fix their own errors.

On the subject of attacks, I noticed one designer promoting himself recently.  His own website was powered by Wordpress.  Now, here is a designer of websites who did not even bother to create a flagship website for himself, but instead put one up based on open source software.  He did change the design, which looked nice and professional.  However, the point is that I suspect he will create sites for other people based on this free software and he will get paid for it.  Ok, there is still work to do to make it look good and suit the customers’ needs, but using Wordpress for a customer’s site is a bad idea.  Wordpress on the whole is great but is unfortunately (because of its success) a notorious hacking target.  By putting someone’s site online and then walking away, he is leaving them with a site which in a few months or years will definitely need upgrading to protect it from the various attacks that this software invites.  A hacker could in 6 months use a commonly available script to access the customer site’s code.  

The point is that you need to be careful that your designer is not a cowboy and this is especially true if you intend to host a payment system and store customer’s details.  If in doubt, find a forum and ask questions.  If you are still lost or confused, post your question here.

Will website_technology site design, Wordpress

I was just researching the benefits of trackbacks and trying to determine if I should enable them on this blog or not and I have to admit I am still not convinced of their value.  The problem lies in the way spammers attack every little vulnerability they can find… and trackback links just strike me as very open to abuse.  The problem is that there are so many of them and moderating can become a full-time job.  It would be easy to miss the odd link or two which is actually spam; trust me when I say you do not want to be linking to some of those dodgy sites which spam blogs.  Google can be a little merciless at times and making mistakes such as this can be costly.

Yes, the trackback links can be useful to your readers, but also they can dilute the look and content of the real comments to your article/blog post.  I personally do not like to scroll to the comments on a blog only to spend an extra 10 seconds scrolling past the trackbacks which make up the majority of the ‘comments’.

Additionally, I prefer to pass on my PR to those sites I deem worthy.  I will link to only useful content for my visitors (to provide them with more information), but also to provide the author of the blog a big thumbs up with some added PR value for her/his efforts.

Will website_technology inbound links, pr, trackback

When dealing with any task that requires a learning curve, there is always the risk that motivation will run out long before finishing the task.  For instance, if you are new to web design and you want to put up your own site, you are faced with a plethora of skills to acquire, as well as having to apply those skills to generate the end result, i.e. a well designed, successful site.  Keep in mind what web development has come to mean these days: HTML, XHTML, SHTML, Javascript, PHP, ASP, MySQL, XML, XSL, XSLT, XPointer, XQuery, XLink, Graphic Design, Photoshop (or equivalent), and a host of other tools.  You do not need to be an expert in all of these to do a website, but it helps to know some or all of them and this list is not exhaustive by any means.

However, whilst learrning those skills your motivation to complete the learning process and apply your new talent might waver and the project may never get completed.  That is why it is important to establish a working principle prior to starting any large piece of work.  By that I mean agreeing with yourself a set of rules to which you will adhere and which by doing so will help bypass the motivation obstacles you will face. In short, you need to detach emotions from your work.  Self-discipline and motivation are great allies in your attempts to finish that site, but only self-discipline will get you there.  The problem with motivation is that it comes and goes.  Sure it gives you a huge burst of emotional energy to get you started or running for a while, but it inevitably disappears to be replaced with apathy or complete disinterest.  Self-discipline however, will keep you focused and paying attention to the end goal.  With self-discipline it won’t matter if the weather is a bit overcast today, or you had an argument with your partner.  A little bit of self-discipline every day will keep your goals alive and bring you closer to them, slowly and surely.

The trick is to make sure you do a little bit of work everyday.  This is especially important when you are not motivated to do the work that day.  By forcing yourself to do it, even if you don’t feel like it, you can be sure that the project will be completed.  This is because the only thing that can stop the project being finished is your lack of effort to finish it.  With a little bit of work everyday, you are investing effort in your project and eventually the goal will be achieved.  Furthermore, this self-discipline will extend to unexpected areas of your life and have far-reaching impact on the level of success you enjoy in various arenas.

Will datingsite, website_technology ambition, motivation, self-discipline, web design

Further to yesterday’s comments on Javascript libraries, today I would like to touch on the server side of things and focus on PHP.

PHP, like Javascript is a object-orientated scripting language.  This means classes can be created and instantiated when needed.  However, online resources for PHP most often fail to treat it as an OO language and instead prefer to offer tutorials and solutions based on the procedural side of things.  This is a big mistake and makes the code hard to port and reuse.

If you take the time, you can create classes which perform many tasks and which you can cleanly use over and over again.  You can create a library of such classes and use the ‘require_once’ construct to include them in your code.  All very straightforward.  An example of a predefined class is the PDO class.  This wraps around your database and provides a nice consistent interface to connecting to your MySQL DB.  PHP has many such classes which come pre-installed with the package, depending on the version you are currently using.

Besides creating your own classes and using those already defined as part of the PHP package, there are sites where people upload classes they have created.  With care you can use these classes and increase the modularity of your code.  For instance, it is possible to find classes for standard form manipulation, emails systems, payment systems and others.

There is not much you cannot pack into a PHP class and keep for reuse later.  Not only is this design methodology good for reusing your code, it also promotes good coding practices and reduces bugs due to the increased amount of testing on each instantiation of the class.

Another step in good website programming practices (after reusing PHP classes and standard Javascript libraries), is to decouple your logic from your site design.  I shall leave this discussion for tomorrow, but in the meantime you can read about Smarty to give yourself a headstart.

Will website_technology OOP, PDO, PHP, PHP classes, website tutorial

Have you ever looked at a website and seen some cool feature which you thought you would like to implement on your own site?  Many times I have hit this scenario and I am surprised at the number of times I have traced the feature down to one of a number of popular javascript libraries.  The point to take from this is that using one or more of these javascript libraries appears to be the fastest and neatest way to implement client-side functionality on your site.  Some of the benefits of using these libraries include:

• a set of API interfaces already written for you
• encapsulation of the data – classes are already well designed and implemented
• regular updates keep the code current
• well tested and open-source availability (and all the benefits that come with that)
• well documented APIs
• impressive feature set

One downside is that some of them can be relatively large and it is an unnecessary bandwidth overhead (for both you and your visitors) if you only want one or two of the features the library provides.  However, Google has anticipated this issue and now provides a service to host these libraries for free on their servers.  If you use the libraries hosted on their servers, there can be many benefits.  Most notably of which is the improved load speed for your site visitors.  The more webmasters use these libraries hosted by Google, the more their visitors are exposed to them and hence have already downloaded the relevant libs.  The obvious benefit is that many visitors will have loaded the library into their cache prior to visiting your site, which both saves your bandwidth and increases their speed of access.  It is a win-win situation.

Current popular libraries which are hosted by Google are:

• jQuery
• jQuery UI
• Prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• Dojo
• SWFObject

Click on the links above to visit the respective sites and find out which features they offer. For instance, on the clickinlove dating site, you have the ability to upload multiple images and see a loading progress bar for each image. This feature is not technically available using just javascript functionality, but is possible by combining javascript with a Flash module). The SWFObject library makes this relatively easy to implement and the end result is a streamlined intuitive interface for visitors to clickinlove to utilise.  The development time for me to have written this by myself would have been much longer than simply using the library they provide.

I anticipate that the future of web development will make good use of centrally-served popular libraries, such as what Google is offering.  To me it makes sense to utilise these libraries for the reasons mentioned above, i.e. well-tested code, great functionality, good support and easy to implement.  In addition, it makes sense to have them centrally retrievable (as opposed to storing them on your own server), as it provides bandwidth savings, increased download speed for visitors and a convenient one-stop shop for all the scripts you need.

Will website_technology Dojo, jQuery, jQuery UI, MooTools, Prototype, scriptaculous, SWFObject

How easy is it to design a site when you are not a grapic designer?  I can vouch that creating a professional-looking site is a lot harder than it appears.  ’The devil is in the detail’ is a common phrase which applies in this case and basically means that some of the more important aspects of creating a good looking site are wrapped up in small subtle details which can be easily overlooked.  The key areas of site design (i.e. the look and usability) I have had difficulty with are:

• colours – you need to choose a complimentary colour scheme which not only looks well, but actually fits in with the theme of your site and reinforces the image you are trying to project.  
• positioning – the positioning of on-page elements (text, images, buttons, etc) should be the right size and spaced appropriately.  Different spacing strategies can give a site a completely different feel and one which may pull the user in the opposite direction to what you are intending.  An awareness of how to place the content relative to other content is subtle but important.
• gradients – these are the subtle transitions in colour between adjacent areas which allows elements on the page to look smoother and more natural.  It adds a professional touch as it takes time to create the gradient effect and doing it properly is an art… without using gradients, graphic edges can appear sharp and look less professional.  Gradients are one of the more subtle effects you can use but which can have quite a dramatic effect if used correctly.
• negative space – this is the name given to blank space on a canvas.  On a website, negative space can aid in providing a Zen-like atmosphere, which is useful if you are aiming for a calming, relaxing user experience.  Negative space also works by placing extra emphasis on the visible content.
• lines – factors to consider when using lines in web design are length, orientation, colour, thickness, composite lines (made up of things like dots, small shapes, etc).  Lines can (and often are) combined to form shapes and this is a complete science in itself which you should not underestimate. 
• shapes – different graphic shapes unconsciously imply different meanings and instill feelings which may or may not reinforce your site theme.  Choose the shape and orientation of shapes on the site carefully and try to made them strengthen the message you are imparting.
• font – this is greatly underestimated and can completely ruin a site.  Choosing a suitable font is critical.  The wrong font can make a site look unprofessional. Certain fonts are better suited to certain types of sites and an awareness of this can help you strengthen your site’s theme, as opposed to pulling it in a different direction.
• packing – this refers to trying to get all your useful content onto the page in question.  Sometimes doing so can cause a site to be cluttered and difficult to navigate, which adds to the feeling of confusion.  You need to remember that new users will be looking upon an unfamiliar page and won’t know where all the critical data is… you need to give them what they are looking for within a few seconds, else they may go elsewhere.  Internet users are an impatient market to cater for and your content must be uncluttered enough to allow them to easily find what they want.  This may involve using tried and tested navigation techniques (which new users may be already familiar with) or somehow masking less-important content until required.
• usability – being innovative is good, but if you have completely re-engineered standard navigation features, then your users might struggle to use the site.  Stick to common usability features.
• SEO – when designing a site, always have an eye on SEO.  Though this is primarily a technical consideration, factors such as image sizes, masked-out content, duplicate content and other such influences can all have a progressively bigger impact on the on-page rating of a site by a search engine.

These are just a few of the major considerations you need to be aware of if you plan to design the look of your site yourself.  You do not need to be a graphic designer, but a basic knowledge of these concepts can help you get closer to the type of site design you want and also help you avoid making common mistakes which can look unprofessional.

Will website_technology graphic design, site layout, website design

There are so many dating sites online that it is hard to break into this field with a new site.  Extensive SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) ability can help reduce the headstart other sites have.  By this I mean being innovative in the use and implementation of unique SEO strategies.  ’Link Bait’ is a hot SEO term at the moment and refers to the organic harvesting of inbound links (links from other sites pointing to yours).  Get the link bait correct and you stand a chance of ramping-up link growth to a useful level which will bring an increase in traffic (people visiting your site).

What is link bait exactly?  It is any site content which causes your visitors to naturally want to link to your site.  Perhaps it is a piece of code which you give away for free which does something useful, i.e. an innovative script to allow visitors with their own website to track graphically what part of the world their own  visitors come from.  If you are able to offer your visitors something which they can use and for which they will require a link back to your site, then you are on your way to creating useful link-bait.

The trick to a successful SEO campaign is to be consistent in manually acquiring inbound links, whilst at the same time being innovative in generating genuinely useful link bait for your users.  After a while you should reap the rewards of your dedicated link-building attempts.

Will datingsite, website_technology dating, link bait, seo

Recently a number of blogs I own were hacked and spam links added to the posts automatically.  The solution to removing the hacked code involved delving into the footer code in the default template folder and modifying the footer.php file to reflect what it was prior to the hack.  Needless to say this took a few hours of diffing files to find the main culprit.  The outcome is that the wordpress blog software has been updated and security has been improved.  However, Wordpress is a prime target for hackers and it is only a matter of time before it is hit again.  Therefore, make sure you do regular backups and keep your blog software current and patched.

Will website_technology blog, fix, hack, patch, spam

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a boring and repetitive task that takes a lot of time and dedication. Results with SEO are not obvious and take a long time to be seen and appreciated. All of these factors lead many people to lose interest in this field and to give up.
One needs to persevere. You are in it for the long run and results will be few and far between for many months or even in some cases a few years, depending on how competitive your field is. Be unemotional about your work. Everyday get those links, write that blog, update the forum and scour the Internet for related content on which to obtain a backlink.
Do not expect results and get used to disappointment. Again, as I said, do not get emotional about your work. Treat it as an investment. Overtime you will see returns, but only if you are dedicated enough to keep going when no results are on the horizon. Once you do make your site competitive from an SEO perspective, then you are well on your way to using these skills you have developed, as well as the tricks you have learned along the way, to do SEO for another site… and another. it just gets easier and easier. Eventually, you will have created a site or two that ranks well in Google and generates revenue (if you have monetised your site in some way).

Will website_technology

So the new Google Chrome browser became available yesterday amid a lot of speculation as to how good it is.  So how good is it?  I downloaded it last night as soon as it became available and installed it on my XP-64 machine. My first reaction was a little confusion as to where bookmarks were added and accessed, but it is actually far simpler than I had imagined and very convenient to perform these actions. The tabs fitted nicely along the top and the speed of startup, loading new tabs and traversing them was very fluid. Amazingly, I noticed little in the way of compatibility issues with other browsers. I have been used to dealing with the eternal Firefox/IE battle when designing websites, but I was surprised at how few bugs I found on this browser. I did notice one or two javascript anomalies which I will notify Google about, but on the whole, an excellent job has been done by the Google engineers.
The browser does start up fast, but the speed improvement I was expecting did not materialse. I am hoping this will be ironed-out over the coming months and we can start to see the full benefit of this innovative browser.
I was a die-hard Firefox fan beforehand, but in one fell swoop, I suspect Google may have displaced the competition.
Yes, there will be issues with Chrome, but it is open source and that counts for a lot. Give it time and you could see this browser really taking off. IE8 is trying to compete and itself has a few innovations which may compete or even slightly surpass Chrome; however I am off the opinion that making Chrome open source will effectively force the other browsers creators to take note and improve their own offerings.

Will website_technology

It appears Google is on the verge of releasing it’s new browser, which has been in development for around 2 years.  This will be open source and includes many new features and innovations which are sure to please.  The most important thing about this new browser, called Chrome, is that it is the first new browser in many years which is written mostly from scratch.  Tomorrow or this evening I shall use this blog to link to the Chrome download page as soon as it becomes available, so post a comment here and I will notify you via email when it is available and send you the link.

A few of the highlights:
The Chrome process manager decouples each tab from the other tabs and houses the data in an encapsulated environment.  This should prevent one site causing the browser to ‘freeze’  in the event that the site hits some issues.  In addition, phising and malware are tackled by the way that Google identifies suspect sites, but also by the way that permissions are handled.  Another neat feature is the way that search boxes on some sites will automatically be accessible to the user even when not viewing that page.  Could be a handy feature. for when you wish to search for something without having to load the page beforehand. Of course this capability does exist as an Add-on on some browsers anyway, but still nice to have in included by default.

Webkit and V8 form the internals on Chrome.  Webkit is a simple to follow API and should prove a nice tool for the web developer to play with, if she/he so wishes. Another great innovation is the change from ‘interpreting’ Javascript, to the generation of machine code.  This could speed things up a lot in the long run. Actually, there are so many great features that I am rambling on a bit.  Visit Google Chrome Overview for a rundown of what the new browser offers.
Don’t forget to bookmark this page and come back later to get the download link, else leave a comment and I will email it to you.

UPDATE: the link to the Google Chrome Browser download is here.

Happy browsing,
Will

Will website_technology

It is easy to dismiss blogging and blog comments as nothing more than a passing fad that Google will eliminate as a source of quality in-bound links in due course, however, for the moment it is a valid and useful way to build traffic.

An SEO colleague of mine recently based a successful campaign on comments on other peoples blogs and forums.  He did not spam these forums, but instead added small snippets of valuable, relevant content.  Everyday he gathered about 10-20 inbound links.  Within 2 months his campaign was paying dividends in terms of a 100% increase in traffic and Adsense revenue.  Google saw fit to acknowledge the links and list them in it’s Webmaster Tools for the account in question.

By regularly posting on others’ forums and blogs and sticking to this strategy for a few months, it seems that it is indeed possible to dramitically improve your site exposure in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) .  Blog and forum comments are not dead yet, so make use of this technique whilst the window is still open.

Will website_technology

A sitemap generator is a much needed tool for a website with a lot of content.  Getting this right is actually more important than many people think as Google follows the sitemap and omits anything not included in it.  For TalkMunich I will require such a tool but need to create it myself as I do not like trusting other companies’ software.  Being able to tweak your own code is a big advantage and allows a level of flexibility that you would not normally get with code written by others.  I suspect that writing your own sitemap generator is a useful process as it allows you to nicely parse those files which contain the links you really want to follow as opposed to unimportant links.  I am aware of course that some sitemap generator tools allow you to use regular expressions to produce an exclude filter, but nevertheless, creating your own software tool means yo need to increase your understanding to a significantly more illuminating depth.

I can make my tool available for free to anyone who wishes to use it.

Will munich, website_technology

Getting content on your site is critical (on average) to helping your site rank well.  However, this usually involves a lot of work.  One way to ease the workload, is to allow user-generated content on your web site.  This can take the form of a blog which you write, but which can be commented on by others, or maybe even a forum.  Both these examples (and there are many more such technicuqes) offer advantages as well as challenges.  Two main areas of concern are spammers and illegal/offensive content.  If you allow user-generated content, then you must make sure that you adequately moderate what is posted on your site.  The last thing you need is a lawsuit on your hands or your customers being barraged with offensive material.

Both blogs and forums can be enabled with free software.  For forum software try SMF or phpBB; for blogging try Wordpress.

Will website_technology

If you do a lot of work with Macromedia products and image-editing software like Adobe Photoshop, then you really need your development system (i.e. personal computer) to be able to cope with the workload.  For example, in Photoshop, you can open and edit many images simultaneously.  You might perform various actions on each of these images and if you are dealing with large JPEG’s (in the region of MB’s), then the history of those changes you are making could result in an awful lot of system memory (RAM) being used up.  This most likely will slow your system considerably.  Throw into the equation the processing power required to cope with using Dreamweaver or a video-editing suite of tools and then your system will really be under stress.  The consequence is a sluggish and slow to respond computer which will reduce productivity and increase your frustration as you try to work.

Recently my computer could not seem to keep up with my demands.  I had deleted unused data, uninstalled redundant applications and defragmented my hard disc, but still the development work I was doing was eating the system resources too quickly and slowing my work to a grinding halt.  After various tweaks, I decided that an upgrade was needed – well actually I opted for a completely new system.

Here is the specification of my newly self-built computer:

• Motherboard – I chose the Gigabyte X48-DQ6
• Processor – Intel Quad Core XQ9450
• RAM – 4 GB
• Power Supply – 500Watts
• Hard Disc – 2 x 320GB SATA, arranged in a RAID0 array
• Graphics card – 512MB
• Fan – the bigger and more silent, the better
• Backup – external hard disc, 80GB in an IDE (PATA) enclosure

I installed XP 64-bit on the system partition and keep all my data on a second partition.  I also have a smaller third partition to allow me to archive old data.  Note that I use XP 64 for various reasons.  Not only is it faster, but it also supports the large amount of RAM I have.  For instance, on my system if I run XP 32-bit, the OS only sees 2.9GB RAM, yet there is 4GB RAM installed.  On XP 64-bit, it can see all the RAM; this is because 32-bit systems only have an address range of 4 GB and this must be shared with other resources, such as the graphics card.  Hence if you use 4GB or more, it is worthwhile getting the 64-bit OS, which can fully utilise your sizeable memory.  Just make sure that your processor can cope with the 64-bit system.  I use the quad core q9450 from Intel, which is a great processor and one which overclocks very well.

All in all, my system was easy to install and to get working.  The improvement in my productivity is actually measurable in terms of time saved and the noticable reduction in frustration, as my computer no longer has to struggle to cope with Photoshop’s extensive RAM usage.

So, my computer upgrade was a very worthwhile exercise in improving my system and allowing me to work faster.  I would recommend taking the same action if you find that the common performance tweaks you can normally use are not really helping you get the speed you need from your machine.  Just remember, building a system from scratch is not as difficult as you may at first think.

Will website_technology

How do you make your website a success?  SEO – Search Engine Optimisation, is the process by which you tweak critical factors concerning your site (both on-page and off-page factors) to try to make it rank well in the search engines for key words or phrases that people search for.  if you rank well, more people see your site in the listing and hence you gain more traffic (i.e. site visitors).

SEO is a risky business and can fall into three categories; Black Hat, Grey Hat and White Hat techniques.  The first two should be avoided as they involve practices which could see your site banned from the search engines.  White hat SEO is a different matter and is a legitimate way to try and improve your site’s positioning in the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN.  As Google accounts for over 50% of all searches, it is worth focusing on this search engine (SE) for optimisation.  Note that the different SE’s require slightly different optimisation techniques as their algorithms (which stipulate the rules for how sites rank for various keywords) are different from each other and evolve over time.  Nevertheless, if you focus your SEO techniques on Google, which has arguably the most successful algorithm, then you stand a great chance of doing well in the other SE’s as well.

So what is good SEO practice?  There are two types of optimisations efforts; on-page and off-page.  On-page optimisation concerns tweaking your content, positioning of page elements and proper use of HTML tags/attributes.  There is a wealth of information about this subject… just go to Google and type “white hat on-page SEO”.  You need to get this form of content optimisation right!  The second area you need to deal with is Off-page optimisation.  This revolves around getting your site noticed online, via in-bound links, i.e. other sites linking to your site.  There are many techniques to acquire in-bound links and this is where most of the spade-work of SEO is performed.  It is not an easy task to do and will require a lot of effort and time.  I think a good starting point is to make sure you have around 4000-8000 good quality in-bound links, and keep building it from there.  There are ways to check the quality and number of these links, but that is for another post.  As with on-page techniques, look up Google to find out the best ways to acquire in-bound links, or search this blog to find some tips.

Will website_technology

The importance of getting the sitemap right cannot be underestimated.  If you have many pages of content and your sitemap lists every page but one, then you can expect Google to ignore that one page in its listings.

I have found this out on a number of different occasions.  Recently I installed a Wordpress plugin which automatically creates a sitemap everytime I write a blog post.  Everything seemed fine until I noticed that the blog was dropping in the SERP’s for keywords I knew it had previously ranked well for.  I decided to investigate and noticed that my blog had first started to perform badly around the time I loaded the plugin.  On checking the auto-generated sitemap created by the plugin I noticed that it had errors (every entry was missing the ‘category’ name in the path) which invalidated every single link to a post on my site’s blog.  Google picked up my sitemap and consequently determined that every page  that was identified in it did not exist and hence was not indexed.  Overnight I lost the ability of my blog content to be indexed.

So, treat your blog with care and make sure that there are no issues with it.  If you find there are problems, immediately fix them and resubmit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

Will website_technology

So you have completed your site and you now need to focus on traffic.  At this stage you are starting to investigate SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and what it means for your site.  SEO is a popular area right now and has been for a while; basically it revolves around good practices aimed at increasing your site’s exposure in the search engines (and more explicitly in Google).  There are many techniques to try, but one sure fire way of getting noticed and rewarded is by having what we term ‘link-bait’.  This is nothing more than attractive content on your site which other webmasters/bloggers, etc will naturally wish to link to.

As an example of effective link bait, look to Google Gadgets and Social Networking sites for inspiration.  It is possible to write small applications which could be useful for your visitors and for which they can then load onto their Facebook profile (for example) or on iGoogle.  Your application can either be hosted on your own site or at least contains links/adverts to it.  Everyone benefits as your visitors get a useful tool, whilst you benefit as you get inbound links that were organically and ethically harvested.

Be inventive and creative and with a little bit of technical knowledge and the right direction, your efforts could result in a link-building campaign that works and generates targeted traffic to your site.

Will website_technology

When writing PHP scripts for a complex website, it can be tricky to debug your code and remove bugs. This is due to the fact that you are running your scripts on a remote server (where your site is hosted). Most PHP programmers resort to using the Echo command or the var_dump() function to send debug info to the browser. Whilst this works, it is cumbersome and involves modifying code on the server. A far better way would be to enable real-time debugging on the server itself, which allows you to step through your code and look at the stack, local vars, etc. Is this possible? Of course it is if you have complete access to the server, but what if you don’t?

There is a solution. In a nutshell you need to run a server on your development PC, configure it for debugging and then use a debugging client to enable code step-through. All sounds a bit complicated and it is in fact a slightly messy task, however I have simplified the process for you and detailed it below.

1. download Apache, with PHP and MySQL (assuming you use MySQL). I find that the Xampp installation is quite convenient and easy to use, with everything you need to run a server on your PC.
2. download the debug extension to the PHP installation on Xampp.
3. download the Eclipse debugger client.
4. follow this tutorial to show you how to setup/debug your new system.

All you need to do is copy your web project files to the project folder (which you set up in Eclipse) and make sure that the project is housed within the htdocs folder of the Xampp installation. Everything should run fine if you followed the steps. I will write a more comprehensive outline of PHP debugging when I have more time. Feel free to ask me questions if you have difficulties.

Best of luck,
Will

Will website_technology

If you are the administrator of a blog, you will doubtless be familiar with receiving a fair quantity of spam on a daily basis. Many of the comments would nearly make you think that they were left specifically by people who had read your blog. Closer inspection will however, show that the comments are usually generic and/or with the title of your blog and/or post inserted into the body of the spam comment. For someone new to blog maintenance, they may be fooled into believing that the comment was a genuine one. The danger here is that they will permit its inclusion in their blog and subsequently provide the spammer with an inevitable backlink to the spamming site. This will also have the effect of reducing the blog owners page’s PR weighting for valid links (PR is distributed amongst outgoing links evenly, therefore 2 links from a PR2 page, would carry more significance to Google than 3 links from the same page – do you really want some of your PR value being diverted to a spammers website?).

How to cope with this is not that difficult. Some bloggers refuse to accept comments at all. I find this approach a bit drastic. One way is to not publish a comment until it has been verified by the administrator, which is something your blog software can help you with by automatically temporarily storing these comments, awaiting for your approval/rejection. If you are unsure of the validity of the source of a comment, you can always remove the web address they invariably add to their post, hence depriving them of the valuable backlink to their site. If I am unsure, I take a sizeable portion of the comment text which looks generic, i.e. without any reference to my site or post title, and then I Google it to see if a similar comment is published elsewhere on other blogs. If so, I delete the post.

Many bloggers who wish to have a successful site and are novices in SEO, may feel that ‘Content is King’ and accept any and all blog comments. This is a dangerous strategy, as usually the comments from spammers are already on other sites and hence would be deemed by Google as duplicate content. As well as that the backlink to the spamming site can influence how Google views your site. Link to a bad neighbourhood and you may be ‘tarred with the same brush’ by Google, i.e. they will assume you are no different from the spammers they are trying to crack down on. This could seriously damage your site’s reputation in the Google index and once damaged, it is very hard to repair. So take the time and perform careful routine maintenance on your blog’s comment… it could mean the difference between a successful blog and a sand-boxed one.

Will website_technology

Yes and no.  In the sense of SEO as it was a few years ago, then no, it does not work.  By this I mean no quick results are possible, no killer ’secret’ techniques exist to shoot up the rankings and no ‘experts’ exist who know how to make things happen with their ‘proven’ formulas.  If however, your expectations are realistic, then SEO can work.

Ask your SEO consultant for demonstrable evidence of their prowess in this field.  If they are any good, they will have an online setup (a work in progress) which they use to analyse the latest trends, to tweak their own on-page parameters and to show potential clients what they know.  For instance, I often use this blog as an example of what is possible.  It is a small blog, offering small tit-bits of advice, but by no means a ground-breaking Google-smashing piece of research.  Yet, in its own way, this blog can do what many major corporations are unable to do… i.e. it ranks well for whatever I wish to make it rank for and it does it very fast (i.e. in minutes… not hours, days, weeks or years).  For my clients, this means I can show them how quickly I can rank at the top for keywords they also may want to rank well for.  By using my blog I can show what I have been able to do, and by inference, what I can do for them.

Of course, to get another site to rank well for keywords which my blog ranks well for, takes a lot of time.  But by being able to demonstrate this ability in my own blog, I can show potential clients that I have the tenacity and ability to make it all work for them as well.  Nothing is guaranteed of course, but a little display of your own ability goes a long way to instilling some confidence.  Showing clients various other sites you have optimised and which rank well for certain specific keyword phrases is very much a cheap trick and one which should be frowned upon… it is too easy to pull the wool over people’s eyes with this.

Will website_technology

Recently a few pages on the Click in Love dating site had a dip in PR.  Actually, the pages affected were all related to the Wordpress blog and they were scattered across several sub-domains.  I suspect the culprit is either Wordpress being penalised by Google (for some reason) or an initiative last week whereby old deleted blog entries were resurrected and re-posted onto this blog… perhaps Google may consider these reproduced entries duplicate content and punish accordingly.

Either way, the PR dropped one place and will need to be improved.  I just need to find the time to finish both the site and the SEO work required to make it successful.  If anyone else has noticed a drop in their blog PR for no apparent reason, then please let me know and we can try to work out what has went wrong.

Will website_technology

If you have decided to go down the route of doing your own SEO work, how do you manage to maintain the work level when there are no immediately obvious results from which to measure your success?  Without something to show for all your effort, it is human nature to lose motivation and eventually give up.  SEO is a tedious business, with nothing to show for many months and even years, which makes it even more likely that you will lose heart and neglect your SEO work.  So how do you manage to stay motivated?

I use imagination.  Imagination and self-discipline.  I suspect my SEO efforts will pay off eventually, so I imagine the success that I hope to achieve.  I do not fool myself, as that is a dangerous ploy and one which could sink your entire project when your expectations are invariably dashed at some stage in the near future.  Instead, I focus on the likely position of my site in terms of traffic and popularity.  I try to taste the success and instill in myself a belief that with a good framework of solid SEO practices and a healthy dose of self-discipline, I will reach my goals for the site.  Effectively I am rehearsing success in my head before I can even achieve it.  Many professionals do this in the course of their careers to focus and project an image of where they want to be.  By focusing on a desired goal and trying to make it as livid as possible, we condition or minds to expect that result and consequently find that we move towards it subconsciously.  This increases the likelihood of actually reaching our goal.

Self-discipline is an important trait you will need to foster to keep the goal alive.  By this I mean an unemotional commitment to the work required to reach your SEO targets.  Do not let a lack of motivation or any other negative emotion impact on your single-mindedness when it comes to doing the necessary work. I find both self-discipline and a focused mental attitude help keep me working on the SEO for ClickInLove.  Soon enough you will see the benefits of your work and your attitude will be rewarded.  Not everyone is able to work so hard on something with little to show for it for so long, so when you reach your SEO goals, you will have proven something to yourself… as well as reaping the benefits of conducting your own successful SEO campaign.

Will website_technology

This blog is a work in progress and I often use it to test my SEO ideas.  What I have noticed recently is the speed with which Google is picking up these articles and placing it in their index.  I am referring to their main index and not their Supplemental index which has been discontinued.  For instance, I took the article title of my daily blog entry a few days ago and I timed how long it took from when I posted my article to the blog to when Google placed it on the first page in it’s SERP’s.  It took 8 minutes.  This is by no means an isolated example.  I find the search results display my blog entries no later than 20 mins after I post them.

So how is this acheiveable and can anyone do it.  I am not sure.  For me I believe it is a combination of constant maintenance, perseverence, unique content updated on a daily basis as well normal SEO practices.  The result is a blog which Google attaches enough significance to it to enable first page placement in the SERP’s in a matter of a few minutes for whatever topic I choose to write about (though this depends on the competitiveness of the keywords in the blog title).

Hopefully this will serve to remind blog owners that a consistent approach to writing your blog will help you achieve success with Google.  If you have decided to monetise your blog, then this could result in increased revenue for you.  So keep writing everyday and do not miss even one day.

Will website_technology

So, if like me, you are not the greatest at backing up your data, then maybe, like me, you have found your data has a propensity to go walkies on occasion.  So what happens when this happens and you lose the entire contents of your blog… perhaps months or even years worth of work!  Ouch!  First thing, always make sure you back up your blog database, which can be done on the  php admin interface to your MySQL database (assuming you have both of these, which most webmasters do).

If it is too late for this and you are reading this article because you have lost you blog and need to get it back, then do not despair.  Despite losing my entire blog at least twice in the last year due to buggy Wordpress plugins, I am still here and have managed to retrieve most of my data.  How did I do that.  Here are a few tips.  Firstly, whenever you keep a blog, you may or may not be aware of a handy feature of certain blog utilities (CMS’s) like Wordpress, which generate a feed for your Blog.  This allows you to subscribe your feed (which is nothing more than a description of recent blog entries you have made) to a feed reader (such as Google Reader – just type this phrase into Google to find it).  The beauty of this is that certain feed readers like Google Reader, actually keep a complete copy of all your blog entries.  Now the only problem here is that you will have to manually re-enter (via copy/paste) all the entries, including blog titles, into your blog admin/entry page.  A painful exercise, but one which should not take more than an hour or so, depending on the size of the blog you lost.  There is a risk however.  If you used the ‘<more>’ command (as in Wordpress) then you will have cut off all the content which comes after that tag and the reader will not have a copy of it.  So you need to determine if you really wish to use the ‘<more>’ tag or not.

Another way to retrieve your blog data, is to look for sites which keep a cache of other sites.  Here is a website which details other archiving places which you can use to see if they have a copy of your blog’s contents: www.searchengineshowdown.com/others/archive.shtml.  I was able to get a fair amount of my data back from these archiving sites.  Yet again though, it may be tricky to get any blog entry back that was redirected with the ‘<more>’ tag.

Nothing beats keeping a backup of you MySQL database though (which is really easy) and it is well worth kicking off a Cron job to automate this sort of backup.  You can export to a number of different formats, with just raw data, or data and MySQL commands as well (to load the data), which is what I would recommend.  If you do lose your blog entires, then simply going to the latest backup and running the generated script will give you back all the entries you lost till the latest backup was created.

Will website_technology

Work is still ongoing with the firefox extension toolbar I have been developing. Over the last couple of days I have started to appreciate the power of the Javascript capabilities present in the Chrome XUL API. In layman’s terms, this simply means that the toolbar can do a lot more than I realised. I plan to utilise the potential and merge into my toolbar some useful additions which will ease the SEO workload. For instance, auto-generation of forum RSS feeds and instant submission to aggregate feed readers would be a very handy feature. I have named my firefox toolbar ‘SEO Link Tracker’ and plan to release it for general download to anyone who wants it. This will be complete in the next few days.

Will website_technology

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, I am making good progress integrating my SEO Javascripts with Mozilla’s XUL interface. Up to this point I have been learning how to use the various controls and propagate events through the DOM hierarchy. I have reached a stage where I can smoothly pass data between listboxes, monitor key events, parse user input and generate useful output (amongst other things). These capabilities will fuse together to form my SEO toolbar for Firefox. I plan to launch ‘SEO Link Tracker’ very shortly.

Will website_technology

How do we know when an SEO campaign is effective? Ultimately, every SEO campaign exists to increase targeted traffic to a particular site. However, it can take many, many months of hard work by an SEO engineer before any visible results are seen in terms of increased traffic. How then, can an SEO engineer prove that they are providing value for money to their client. This is a grey area and is a source of debate due to the ambiguity of the various limited metrics available to someone trying to measure the success of an SEO campaign. Some say that the number of inbound links pointing to the domain in question is a relatively accurate measure of how hard-working the SEO engineer is. However, this is misleading… links as reported by Google are only the tip of the iceberg and more work will definitely have been performed than what is visible to the customer. Another measure is the volume of traffic, but again this is also easily misleading due to the fact that the traffic could be non-targeted. The only way an SEO practicioner can prove to their client how effectively they are working, is to stay in regular communication with the client, discuss progress and provide status updates on a monthly basis.

Will website_technology

Google is reaching a stage where its algorithm is catching up with the spammers, black-hat tricksters and those who wish to manipulate the SERP’s. No longer is it easy to trick the search engine with dubious coding and clever text-placement techniques. Whilst it is good for the end user to have more relevant search results, it does pose problems for webmasters. Until recently, the web was a level playing field and the small site could effectively compete against the big players (to a degree). With the advent of the constantly improving Google algorithm, smaller sites are finding it harder to rank well.

The reason is that, what were once considered safe strategies for improving your site’s SERP positioning, have now fallen foul of the advancement of the algorithm used by Google and instead it now favours big sites with the money and momentum to rank well. Gone are the days when a simple link exchange would have helped make you popular. Buying links is also frowned upon. Instead, you must have a relatively old site, an organic linking strategy, constantly changing content etc. All of these things favour the bigger players and make it more difficult for smaller sites to survive long enough to make it economically feasible to continue trading online. Of course, this is the way business has been throughout history, i.e. the big companies always managed to keep the biggest slice of the cake for themselves. However, one of the greatest benefits of the Internet was the fact that Joe Bloggs could kick-start a small concern and see it grow quickly to eclipse the companies which had been trading for years. I think those days are coming to an end, unless something drastic happens to the Internet model which will safeguard the economic interests of the start-ups.

Will website_technology

When it comes to web design, you often have a choice of which scripting language to use for a particular effect/task. For client-side scripting you are basically limited to the prevalent Javascript language (Java Applets, Java and the like are also alternatives). However, for server-side scripting, you have PHP, ASP, VB scripting etc. For this discussion and ease of writing, I shall refer to client-side scripts as Javascript and server-side scripts as PHP. Which language should you choose? Well, it depends on three criteria:

1. target audience
2. scripting capabilities for the task to be performed
3. compatibility and usability

The target audience is a consideration, because it is important to know if your demographics include people who are likely to have limited browser functionality, e.g. those who may be using an Internet cafe (browser restrictions may apply for these site users imposed by the cafe IT administrators) or those who are more web savvy and disable non-essential browser services (such as image display, scripting, etc) and those who may actually prefer client-side scripting (for whatever reason). You need to take these factors into consideration when choosing which scripting language to use. This leads onto the next point, the actual ability of the language to provide the functionality you wish to deliver. For database manipulation, you cannot use Javascript, only a server-side language will suffice, such as PHP. For fancy usability techniques, Javascript is the right choice. Lastly, you may wish to consider the compatibility and usability of the scripting language. If the task to be performed can be implemented by either Javascript or PHP, then ask yourself what is more important… speed of use, or coverage. By this I mean, using PHP (or any server-side script) will be universally accepted by the browsers (as this script does not run on the browsers), it runs on the server… so everyone will be able to run it. However, if many people access your server, it may slow down the browsing experience for all those users. Javascript on the other hand, may not be supported or switched on for all browsers employed by the end user, so you might lose a percentage of your visitors through non-usability, however, as Javascript runs on the host machine and not the server, then heavy usage of your site will impact each end user less than if you implemented a popular feature exclusively in PHP. It is a trade-off and one which the site designer needs to consider when planning which language to use.

My preference is to use PHP whenever possible, but to make the assumption that Javascript is enabled on the end users’ host machine. In my opinion, AJAX should be incorporated wherever possible, which uses both Javascript and PHP. This allows a very quick way to query the server’s database and transmit the results back to the end user. For more on AJAX please use the search feature on this blog.

Will website_technology

There are a number of tools which allow you to check search engine traffic.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.wordtracker.com/

This one is interesting:
http://google.com/trends

Type in two keyword phrases in the previous link, separated by a comma and see the comparison in chart form. E.g. to compare ‘online dating’ with just ‘dating’, just enter in the search field “online dating, dating”, as below:
http://google.com/trends?q=online+dating%2C+dating&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

The keyword phrases above are good examples, but you may want to see how they compare to each other and other similar keyword phrases. Use Overture and Google trends to get an idea of which are the best. I would recommend ‘Free Online Dating’ and ‘Online Dating’, though both are very very competitive and it may take years before you appear in the top 1000 SERP’s for Google. Good luck.
Will

Will website_technology

All websites need a helping hand up the SERP’s and adhering to a good SEO plan is one way to help your site reach it’s maximum potential in terms of traffic generation.  There are many different techniques to use during an SEO campaign, but one outcome is consistent in most techniques, i.e. the acquisition of inbound links.  Most of your endeavours are aiming to build your inbound link base and this is something you should not lose sight of.  It is easy to forget this end goal when you are trawling through directory listings, writing articles, contributing to forums and blogs etc.  If you manage to keep in the mind that you are essentially building quality links to your site, then make it your goal to achieve a certain number of these links on a weekly basis.  Keep the momentum going and stick rigidly to your strategy and remember that you are in it for the long run.  Looking for quick results will lead to demotivation and a floundering of your SEO campaign.

In fact, campaign is a bad word to describe the effort required to achieve SERP success: it implies that a concerted effort for a finite time is required.  Rather, an SEO campaign is a never-ending battle and one which requires continuous investment of both time and (for bigger sites) money.

So, my advice to people doing their own SEO ‘campaign’, is to set realistic goals.  Follow the SMART approach:

• specific
• measurable
• agreed upon
• realistic
• time-based

By being methodical and planning your work realistically, aiming for a sustainable campaign with measurable weekly results, you will be able to unemotionally commit to your SEO campaign for the long run.  Seek no immediate results and stick to your plan.  In 6 months to a year, the traffic to your site will have increased a lot.  Keep it going and within a few years your site will be competing with the best.  Remember, most people do not stick to their SEO plans and this is one area in which you can beat the majority of competition.

Will website_technology

Today I started to work on a page to upload Click in Love members’ photos. I already have a page which does this, but I have opted to change it to Flash because it shows a progress bar and seems a lot smoother. Hopefully this will be easy to use and provide a nice interface for the dating site users to upload their photos.
Will

Will website_technology

Further to an earlier post on this subject, last night I choose an affiliate link partner – youcangetme.com and loaded their banner onto the front page. Well I actually chose them as an affiliate partner last weekend, but it takes a few days before their site webmaster verifies Click In Love and actually approves me as their affiliate partner. So last night was the first time I was actually able to upload their advert. Using a site called ‘Commission Junction’, I am able to monitor the click-through rate and the number of leads my visitors provide to youcangetme.com. Assuming I don’t lose too many potential members to my competitors, I hope this risky advertising scheme will pay off.

Will website_technology

Today’s task was to find a few affiliate programmes, which I managed to do quite easily. However, I find myself back on the CSS track again with another troublesome issue. This time however, Firefox is the culprit. I have a block of text (actually a <form> element) enclosed in a <div> statement which refuses to be positioned correctly. Strange things are afoot with this issue. For example, modifying the top margin, results in the left margin changing!!!! Oh woe is the life of the humble engineer.
Ok, I have worked on this for about 6 hours today and the time is 3am. I am not prone to working late into the night and would much rather have retired to bed a good three hours ago (at least). Anyway, tomorrow is another day and this battle will have to wait till then. Goodnight.
Will

Will website_technology

Phew! After spending all day on this issue, I have finally managed to get the CSS hover menu working in IE! I have a headache from having spent the entire day in front of a computer. Unless you are a software engineer, it is hard to imagine the absolute frustration and lack of job satisfaction that comes with having spent an entire day working tirelessly to achieve something as obscure as fixing a bug. Will the ‘click in love’ members notice this valiant work… no! Will anybody heap praise and rewards on me for this epic battle… no! Do I feel it was a worthwhile day and the site is so much better for it… no! However, it was necessary to fix this bug. The CSS hover menu will never be appreciated by anyone, but the Google bots will devour it. By using this special type of CSS-only menu (no Javascript required) I am helping to ensure a more compatible site with ease of use for both the search engines and the end users. Of course no-one will appreciate the work that has gone into the site, but hopefully all this extra effort will result in ClickInLove being a more friendly and visible site for everyone.
Will

Will website_technology

Continuing off from where I left last night (when I finished work after 1am), I got up early today and managed to fix the IE issue concerning the failure of the Google ads to be clickable. This problem was connected to a block of text to the right of the advert. Therefore the front page advert is live and working. My main task for the moment however, is to now fix another IE issue with the CSS hover menu. As usual everything works fine with Firefox, but not so with IE. I need this fixed so that Google can crawl to the various submenu’s which IE has failed to have working.

Will website_technology

So here I am, trying to finish the dating site ClickInLove.com on my week off work, when I have to face up to the realisation that my computer is running far too slowly recently. So today’s time was spent spring-cleaning my PC. First is the new Norton Antivirus software. I ran that a couple of times and removed a few things. Next is my AdAware sweep. This too found a couple of things to dispose of. Using the add/remove programs tool I uninstalled many an unused exe. An update of various Windows patches following by the CleanDisc utility should free some much-needed space. What remains is to manually delete old files which I do not need or use. Lastly, I shall leave the PC runing overnight and defragment the hard-disc. I have also ran ‘Hijack This’ to clean out the browser clutter. Hopefully this collection of measures will improve performance and allow me to work quicker.

Will website_technology

It seems that for dating websites the competition is severe. If you type into any search engine, terms like ‘Dating‘, ‘Personals‘, ‘Love Online‘ etc, you are faced with 1000’s of results. Ideally I want Click in Love at the top of these results. However, how do I achieve that when there are so many bigger sites with stronger budgets for marketing and advertising. The only solution I know is to plow away and build up the in-bound links. By using ‘Google Alerts’ it is possible to track when Google picks up your site in its index. This is a handy tool and good for motivation reasons as it can be a bit demoralising if you work for month after month with no obvious benefit to show for it. At least an email from Google reminds you to check your search results and see the addition of your new links. Every little trick helps in the world of SEO.

Will website_technology