Recently we launched a website for In House Clothing, a factory clothing supplier with outlets in Bakewell, Leek and Glossop. The brief meant we needed to implement a content management system, so being rather handy with it we built the site using Joomla. In House Clothing wanted to display the clothes that are available in-store and we decided the best way to do this was to use the Virtuemart E-commerce component for Joomla, but with the shopping basket turned off, essentially using it as a catalogue. The finished site is a clean, easy to use site that can be updated very quickly by the staff at In House Clothing.

Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog seems to have banned one of the internet’s recent celebrities Jeremy Schoemaker from it’s site because he had the audacity to point out it’s flaws. Loads of SEO blogs are going nuts bout this, promising to boycott the site and writing all manner of horrible things about the people that run it. What’s the point though? Does a link from MyBlogLog really make that much difference in terms of SEO? And, outside of Western Geekland (where I must admit I enjoy living sometimes), has anyone even heard of MyBlogLog.com.
I guess they have now. Could it all be a case of extreme linkbaiting? “Let’s pick a popular internet user like Shoemoney, ban him and see how much publicity we can create for our site”. Hell, it got me to visit their site to see what it was all about (and frankly I didn’t see the appeal, but then I’m not a Myspace junkie either).

To those keen-eyed visitors who have returned to our website recently, you might notice that the main Netpromote site has undergone something of a re-vamp.
The entire site has been moved over to the Joomla content management system so that we can show our clients what it’s like to have a site that is scalable and easily updateable.
If anyone spots anything that’s not working, please contact adam AT netpromote.co.uk and let me know so I can fix it. Thanks.

http://www.rorweb.com/
This site is a nifty tool for creating structured feeds from your website. The idea is that the generic RSS format that many of us use at the moment does not really tell search engines the truth about most sites, and a structured XML feed would help the search engines see what is really important in your site.
They also have a free sitemap generator which is worth a look.

Like most people who run a blog, we’ve been plagued by comment spam recently. It has been taking time out of the working day to login to Wordpress and sift through all the rubbish looking for a real comment.
Today I’ve had enough and have installed the Akismet anti-spam plugin for Wordpress and because I know how effective it’s been on another blog I know I can relax and let the spam take care of itself.

With the continued growth of the Internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to keep up to date with all the information sources they are interested in. The Internet is a complex and rapidly changing environment and searching through known websites for new information takes a great deal of time. This is where RSS can help; with an RSS reader any Internet user can be told when the sites they are interested in have new content, without having to check each site. Also, free RSS reader services are readily available, which always helps to get new trends established! The growing popularity of RSS has great implications for both commercial and private use.

RSS will help businesses syndicate news to the web at a much faster rate. New content takes about two weeks to register with the present submission and link promotion processes. This takes too long for news stories, as by the time the page is listed the news section has moved onto different content. By releasing articles by RSS feed, businesses will be able to get more Google news listings, and keep subscribing customers up to date with their news, and industry news, via their RSS reader.

Taking this a step further, industry leaders could potentially evolve into the central news source for their industries. Many already collect relevant news items from around the web and supply that news to their employees and executive board. This can be extended to supply all this news through the one RSS feed, or by separating multiple feeds by subject, thereby supplying readers with all the news specific to their industry or interests.

Those businesses that provide RSS feeds will also be in a position to release timely counter stories when necessary, for example when stories about competitors or their industry go out in general news. This is also an excellent way for businesses to reply directly to any news article about them, as well as get their press releases out to a wider audience.

An RSS news feed could be used to send branded news to customers each day, keeping the company at the forefront of each customers mind and adding to brand recognition efforts. It could also syndicate the businesses news to the press as many journalists make extensive use of RSS feeds to keep up to date and to pick up on breaking news.

News articles can be published for reuse on other sites. Either the whole article, or a synopsis that the leads back to the main story on the home site, can be syndicated. The authors would retain the copy write of all articles and any site that used the article would have to link back to the originating site and provide full credits. This will allow businesses to softly advertise their expertise through news articles. It’s a valuable way to promote trust in businesses; recommendations from news sources rate amongst the most highly trusted after recommendations from colleagues and friends.

RSS content syndication is set to become a major trend in search patterns and we feel that companies of any size will reap benefits from getting involved with this as early as possible.

If you are interested in RSS for personal use, and do not currently subscribe to any RSS feeds, Google provide a free web based reader service called Google Reader, whilst still in beta testing it’s a relatively intuitive interface which can handle a large number of subscriptions effectively, the only immediately evident drawback can be a lag in adding new RSS subscriptions to your list. There are however many other, fully tested, blog and RSS readers available.

If you have any queries or would like further information on RSS, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

This book looks worth a recommendation for any businesses out there saying “I know blogging is there, but we don’t have any use for it”. As the web moves from being a place where you can upload your business brochure and call it a website to being a place where business is conducted through information and interactivity, Scoble goes into how you can apply blogging to your business.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/047174719X

When Google kicked out BMW.de from their index this week for cloaking, it made me wonder just how many large companies know exactly what their SEO company are doing on their behalf. I’m sure that when the SEO company in question approached BMW and suggested this was going to be their strategy it would have all appeared above board and would have been explained as the best way to get rankings for a graphically complex site like this.

The suits at BMW probably did not have a clue what was going to happen.

The SEO company on the other hand could not have failed to know that this could and probably would happen. So who’s responsible? Is it BMW for trusting people to just get on with their jobs and not corroborating the information with another SEO company, or is it the SEO person for really just being rubbish at their job. And have Google delivered just punishment, or should they actually follow the link trail back to the site of the SEO company that did this and make sure they are excluded from the index for promoting spammy SEO techniques?

It’s a wake up call to check up on what your SEO company is doing. If they can’t explain it, or you are not sure about what they are doing, it could be time to ask for another opinion.

Some mornings I wake up and find nothing but good email in my mailbox. Some mornings like today I wake up and find my inbox full of blog comment alerts which I have to moderate.

To all the blog spammers out there who think they are being really clever. You’re thick as planks.

This blog runs on Wordpress. The template is the standard Kubrick template. By default on this template on Wordpress all links in comments are appended with the rel=”nofollow” tag. You won’t get pagerank transferred and you wont get search engines visiting your site from ours. In fact, because of this the link means nothing at all unless one of our readers happened to think your comment was worthy of a click-through and a visit to your site.

But hang-on, get past the nofollow tag and then you’ve got to get past moderation. That means with a single click I can approve or send your comment to oblivion. No comments get onto the blog without my approval. So your 10 minutes of adding spammy links to my site are undone in a couple of seconds.

There are ways to post decent comments. Read the post. Think up a good reply or point to note then write it down. Don’t put your link in the comment box, put it in the proper URL box. Give something that at least looks like a real email address. If readers like your comment they’ll maybe visit your site.

So Mr Cial1s Spampot I hope you’re glad you put me in a great mood on a friday morning. I look forward to reading your next comment.

PageRank is Googles ranking system and one of the means Google has to rate pages is by the number & type of inbound links. Links to your site will increase your rank, however the amount it will increase it by depends on several factors: how highly rated the site is that is linking to you & how many other links that site has made. Similarly, having good internal site links from page to page will maximise your PageRank score, as will having many additional pages of good, relevant information.

Links to your site will generally increase rank by some amount, however some links from your site could cause your site to be penalised by Google. If the site you are considering linking to has a PageRank of 0, do not swap links with that site. Do not use link farms as a means of increasing inbound links, not only is this contrary to Googles stated aims when setting up the PageRank system, and therefore likely to be deliberately penalised by Google, but you cannot control what other prohibited tactics that site may use, such as hidden links, gateway pages or use of your email for other purposes (spam). Use of such tactics by a site that you link to can lead to you being penalised too – whilst they can change their site address quickly with no loss of business, you will have a site you have no doubt invested a lot of time & energy in.

Google will also rank higher, links that are relevant to your site. It uses “sophisticated text-matching techniques” (source: http://www.google.com/technology/index.html) to determine which sites are relevant to your own. In addition having relevant, useful links will naturally increase the volume of traffic to your site, independently to the search engine listings, and if found to be useful to visitors should help to naturally increase the number of inbound links into your site.

One way of starting to build up links to your site is to set up a links page. Choose carefully which sites you would like to swap links with. These sites should have good quality services and/or information, which would be relevant to your sites visitors. One way to find out what other people think may be relevant links to & from your business would be to identify a highly ranked competitor & see who links to them & who they link to. Whilst we would not suggest that you then duplicate your competitors’ links exactly, it can give you an idea of what kind of businesses to approach, perhaps in your local area, as well as identifying sites that link to several competitors & who may well be reviewing businesses such as yourself, and be happy to include you in that review.

If approached by another site & a link swap offered, we must urge a certain amount of caution, similarly if approaching another company to offer a link swap, be aware that they will also regard your approach with caution. As previously mentioned, not all links are good links, and relevant links from high quality sites are much more highly rated, so when approaching a company to offer a link swap it is important to address that request individually – do not use a stock letter. Detail why you think linking to your site would be useful to their clients & vice versa. If the site would be genuinely useful to your clients, then put the link on your site regardless of whether or not there is a reciprocal link.

If a company offering a link swap approaches you, first check that site out thoroughly. Download Googles browser add-on & check the others sites PageRank, a rank of 4 or above is good. Sites with 0 PageRank on their home page must be avoided – a 0 PageRank usually means that the site has been penalised by Google. It may also mean that the site is linked badly & the Googlebots cannot read the site to rank it. You can check Google to see if the site is listed at all. Either way the link is unlikely to prove useful to you, so only link if the sites information is excellent & truly useful to your customers. In addition, ensure the links page on the other site is connected to the rest of the site & therefore readable by Googlebots – the site map will clearly show if the links page is accessible. Check the age of the site on the “who is” information, if the site is over 6 months old then it is likely to be more highly ranked by Google, and also by dint of having already lasting six months, are more likely to be a useful link for longer. Check if the other company’s site seems honest: Are there any hidden links?; Is the information they provide accurate and in good faith?; Is there any hidden text or ‘gateway’ pages? If you are happy with the site, swap links!

It is worth checking with new customers to see what drew them to your site, if you find that one particular link or type of link proves particularly valuable to you in terms of new custom, it may be worth offering to swap content with that site as well as the swapped links, i.e. each would host one page of information about the others site/services. In effect a full-page advert – in permanent publication!

Once you have a worthwhile, informative links page you can start to build up an online network of businesses with mutual interests. This can be based on location, for example it can be useful to link to businesses in your local area if your services are location specific. If your services do not depend on location however it may be more beneficial to link to companies for other reasons. These online communities will grow naturally beyond a certain point.

Whilst you can optimise your site & encourage the right kind of links, the aim is not to ‘trick’ the search engines into giving you better listings, but to attain better listings by offering a better & more relevant site than your competitors. It is very difficult to say exactly how much one link or change to your site will improve your listing as PageRank is not a direct rating of your site – it is rated on a ‘grade curve’ so it is relatively easy to raise your sites ranking from low to good (from 2/10 to 4/10); very difficult to raise it from high, to very high (from 8/10 to 9/10); and virtually impossible to raise it from very high to highest (from 9/10 to 10/10). As we have mentioned, if you choose links based on what will be most useful to your customer & not solely on what will improve ratings, it is likely you will achieve what Google wishes to encourage with it’s PageRank system –useful, coherent networks of mutually beneficial sites.