Archive for November, 2008
November 25th, 2008
Nielsen Online have reported that mobile Internet usage is 8 times greater than PC based Internet usage. They state that from Q2 to Q3 2008, the number of Britons using mobile Internet increased by 25% (from 5.8 to 7.3 million) compared to 3% for PC-based Internet (34.3 to 35.3 million Britons).
Interestingly, the mobile Internet audience has a higher concentration of younger users than PC-based Internet; 25% of mobile Internet consumers are aged 15-24 compared to 16% for PC-based consumers. Whilst, 23% of the PC-based Internet population is 55+, only 12% of the mobile Internet audience is.
Kent Ferguson, Nielsen Senior Analyst, had this to say: “The first insights from the launch of Mobile Media View confirm two things – that when it comes to the Internet, the huge growth is now happening through the mobile platform and that the mobile online audience is younger than its PC-based counterpart. The fact that almost seven and a half million Britons now access the web through their phone shows that mobile Internet is fast becoming a viable way for advertisers and publishers to reach important demographic groups.”
The most popular mobile Internet sites – and how they perform on the PC-based Internet:
- Whilst Google Search is the most popular PC-based Internet site, on mobile Internet BBC News is the most popular, being visited by 24% of British mobile Internet consumers (1.7 million people)
- Of the most popular mobile sites, BBC Weather (21% mobile, 17% PC-based) Sky Sports (11% mobile, 8% PC-based) and Gmail (9% mobile, 7% PC-based) have greater reach on mobile Internet than they do on the PC-based Internet
- Of the most popular mobile sites, Google Search (23% mobile, 79% PC-based) and eBay (13% mobile, 43% PC-based) have the greatest reach differential between mobile and PC-based Internet
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November 16th, 2008
Credit reference agency Equifax has launched an online identity card scheme that aims to reduce consumer security and password headaches.
The “I-Card”, launched as a beta on Thursday, is designed to make online transactions easier and more secure. According to Equifax, users of the I-Card will be able to:
- Login to websites with a single click
- Create relationships with those you want to do business with
- Manage your personal data more easily
- Manage the claims that you make to other people and institutions about yourself (for example, you are over 18)
- Prove that you are who you say you are without revealing unnecessary details, by using trusted identity providers
Will this scheme take off? Only time will tell…
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November 14th, 2008
Following on from one of our earlier posts on SEO (search engine optimisation), let’s talk about XML sitemaps in more detail. Aside from registering your website with the major search engines, you should also have an up to date XML sitemap of your website. This file is essentially a list of all pages on your website.
Sitemaps help people find what they are looking for, and in the case of Google’s spider, Googlebot, the ability to orient themselves and manage their crawl activities. Spiders such as Googlebot may complete the indexing of your website over many visits, and even after completing it’s crawl of your website may return from time-to-time to check for changes. A sitemap gives the spider a rapid guide to the structure of your website and what has changed since it’s last visit.
Googlebot will look at the depth of your sitemap amongst other factors to determine how to distribute your PageRank, the numerical weighting it assigns to the relative importance of your pages.
Step One: Create Your Sitemap
The easiest way to create your sitemap is to use an automated XML sitemap generator, such as the one at xml-sitemaps.com. This is a free service that will index up to 500 pages – you will need to pay them some money if you have more pages on your website…
Once it has generated your sitemap, you will need to download it to your computer (the file to download is the uncompressed XML file).
Step Two: Reference Your Sitemap In robots.txt
Once you have downloaded your sitemap, you need to reference it in your robots.txt file. This file tells spiders such as Googlebot what files and directories it is and isn’t allowed to index. The robots.txt file needs to be in the root directory of your website. To reference your sitemap you need to add this line to it:
Sitemap: http://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml
(obviously replace mywebsite.com with your real domain name!)
Step Three: Upload Your Files To Your Website
You now need to upload your sitemap.xml and robots.txt files to the root directory of your website.
Step Four: Tell The World About Your Sitemap!
Now that you have sorted your sitemap.xml and robots.txt files out, you need to submit your sitemap to the main search engines. In other words, you give the address to your sitemap (i.e. “http://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml”) to the search engines and request them to send out a ‘ping’ to it and ‘listen’ for a reply, kind of like the echo on a submarine’s sonar search.
Here’s how to submit your sitemap to the major search engines:
Google
- Create a Google account if you haven’t already done so.
- Add Webmaster Tools to your account.
- Add your website – you will need to either insert a meta tag in your HTML code of your home page or upload a file to the root directory of your website to verify you own/are authorised to work on your website.
- Once you have done this, you can add your sitemap by clicking on the sitemap column link next to your website’s name.
Yahoo!
Yahoo! follows a similar approach to Google, in that you need to create an account with them and then register your XML sitemap with them.
ask.com
Type in the following URL into your web browser’s address bar:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml
(obviously replace mywebsite.com with your real domain name!)
MSN/Live Search
Type in the following URL into your web browser’s address bar:
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml
(obviously replace mywebsite.com with your real domain name!)
Note: if you are wondering who moreover.com is, then wonder no more! With MSN/Live Search, they have yet to implement a formal interface to submit XML sitemaps to. moreover.com are the official provider of RSS feeds to the MyMSN portal, so we are working on the theory that by moreover.com pinging your sitemap, it will tell MSN/Live Search about your XML sitemap somewhere along the line.
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November 14th, 2008
Recently at Tech ED EMEA, Microsoft announced the availability of emulators and documentation for Internet Explorer Mobile 6, which is the next generation browser for Windows Mobile. Some of the new features for IE6 include:
- Improved fidelity (support for full fidelity desktop rendering)
- Layout fixes to accommodate a mobile screen (text wrap)
- Enhanced Script and AJAX support (Jscript v5.7 from Internet Explorer
- Improved multimedia experience (Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 for Adobe Flash content)
- Deeper integration with search
- Enhanced cursor navigation model
- Touch and gesture support – pan support
- Multiple zoom levels
- Easy switching between mobile / desktop versions of sites by specifying UA strings
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November 11th, 2008
Mozilla Firefox, the open source web browser which recently celebrated its fourth birthday, could well overtake Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the number one web browser used on the Internet.
According to an article on ReadWriteWeb, Firefox has reached a 329% market share increase since it was launched in 2004, and that if it continues with this current rate of growth, it could hit 85.67% market share in four years time.
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November 8th, 2008
A recent press release suggests that despite the credit crunch, the mobile Internet sector is still going strong.
Robin Batt, founder and MD of the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco, USA, has this to say:
“There’s no doubt that the economic crisis will impair discretional spending, which will impact revenues. Meanwhile, the credit crunch will make it harder for both established brands and start-ups to access cash. However, this won’t reverse Internet/wireless convergence”.
“The disruption in wireless – brought about by the trend towards open, Internet models is now inexorable. The fact that there is also general economic pressure on wireless industry players to reinvent their business models only reinforces this trend” said Batt. “Everyone – operators, software companies, content and application players, and handset manufacturers – needs to adjust their strategies to compete in the open mobile economy.”
“That’s why we have 200 industry leaders from across the US and rest of world coming together at the Open Mobile Summit. Times might be tough, but people still need to do business. And now there’s even more pressure to get new business models right, in the light of the economic pressure.”
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November 6th, 2008
Word on the street is that Mozilla Firefox now has 20% web browser market share, making it second place to Microsoft Internet Explorer which still has the lead at 71%. Apple Safari makes third place at just under 7%.
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November 5th, 2008
According to a recent press release by Nokia, the Finnish company has announced that they plan to bring the power of the Internet to “non-urban” consumers in rural parts of India.
They plan to launch Nokia Life Tools, which they say will help overcome information constraints and provide services to this “next generation of mobile users”. Nokia plans to launch the service, beginning in the first half of 2009 with the Nokia 2323 classic and the Nokia 2330 classic as the lead devices in India and expand across select countries in Asia and Africa later in 2009.
“Filling in the information gaps in agriculture and education with Nokia Life Tools, we strive to contribute towards empowering people with the right tools to help them make informed decisions in their daily lives,” said Jawahar Kanjilal, Global Head of Emerging Market Services, Nokia. “Nokia Life Tools was developed to help bridge the digital divide in the emerging markets.”
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November 3rd, 2008
It is with great sadness that we learned of the recent and unexpected death of one of our customers, Rod Paskey. Rod was a director of a company called Dekko Exclusive Gifts Ltd, who sadly died along with two passengers in a helicopter crash on Saturday 1st November 2008 in Gloucestershire. We worked with Rod on a couple of website projects in the past, and would like to offer our sincere condolences to his family and friends in such a sad time.
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November 2nd, 2008
Chances are, if someone does a search on Google for a product or service, your organisation’s name won’t immediately spring to mind (that is assuming they even know you exist). If you run a website, then you may have heard of a term called “search engine optimisation” or SEO as it is normally abbreviated to. SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via “natural” search results.
The idea is that the earlier a website is shown in search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more visitors it will have. In other words, people are more likely to visit your website if it comes up on the first or second page of search results than say 30 pages later from their search keywords.
We describe good and bad practices for optimising your website (in no particular order). This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it highlights the main points.
Good Practices
- Pages should have well structured content – there is no point making web pages that have too little or too much information on it. Provide enough content on each page that is detailed and interesting to read. Make sure that your page content includes the keywords relating to your website that you think people will search for. Use Google’s Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool to see what how popular your keywords are.
- Page titles and meta descriptions should have relevant keywords – when you search on Google you will have noticed that each result is in the format of:
Your Page Title Goes Here
Description of your page goes here, this information comes from your meta description tag
http://www.yourwebsite.com/page.htm – 5Kb
This post from Google’s Webmaster Central blog explains meta descriptions in more detail.
- Submit your website to search engines – as obvious as this sounds, a lot of people think submitting their website to Google alone is fine – it isn’t! In the very least, you should be submitting your website to the top 3 search engines – Google, Yahoo! UK & Ireland, and MSN. Consider submitting your website to niche search engines as well – that is, search engines that cater to your particular field/industry.
- Create an XML sitemap of your website and submit it to search engines – you can create an XML sitemap of your website easily and for free by going to xml-sitemaps.com. Once you have created your XML sitemap and uploaded it to your web server, you can then submit it to search engines. An XML sitemap helps search engines spider your website, in case they miss important pages.
- Make sure your website has a good navigation system – this helps both search engine bots and visitors to your website easily navigate your website.
- Link to good quality related websites – linking to good well established websites will help your page rank well with Google. Even better, get them to link back to you as well! Just make sure that you only link to related websites as you may be penalised by Google for link spamming – for example, your website is about cars and you link to a website about ice creams.
Bad Practices
- Steer clear of link exchanges – despite the attraction of swapping (or paying for) link exchanges, your website may be penalised by Google for participating in such schemes. Read the offical word from Google for clarification on this.
- Hidden text and links on your web pages – hiding text or links in your content can cause your website to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. If your website is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.
- “Cloaking” techniques – cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your website to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. If your website contains elements that aren’t crawlable by search engines (such as rich media files other than Flash, JavaScript, or images), you shouldn’t provide cloaked content to search engines. Rather, you should consider visitors to your website who are unable to view these elements as well.
- “Doorway” pages - doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimised for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination. Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.
- JavaScript redirects – when Google’s bot indexes a page containing JavaScript, it will index that page but it cannot follow or index any links hidden in the JavaScript itself. Use of JavaScript is an entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of JavaScript with the intent to deceive search engines is not. Note that placement of links within JavaScript is alone not deceptive. When examining JavaScript on your website to ensure your site adheres to Google’s guidelines, consider the intent.
- Keyword stuffing – “keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Other Things To Consider Doing
- Make sure you have valid web pages – although this isn’t a major factor in Google determining how far up the list of search results you go for a given keyword, it will ensure that you care enough about the experience visitors to your website have. For example, your web pages may have some errors that you have not spotted, and although the pages look OK in one browser, they might look completely messed up in another. Certain errors may or may not stop search engine bots from indexing your website, so it’s best to check your code and make sure everything is fine.
- Make your website more accessible – a lot of people in the UK may not realise this, but failing to make your website accessible to disabled visitors may lead to legal problems for you under the Disability Discrimination Act. Visit the RNIB (Royal National Institute for Blind people)’s website for more information on how you can make your website more accessible.
- Submit your website to the ODP (Open Directory Project) – the ODP is essentially a directory of websites owned by Netscape which is edited by volunteers. The ODP is also known as DMOZ from the days when it was located at http://directory.mozilla.org. It was originally thought that website page ranks were automatically boosted if it was listed in the ODP, but actually this isn’t strictly true. The reason is that basically Google spiders the directories just like any other website and their pages have decent page rank, so they are good inbound links to have.
In the case of the ODP, Google’s directory is a copy of the ODP directory. Each time that websites are added and dropped from the ODP, they are added and dropped from Google’s directory when they next update it. The entry in Google’s directory is yet another good, page rank boosting, inbound link. Also, the ODP data is used for searches on a myriad of websites – more inbound links!
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