With the review I have been under taking I wanted to know what people coming to each of those sits were actually looking for, ok so site A has 1000 visitors from search engines, but which products are they looking for, which niche on my blog are they looking for.

You will appreciate looking at this blog especially, it covers a very wide range of subjects, tech, affiliate marketing, wordpress plugins, software development, diy and much more. I wanted to know which of those subjects were my readers interested in.

The problem is when you view the keywords list of which in my case there are many thousand, you will see that there are many phrases all covering the same subject for example:

Windows Media Centre Plugins
Windows Media Center Pluginf
Windows 7 Media Centre Plugns
Remote plugin for Media Center
etc.

It is therefore difficult to easily ascertain how many people are searching for a particular subject.

I first started exporting the keyword to excel and doing some conditional formatting in excel to highlight cells containing a keyword, a fairly simple formula in the conditional formatting of Excel along the lines of:

=NOT(ISERROR(FIND("keyword",A1)))

and setting it to colour the cell background gives you a quick visual indication of all keyword phrases containing ‘Media Centre’ for example. This still did not really give me what I was after, I still had to look down a list containing thousands of rows.

It was then that I found Segments in Google Analytics. I have read about them before and forgotten that I knew about them (it’s an age thing). I have to say this is an absolutely fantastic feature and one that I have been using all afternoon to look in depth at the traffic sources for my sites.

Simply click on ‘Advanced segments’ on the menu of Google Analytics, create a new segment, drag in the item you want to analyse, Keyword in my case. I then did ‘Contains’ and then my keyword.

I have several Segments setup now for all my sites, when you run the segment it simply filters the analytics reports by that segment, so you can see that those searching for phrases containing ‘Media Centre’ stayed on the site and average of x, went to these pages etc.

This exercise has brought up some very surprising results for me, about 20% of the visitors to this blog are looking for information about Coroline sheets or how to do roofing.

I hope that with this analysis I will be able to target better the existing traffic that I have on all the sites to provide them more of what they are looking for, perhaps improve the posts, product listings or pages that attract those visitors and improve the sites in that way.

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I have been running a ShevaPlug Ubuntu server for some time now, this has controlled the Networks DHCP and controlled Internet access, I have it running DansGuardian which protects the little one from the unsavory side of the Internet. I also have it running as a proxy so that I can scan all traffic through ClamAV for Viruses. This is not a really necessary step but it does keep thinks a little safer.

The problems I had moving the USB Disks to the Ubuntu ShevaPlug was the file system on those disks, they were in NTFS, perfectly ok for Windows 7 but ubuntu complained about it, so I ended up re-formatting them all the EXT4 which makes a vast difference in terms of the performance of those disks.

I have now completed the system, I have 4 Western Digital 2tb USB Disks attached to a USB hub which then goes straight into the ShevaPlug, on ubuntu I have then setup Samba Shares:

[Photographs]
comment = Photographs
path = /mnt/Disk2/Photographs
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = no
create mask = 0777
writeable = Yes

One share for each type of media, DVCam, Photographs, Movies, DVDs, Music etc.

Each one of those shares is then mapped as a network drive on each PC (All running Windows 7) and then the Windows 7 Media Centre looks to those network drives for its media, thus all share the media.

The only small problem I have now is that I can not find a way to force Windows 7 Media Centre to record its TV directly to a different location, it always puts it in its default Recorded TV folder. Ideally I would like to have it record to a mapped network drive, as currently newly recorded TV is only available on the media centre that recorded it.

Here is a diagram of what I have done:

When I run out of Space on a Drive I can just add another disk to the USB Hub and create another Samba Share. Eventually it will mean that we have Movies1 and Movies2 but this will not create a problem as those drives are not accessed directly but rather via the Windows 7 Media Centre Interface which will just show all Movies it knows about.

All in all very pleased with this and it seems to be working well thus far. I have put all the disks under the stairs to keep them out of the way, I also have the router, network switch and ShevaPlug under there so I need to build a shelf to support them and keep them out of the way.

This system has also allowed me to create a Samba Share for other things, my work files and business files are all located on a share, which I then back up to Amazon S3 daily to keep it secure.

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The obvious answer is no they have no value and indeed are worthless, this is based on an assumption that search engines do not take noFollow links into consideration, they do not follow them to index your site and they do not contribute to  your Search Rankings, however it seems that this is a very simplistic assumption.

To start with any link to your site has to have value, think of it from a non-search engine point of view, the user viewing a site does not know if it is follow or not, they just click on the link, link backs irrespective of their type generate traffic, traffic places eyes on your site, if your site has good content those people will in turn link back, those new links may or may not be do follow links, but the chances are that you will increase your back links.

It also seems that the search engines use the balance between follow and nofollow links to identify if your link building strategy is forced. One would not expect any site to have 100% do follow links, and one that does would appear to Google as being Spammy and un-natural, the likelihood is that they have paid for or otherwise exchanged those links in someway and as such are not a good indication of that sites value to the end user.

With this in mind we could say that too many do follow links compared to your nofollow links could be actually damaging your site.

We also have to consider that shock horror, there are other search engines than Google, those search engines deal with noFollow links in a different way to Google, they all have their own algorithms to work out the value of your site and its placement in the SERPs (Search engine result pages). So even though a no-follow link may not give you any Google juice, it may help you in Bing or Altavista.

It is possible that NoFollow links count towards backlinks but do not give you any Page Rank Juice. Back links are considered as a good thing by all search engines, a good balance of follow and nofollow back links can only be a good thing. More back links means more traffic, shows popularity of your site and in turn increases your credibility to the search engines algorithm.

I think that the answer is, if you have an opportunity for a link, take it irrespective of its type. This does not mean that you should not try to get dofollow links as a  priority, but nofollow links on a high Page Ranked site will give you all sorts of benefits.

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For the purposes of this article we will concentrate on Google. Success with Google is the most important aspect of any SEO.

There are many factors that contribute to the SEO of your site, some related to the site its self and some related to the marketing and link building programmes you employ. There are what are called ‘White hat methods’ very simple, common sense things that you must consider, accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar within the content of your site, valid HTML and CSS in the programming of your site and many more.

Then there are ‘Grey Hat’ methods which are a little cheeky, but if done correctly can help your site, these are things such as keyword density monitoring. Finally there are ‘Black hat’ methods, which are a big no, no. These are things like keyword cramming, adding content that is not human readable in the hope that the search engines will pick it up. Generally unless you are really up-to-date with the Google algorithm changes you will not get away with using Black hat methods and these will damage your site.

In this section, I will go through a number of factors that you should consider, I have divided them down into loose categories to help divide up the responsibilities for that part of the SEO.

You will need to decide upon your SEO strategy prior to starting out on your online campaign.

1. What keywords or phrases do you want to rank for
2. Single point of control for your online presence – someone who controls all web content, linking campaigns, google adwords, banner advertising, affiliate programmes. No-one does anything without that one person passing that work.
3. Site Content

Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar

Google takes a dim view of spelling, punctuation and grammar errors; this is something that can easily be perfect with proof reading and an easy way to win points.

On its own it will not improve your SEO, but errors in it can damage your SEO

Don’t get me to write your content for example…!

Unique content

DO NOT EVER COPY CONTENT from anywhere, Google is very good at spotting this and will instantly put you into the sandbox, the sandbox is something that Google deny even exists but Empirical evidence suggests that it is indeed fact. I have seen sites with a high Google page rank and a number one position for a search term disappear from the SERPs (Search engine results Positions) over night. If your sites gets put into the sandbox, you will be stuck there for many months and will not appear in the search engine results during that time, damaging your business as a result. It is therefore something that should be considered in everything you do.

Remember, the Algorithms that control the search engines are trying to make the results as useful as possible, what they are trying to do is become as human as possible and select the sites that a human would if they could physically trawl through the millions of pages and rank them manually. Therefore sites with interesting, unique and useful content will rank higher than sites with little, poor quality content.

Structure your content well, headings and sub-headings, bullet points and well formed paragraphs. Add the most important content near to the top of a page.

When we are talking about content we are looking at the words you write, images and other media you use.

Write for people first and search engines second and you will not go far wrong.

Regular and significant content Updates

Google likes new content on sites, it likes to know that they are still live and active sites, consider the number of new sites put up onto the web everyday, only a small proportion of those sites last more than a few days due to the time and effort required to keep an active site maintained. Google tries to filter those sites out and put active sites at the top of the SERPs.

The Google spider will keep indexing your site at regular intervals, you should ensure that it does not keep coming back and finding your site has not changed.

Keyword density

Keyword density is a ‘Greyhat’ it is balancing how many times your keywords appear in the content of your site.

When the Google spider comes to your site it index it and feed back its findings to the algorithm. The algorithm analyses the content of your site to find out what that site is about. It will look for words that are used regularly in your sites content, ‘solar panel’ for example, and it will then work out what that site is about.

In order to ensure that Google sees your site as one being about ‘Solar panels’ you should ensure that that phrase appears enough throughout the content of your site.

BUT… it is not quite that simple. As we have said previously, the aim of the search engine algorithm is to find content that is useful, if you stuff your content with keywords in order to get google to rank you for those keywords, your content becomes strange for humans to read. Google takes a dim view of this and looks for balanced content.

Having said this there are still ways in which you can ensure that your content contains enough instances of your keywords and phrases while not being deemed as keyword stuffing.

The formula for working this out is:

Keyword Density = ([Keyword Count]*100)/(Total Word Count]

So for example

-Total Word Count: 500
-CAR keyword uses: 12

‘CAR’ density = (12*100)/500

The Keyword density for ‘CAR’ on the page is 2.4%

A keyword density of 3-7% is said to be good, above 10% will be considered as keyword stuffing and below 3% it will be difficult for Google to identify what your site is about.

Fortunately a fantastic company called Digitalquill has developed a WordPress Plugin that will monitor this, across individual posts and across the whole site.

A copy of this plugin should be installed and the chosen keywords monitored for their density.

The balance of keywords should also be different depending on what page you are on. The page about free electricity should include more phrases related to budgets, saving money and free electricity rather than the environmental impact for example.

Use of WordPress Tags

Spiders love tags, they are another way that a website can be crawled. Use a good tag structure, again with keywords while avoiding keyword stuffing.

Look at you competition

Look at what your competition are going, they may not rank very well for your chosen keywords, but they may rank well for something you have not thought about, look at what keywords they rank for. Look at their content, what are they writing about.
Social networks

Make sure you have a presence on social networks, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Digg and others, this will generate traffic and provide link backs to your site. It also adds authenticity to your site, all things that Google will pickup on when looking to analyse your site.

If you are a blogger, write a post per day and tweet the link, a simple but effective way of building your presence. If you sell in a niche, monitor the news for relevant news articles, advances in your niche write a small intro to those articles on your company website, and tweet the link to your review. This is keeping people informed about what is going on in the sector, providing a service that is not hard to achieve, but in turn has great advantages of raising the profile of the company.

Technical aspects

Monitor what the Google bot is doing

There is a great plugin that allows you to see what the Google bot has crawled on your site, this gives you an idea of how the spider is roaming your site and allows you to modify your strategy to suit.

Install the Google Bling plugin and have it send email reports to the person responsible for your web presence.

Valid HTML and CSS

It goes without saying that script errors, poorly formatted HTML and CSS spell a death warrant for a sites Google ranking. This is something that is easy to fix and ensure we get right. In its self it will not improve our SEO but poor HTML and CSS will damage SEO.

Image titles and Alt Tags

Image titles and ALT tags are very important, not only do they improve accessibility of your site (good news in googles eyes) they also allow you to get additional content and keywords into your site. Again do not do any keyword stuffing here, but one or two of your critical keywords worked into a description of the image is always good.

Page Titles, descriptions and keywords

Title tag:
The title tag should be used with 5-10 words to describe that page with a keyword rich description

Description tag:
The description tag is very important because it is this that search engines will use in the SERPs, the portion of text below your link. Users will use this to decide if they should visit your site or not. It should be up to 160 characters long and have several keywords in it.

Meta Keywords tag:
Us this to add in the critical keywords about your page, there is some debate as to if this is actually used by search engines anymore, however it does not do any hard and it is good practice to add it.

There is a good plugin for WordPress called ‘All in one SEO’ which adds additional fields to the WordPress post page. This allows you to control those fields above. Careful consideration should always be made for those fields.

Aged Domain names

Unfortunately for many Google does not like new domain names, it takes the view that recently registered domain names with website will be hear today and gone tomorrow, until that site proves it’s self. This is related to the issue above about regular updates to your site and keeping it active.

There is nothing we can do about this in terms of our company name and domain name, but we can find domain names that have a registration history. See section below on Keyword Domain names and mini-site structure.
Internal Links

Linking internally between pages is very important; this goes for your menu system and having additional links throughout the site.

Link Building

Very Important and very hard to achieve without spamming. Getting link backs to your site is a difficult job, ideally you want link backs from sites that are already trusted, these sites should be sites about the same niche as you are working in.

The problem we have is that no-one will want to link to an upstart site, you will need track record and will need to become known with a good reputation then links will follow.

There are a few things that you can do. Engage in discussions on forums, with a link back in your signature. Be careful to adhere to that forums policy otherwise you maybe seen as a spammer. Do not actively push the link to your site, engage in the discussions with helpful comments and advice; your link can be included as a side.

Post comments on blogs, many blogs will ask for your website link.

Also make sure that your link building policy is consistent, always link to the same domain name, always include the www (or exclude if your wish). Link to the same page (home page) or run several campaigns to different parts of your site, but the critical thing is to build a quantity of links to a specific URL.

Once you have some trading history, approach relevant sites and ask for a link back. Ask to be included in recommended supplier directories, but monitor all of these, record who you have asked and check your approved listing to ensure that it fits within our link building structure, if it does not get it modified.

Look at your competition; find out who is linking back to them:

In Google do a search such as links: domainName.com

This will show you all the sites linking back that site and give you an idea where you can get link backs.

Links for general sites, even if they are highly ranked are of no use unless they relate to some content that is related. An example would be If we could get a link on the front page of the BBC this would be great and would bring in huge traffic, but that traffic would be general and scattered. Google knows this and would say that the link was not worth as much as the huge page rank that the BBC has.

However, if the BBC write an article on your niche and within that article link back to your site, you will get the full effect of the Google juice.

One or two links will have no affect, you need 1000’s. However, build these over time, do not try and get 100s over night as you will be picked up for Spamming.
Anchor text

The anchor text is the text onto which the URL is added. It is critical that you are consistent with this, getting keywords into that link if possible without spamming. Don’t always use exactly the same Anchor text as Google will see this as being a link building exercise and will take a dim view.

Directory and file names – Permalinks

Most search engines will not follow dynamic links:

http://www.domainName.com/index.php?page=123

Ensure that you have your permalink system setup. This will allow you to add keywords into the URL which again is good for SEO

Your links should look something like:

http://www.domainName.com/about-your-nice-product

WordPress can manage this internally, but we should ensure that it is setup correctly.

Robots Exclusion File

Make sure you have a Robots exclusion file even if you are not going to exclude any robots. Many search engine spiders will simply not index your site if you do not have one. Use this robots exclude file to stop search engine spiders from indexing parts of your site, although I have personally never felt the need to do this there maybe instances where you do not want your information indexing by the search engines.

Site Map

A site map is very important, this not only improves the navigation of your site for the human visitor, it also ensures that the spiders can crawl your sites easily. Also Google takes a dim view of sites without one as they believe that they improve usability of a site and as such all good sites should have one.

Creating your own Web of sites

An experimental method of getting started in your link building is to create your own network of mini sites. These mini sites should not attempt to sell the product, they should be information sites, these will be totally separate from the dark star website and be hosted on their own domains.

These domains should be keyword rich domains, these domain names should not be registered in any name connected to the main company, different address/name. Ideally those domain names should already have been registered, and have a history in google. This is an art in its own right, you can monitor dropping domain names for keywords and try to register them as they become available or you and try and buy some domain names on the domain market.

Each of those mini sites will link back to the main site.

The hope is that if we have useful unique content on those mini sites people may link back to that site when they are writing a blog post about your niche and want someone to explain what they are for example.

This in turn shows Google that people trust those mini sites and Google will improve their ranking, in turn those sites are linking back to dark star so Google will see that those mini sites that it already trusts link to this site and as such they trust it and it follows that Google should also trust that site.

Ion addition, these sites will have their own unique content, this content will become indexed by Google, content which critically we control so we can modify, add to and update it, this will spread the net of our web presence wider.

If you start an affiliate programme this is something that you can get your affiliates to do, if each affiliate builds a mini site for you, maintains it, writes content for it and then links back to your site you are spreading your net even further, getting affiliates to do some of the SEO for you.

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Sites affected seem to be .uk, .de, .fr and .it

I wonder how much this downtime will actually cost Amazon. I for one was doing some last minute Sunday Evening Christmas shopping, and have now bought from Play.com.

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Twitter Hacked

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Although I like the idea of NetNanny and similar products, they are all focused around one PC and controlling that one PC or one profile on that PC. As an IT professional I have a number of computers all over the house, A Media Centre, a laptop for both Cheryl and myself and a PC in my office. With the new kitchen extension we will have another LCD TV along with a media centre PC. So the access to computers in the house is rather open.

I want to control the network we have at home rather better anyway. Currently I allow the router to do all the work, it handles the DHCP and the control of the network. I would like to have more control over that and as such a Linux server to control the network would be ideal.

This being so I would then be able to use Squid proxy to filter content on the network, I could then install Dansguardian on top of Squid to filter our Adult content and provide me with more control.

The only problem with this is that I do not like the idea of a server type PC, this both because I do not like the idea of having it running constantly as that could become costly, but also the size and noise of such a machine does not lend its self to the home environment.

I have been looking at low power PC options and have found the Sheeva plug system which is an ARM based mini PC which is the size of a standard power supply.There are a few options but the one that I was looking at was the Sheeva Plug Multi which takes an SD card for the OS. You can optionally buy an SD with an OS pre-installed Debian 6 or Ubuntu 9. Or you can download the CD Card Images from their site.

Sheva Plug

This is ideal as I want to have a system running Ubuntu as my tests with Dansguardian in VirtualBox have all been with Ubuntu and the install went very easily.

The system has a 1.2Ghz ARM processor with 512Mb of Flash Ram and 512 Mb of DDR2 Memory.It has a Gigabit Ethernet port, USB2 port and ESATA type II port. It does not have a VGA or other monitor port, the idea behind this is that you would access it via SSH which suits me. It also has the ability for another SD card to be plugged in or the USB and ESATA ports give the opportunity to add storage to the device effectively giving you a NAS solution.

The power consumption at about 19w is a little higher than some ‘Low power PC’ options, but at £89 I do not think that you can argue that, especially for the size of the device and being able to hide it away in a draw or behind a desk somewhere without it causing trouble with noise.

My only concern about this is that once I setup this system, I will change all the browsers settings of all the PCs on the network so that they run through the Squid proxy rather than directly to the router. I need to figure out how to stop the router accepting traffic from anything else other than the Squid proxy server so that you can not simply take out the proxy settings.

I have a fairly advanced Billion router (I forget the model) but I ams sure that somewhere on its configuration this will be possible.

I will be placing an order for this device and I will post her how my trials go with setting it up as both a home network server and as a content filter or net nanny.

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On The Allotment blog is a blog about all the activity on my new allotment plot. I have taken the tack of using it to record everything that happens on the plot.

To do this I intend it to be very visual, rather than having lots of words in the blogs, so this weekend I produced my first ever video blogs. I really went to town and produced three in one weekend. Go over to On The Allotment and have a look to see what you think.

I used YouTube and created a channel specifically for the blog. It was very simple to do, I have  Sony HD camera, and was able to upload the files directly from the camera to YouTube in HD format.

Ideally what I need to do is find some software that will allow me to edit those files. I was able to do some simply trimming and joining of the clips using the camera but I really want to do a better job with things like audio balance and putting intro clips and copyright notices onto the clips.

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I thought that bid on an item constituted a legal contract between the buyer and seller. If the seller wants to ensure that they get a certain amount for an item then they should enter a reserve price at the outset of the auction.

It seems that you can no longer pick up bargains on Ebay as sellers simply cancel auctions if they do not archive a large enough sale price.

I suspect that this is due to Ebays affiliation with Paypal that relies on a percentage commission of the sale price, meaning that if items achieve a higher price, Ebay makes more money.

Frustrated…

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