Search Engine overview

Search Engines

How do they work?
Search Engines strive to list sites against key words or phrases in terms of their relevance - this is their service to their customers, the end-user. Google have always been the best at this, which is why everybody loves them.

Arthur Leo from joe aliferis on Vimeo.

Engines like Google measure this relevance by analysing the descriptive content of sites and using their own algorithms to judge what they find. There is an industry devoted to unlocking these algorithms and helping people make the best of them. This has become known as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

How site content affects relevance to keywords/key phrases
It is generally understood that search engines reward websites that contain meaningful blocks of descriptive text that is focused around 5-10 key words or phrases, is non repetitive and non plagiarist. The more the better, as long as its high quality content. One might therefore achieve better organic rankings by adding some descriptive passages to each page as well as a general introductory descriptive passage to the home page and subsidiary pages.

Beyond this, a good method of adding meaningful, non-repetitive content to a site is to add news items or articles and link text to other pages within the site where relevant. These extra items will usually talk around subjects that include your product/service, re-enforcing the search engines belief that your site should rank highly for the key phrases that best describe your product/service

Secondary content like this could also be brought in from 3rd party sources, like RSS feeds or an outside contributor (eg. a blog), or group contributions (eg. a discussion forum).

Inbound Links
Another thing that search engines reward is being linked to by other sites - and the bigger the other site, the better as far as they are concerned. Big can mean many pages/lots of content, high traffic or both. For example, being linked to by a page on the Guardian website, which is huge and receives 1000's of visitors a day will lead a search engine to perceive your relevance to be high.

Getting your site listed in as many free directories as possible will also help. As will getting editorial on review sites, being talked about in forums or online groups and Blogging. In each case, some text about your site/product/service followed by a link to the website is what you are aiming for.

Myths
Meta tags are powerful (they're not anymore - only the title tag is important)
WC3 validation is required (A good thing if you can achieve it but won't improve SEO in itself)
Hidden content (not a good idea - this could actually undermine your SEO dramatically)

Non-organic rankings (sponsored links)

If you type 'photo albums' into google you will see that competition for the phrase is very competitive. This is is true of the Organic rankings and the sponsored links (right hand column).

The links on the right of the page are 'sponsored links' - these are sites that compete for the key phrases by bidding on them. Their position is determined by the amount each site bids.

The site owners only pay google the bid amount when their site link is clicked on by an end-user. This is called 'pay-per-click' advertising.

Generally, the more competitive the key phrases, the higher price a site will need to bid to get good sponsored placement for those phrases.

This is why it is a good idea to think about and define your phrases carefully. What will your potential customers be entering into google when they want to find your product?

'photo albums' - or something a little more specific, like 'hand made photo albums' ?

Generally, more specific key phrases like the latter are cheaper to bid on and represent better value for your money.

Trying to compete with WHSMITH for the phrase 'photo albums' is not a good idea.

Anyone can sign up for a google account and start managing their own 'pay-per-click' accounts themselves.


Joe Aliferis
Newforms, Brighton
www.newforms.co.uk

Web 2.0

The name of the Rose (Web 2.0)
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

The Perl programmer that sits next to me keeps telling me that 'Web 2.0' doesn't exist and it’s a constant source of aggravation for him that people keep chucking the term around as if it actually means something, when clearly it doesn't. I nod in agreement, despite the fact that I believe it must mean something - although, it's true that the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on their websites as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of what it means.


So what does it mean?
Not too long ago, a 'Consortium' of like-minded 'consultants' organised a 'brain storming' session which they called the 'web 2' conference'. Here they collaborated to draw up the blueprints of what they saw as 'web 2.0'. What they were trying to do was to define the birth of a new 'better' Internet, with themselves at the forefront of it.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

However, probably because their definition was somewhat vague, the meaning of the term 'web 2.0' quickly went out of focus. Today, some think that it is not much more than a re-branding – whilst others think it implies a type of content that is less static, more collaborative. Designers think it implies an approach to design, whilst developers are, on the whole, baffled by the implied differences to an implied 'Web 1.0' (mainly because they know that, at a low level, there are none!)

The collaborative guru's
Wikipedia describes web 2.0 as referring to a perceived or proposed second generation of Internet-based services - such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies - that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users (yawn).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2


The birth of a new Internet
This school of web 2.0 evangelists have a vested interest in re-branding the Internet. In short, they wish to distance themselves from the stigma of slow internet connections, badly designed websites, static content and floundering dot-com's. They are the consultant-guru's who have not only survived the 'great crash' of 2001, but have emerged as new, shinier, sexier versions of themselves. At least, so they want us to believe.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html


The re-branding acolytes
Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, says 'I think Web 2.0 is…a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means'

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060901-7650.html


Implied improvements – implied sophistication
At its best, jargon can be used as a method of connecting people with ideas, but often it simply obfuscates these ideas. At worst, it can be used to create the illusion that a concept or a technique is fully understood. That one is an 'expert' – or to make something sound more sophisticated than it actually is. If I write a sentence like this:

'The product is designed to leverage contemporary Web 2.0 technologies, creating powerful collaborative tools that will allow users to interact with each other in a real-time virtual space.'

Would you believe that this could be a description of a forum or bulletin board..?

Designers & standards
Putting aside those that are design-centric to the point of thinking that 'Web 2.0' refers to a design style, the problem of definition is further confused by the fact that some take it to mean a standard, like HTML 4.1 or XML 1.0 This it most definitely is not. At most, it is a catchall term that refers to a set of principles – but what those principles are is anybody's guess! In so much as the term 'Web 2.0' is thought to refer to a platform, technology or standard, that is simply not true.

Front facing views
My view is that, whilst it obviously means different things to different groups of people, 'web 2.0' is perhaps a term designed for consumers to digest, rather than developers – and that, at best, it is' is a banner used to denote a more sophisticated type of web application than the traditional 'website'...perhaps for those that only see the front-end. But, in the end, a Rose is still a Rose, by any other name…surely!

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

Online applications

Go online – get it free!
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

Many of today's most common applications are available free online. Not as free downloads, but rather as free web-based applications. A Web application is an application that is accessed with a Web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet.

Almost everyone these days is familiar with a web-based application in the form of web-based email, the most prominent examples of which are Hotmail and Google Mail (Gmail). Aside from email, however, the four most commonly used applications today, are probably

Word Processor
Spreadsheet
Calendar/diary
Image editor

For most people, this means owning a copy of Microsoft Office and a copy of Photoshop and, whilst there are free or low-cost alternatives to this (possibly the subject of another article!), pretty much all of the core functionality offered by these applications can be got for free online

Online alternatives

Calendaring: Yahoo Calendar http://calendar.yahoo.com
Word processing: Google Docs & Spreadsheet http://docs.google.com
Spreadsheet: Google Docs & Spreadsheet http://docs.google.com
Image editing: Snipshot http://snipshot.com

At first glance, the business case for this seems obvious then: you can reduce your I.T infrastructure costs by encouraging your employees to use free online tools in place of traditional applications. But are there any disadvantages?
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Compatibility
Crucially, any alternative to MS Word would have to offer compatibility with the Word format in both directions (opening & saving). Google's Docs & Spreadsheets tools do just that. Take a typical Word doc, perhaps sent to you by a colleague, upload it to your online account, open, edit, share, save and download it to you PC again, preserving the Word document compatibility. In fact, your colleague will probably never know that you did not use Word!
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Usability
Are web applications sophisticated enough in functionality yet friendly enough to allow users to take advantage of that functionality? Despite what you might think, a Web interface places very few limits on an applications user interface or functionality. Technologies such as Java, JavaScript, CSS, Flash and others, have allowed developers to build sophisticated screens and methods such as drawing on the screen, drag and drop and generally create an interactive experience that does not differ greatly from what users have come to expect in a traditional application.
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Security, storage & backup
It may be a little un-nerving for companies to store files in an online account but the reality is that they are probably safer there than on your PC. Consider the following:

A high-end web server is an expensive piece of kit, housed in a secure, often guarded environment with protection against fires, floods and, crucially, cleaners. They will also include integrated backup, hardware redundancy and firewalls as thick, metaphorically speaking, as the walls of a nuclear bunker.

Your PC, on the other hand is probably a relatively cheap consumer product, with one hard disk, located in your office, with little or no backup, no redundancy and a basic firewall. Even if it is a 'Server', with multiple drives and automated backup, kept separate from the other 'Client' computers, of a higher spec and better maintained, how much redundancy does it really have? Where is the backup kept? What contingencies are there for fire or theft? These are important questions that anyone who depends on their files for a living should address. If you use an online application, however, you might not need to. If you are downloading the files you create to your PC, or your network, you are instantly creating a significant level of redundancy and backup, one that would be expensive to replicate within your own I.T infrastructure.
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Accessibility & collaboration
Have you ever sent a colleague, client or supplier a document and they couldn't open it? Do they use the same program as you? Do they use the same version as you? A significant advantage of Web applications is they should work the same for any user, across browsers and across operating systems. This opens up the opportunity for you to be able to access and edit your files from any computer, anywhere. It should also mean that you can share these files easily with anyone you like, regardless of what version of Word they use. Most online applications will offer a simple path to sharing, collaboration and publishing your files and these advantages offer ways of creating and managing documents that the traditional applications like MS Word are struggling to catch up with.
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Achilles heel?
Hold onto your copy of MS Office, there is one tiny flaw in the plan!

My Internet connection is down!

I can't get online, so I can't access my emails and I can't access my work!

What all this means is that the future of web applications depends on the reliability of the network that people use to access those applications. For myself, I have probably experienced a total of half a day's downtime in the last year, so I'm not too worried. There are Wi-Fi connections springing up everywhere and anyway, I download any files that are 'in progress' to my laptop, so I can continue working. I'll upload them later…

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

Voice over IP (VOIP) in business

VOIP (or, making phone calls over the internet)
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

What is VOIP?
Voice over Internet Protocol. The technology used to transmit voice over a data network using the Internet Protocol. This allows you to make telephone calls using a broadband Internet connection (digital) instead of a normal (analog) phone line and, in some cases, these calls can be free.


How do I get VOIP services?
There is more than one provider of VOIP services. Some may only allow you to call other people using the same service, but other providers may allow you to call anyone who has a telephone number - including local, long distance, mobile, and international numbers.

Also, while some services only work on your computer or a special VOIP phone, other services allow you to use a traditional phone through an adaptor.

This diagram illustrates the various configurations of equipment needed to make VOIP calls

What Setup do I need?

Computer method

1. A fairly modern PC (or Mac)
2. VOIP software
3. A headset or handset
4. An internet connection (preferably broadband)

Adapter method

1. A telephone
2. A VOIP adapter
3. An internet connection (preferably broadband)




VOIP providers

Vonage
http://www.vonage.co.uk

This is an example of a provider that makes use of a telephone adapter, so no computer or software is required (the little box does it all). However, like all these providers, broadband is required. It’s essentially a pay-as-you-go service.

Sipgate
http://www.sipgate.co.uk

Another example of a pay-as-you-go VOIP provider. In common with this type of provider, calls to other IP networks are free and a published table of tariffs is available so you can compare the cost of calls to landlines, mobiles, international numbers etc.

Skype
www.skype.com
Skype is different from the two previous providers in that it requires a computer with a headset (or a Skype handset) to use it. However, Skype is fast becoming ubiquitous and Skype call rates are the cheapest by far. Skype will allow you to make free calls to anyone with a Skype account, anywhere in the world and a basic Skype account is free to setup.

Skype also offer fee-based services like ‘skype out’ that allows you make calls to ordinary landlines anywhere in the world for very low rates and ‘skype-in’ that allows you to have a phone number and voicemail so others with traditional phones can call you on your skype setup.

See www.skype.com/products/skypeout/rates/ for more information

Some points about Skype

The Skype client is easily installed and, other than choosing a username, no configuration is required.

Skype clients also work behind firewalls and Network Address Translation (NAT) systems. In other words, over your local network as well as with a direct connection.

Skype is not a telephony replacement service and cannot be used for emergency dialling.

You can use your computer whilst on the phone

You cannot make phone calls while your internet connection is down

VOIP will work over a wireless connection

Almost as soon as you log on your Skype contacts know you are there

Calls are encrypted using latest AES encryption



VOIP and bandwidth

When deciding whether to use VOIP, an important issue to consider is how much bandwidth you have through your internet connection.

Most ADSL broadband lines only have 256k upload, regardless of the download speed. Cable broadband can be even slower. Each VOIP phone call takes approx 40Kb of bandwidth so it’s recommended you only use a maximum of 5 VOIP phones per broadband connection. Of course, you could have 10 phones in total and count on the fact that not all will be used simultaneously. Bear in mind that many simultaneous VOIP calls may affect your overall network performance.

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

Remote Control

Use your computer to control another computer (remotely!)
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

This article is about how to remote control another computer. It deals with Macs and PC’s, OSX and Windows XP.

Sometimes you need to access another PC but for some reason, you can’t simply walk over to it and pick up the mouse. In this scenario, ideally you’d want to be able to logon to that remote computer without moving an inch and using the controls of the computer in front of you. That’s all possible with a few simple things setup in advance.

Windows XP
Find you way to Start Menu: Programs: Accessories: Communications: Remote Desktop. This is where you can access the little Windows app that lets you remote connect to another Windows PC. But first, you need to setup the remote PC to receive incoming connections.

To do this, Right-click MyComputer and choose Properties from the contextual menu that drops out. This opens the System Properties menu. Click the remote tab and tick the box that says ‘Allow users to connect remotely to this computer’. Then click the ‘Select Remote users’ button next to that box. Here you need to add any user accounts that you want to allow to login to this PC. These are user accounts that already exist on this PC. You can find and edit these accounts in Control Panel: User Accounts. The best thing to do is to create a new user in the User Control Panel called ‘Remote’ and set a complex password (8 letters and numbers mixed up and not meaningful). Then, in the Remote access: Select users dialogue box, click ‘Add’ and type the user name (in this case Remote) into the text area and click ‘Ok’. Then click ‘Ok’ again to return to the System Properties window.

Now you have turned on Remote access and setup a User account that can login.

Connect
Go to the PC that you want to use to control this PC and choose Start Menu: Programs: Accessories: Communications: Remote Desktop. In the little connection window that opens, type the network address of the remote PC. If you do not know the network address, go back to the remote PC and choose Start Menu: Run, then type CMD into the text field that appears and click ‘Ok’. In the black screen that opens, type IPCONFIG and hit enter. This will then tell you the IP address of the PC. This is the address to type into the Remote Access connection window on the Controlling PC.

When you have entered the address of the remote PC you wish to control and clicked ‘connect’ the Remote Access app will ask you for a user name and password. Here you type in the User account you have previously setup on the controlled PC. In this case Remote. This will then login to the remote OC as that user. The controlled PC’s desktop will appear and, with a small time lag, you can operate that PC as if it were your own!

Mac Connect
Once the setup of the PC is done, as above, you can also use a small FREE app on a Macintosh computer to login and control a PC in exactly the same way! Go to the URL below and download the free app, then install it and start it up.

RDC main page
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=remotedesktopclient

Once started, it is almost the same in appearance as the PC version. Simply enter the network address of the PC you wish to control and click ‘Connect’ you will then be asked for the login User Name and password.

Connect from outside your network
So far we have looked at how to control a remote PC that resides on the same network as the controller PC. We have not looked at how to connect and control a PC on another network.

Scenario: you are at home on your broadband network and you want to login and control a PC in your office (also on a broadband network).

Routing
Firstly, to be able to route outside traffic into your network, you need a static IP address assigned to your router. If you don’t already have that setup, here is a good article on the subject. http://corz.org/comms/hardware/router/static.ip.address.php

When that is in place, you need to configure your router to forward incoming traffic on a specific port to a computer on its network. This is called Port forwarding. Most modern routers will have a configuration page that allows you to manage these ports. Mine looks like this.

Application Ext port Int port Protocol IP address Enabled
RDC 3389 3389 TCP 192.168.8.34 yes


Here you can see how it is done. Login to your router using a browser (you will need to know the IP address of your router and the Admin username and password) and find the screen similar to this, usually called advanced routing, port forwarding or applications. Copy the above details, changing the IP address part to that IP address of the PC you wish to control. Once done, this means that when you are outside your office network, you can use the Remote Desktop Connection app to connect to the PC in the office. You do this by typing the initial connection string as follows:

Static IP address of your router:3389

eg: 81.86.131.245:3389

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

Web site traffic

Cross town traffic
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

If you’ve just spent some time or money on Search Engine optimisation or have been thinking of doing so, you might also be interested in understanding more about the quantity and type of traffic visiting your site. By the same token, if you’ve just spent or are considering spending some money on a website marketing campaign, you might find it useful to be able to measure how effective your campaign has been. One way to do this is by reading your server logs.

Logs:
Web servers keep log files – and, although there is more than one format and they are not always stored in the same place, with a little perseverance you can find and interpret them.

Tools:
In their raw form logs can be almost unintelligible – but there are a number of tools out there that will process these logs and present you with a visual and usually meaningful representation of the information they contain.

We looked at Sawmill (http://www.sawmill.net)

Key information stored in server log files:

• Hits per page (browser requests for a page or part of a page)
• Referrers (page or domain a visitor came from)
• Geographical locations of visitors

These three types of information alone, can used to interpret things like

• Which parts of your website are popular during any given time period
• What directories or search engines generate the most links to your site
• How many unique users your website has attracted during any given time period

This information could be extremely useful to you, especially during or after a marketing campaign. Other types of information available include:

• Browsers that visitors used to view your website
• Screen resolution of visitors monitors
• Operating systems on visitor computers
• Search terms used by visitors to find you on Search Engines

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

Search Engine Optimisation

Organic search engine placement (free ranking)
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

Recent research has shown that many users trust free-ad results in search engines more than they trust sponsored results. So why do so many businesses pay for sponsored results? It may be because they are frustrated with trying to understand the techniques of gaining organic placement. This article will help you understand the basics of those techniques.


Good page design / build
Your HTML needs to be properly formed to modern standards, preferably W3C compliant and preferably NOT using frames, popup’s or an excessive amount of JavaScript.
Example of a well built website: www.promotionalmarketingexhibition.co.uk
The page title is a focused description of the product/service the site offers.
The page has a balance of images and HTML text.
The page design reads easily and the layout falls easily into most users browsers.The HTML complies with modern standards, there are no FRAMES and no popup’s.


Tags
The 3 relevant tags are: keywords, description and title. “Keywords” and “description” tags play a role in helping search engine spiders to identify the content and purpose of your site and categorize it in their database. They can be thought of as a distillation of the page content. Together with the “title” tag, they also determine what text is shown under your website address in a results page. Research has also shown that this first line description influences which of the top ten results users then click on.

Robots and Spiders
Robots or Spiders, as they are sometimes called, are the faithful servants of the Search Engine that tend to drop by your website unannounced, crawl across every page recording relevant information, then jump off into hyperspace, all the while beaming messages back to the mother ship. Thankfully they are not as malevolent as they sound and can even be guided by you to some extent. Your two mechanisms for doing this are: the robots META tag and the robots.txt file.

The Robots META tag is a simple per-page mechanism to indicate to visiting robots if a page should be indexed, or links on the page should be followed. It is mostly ignored by today’s robots. More relevant is the Robots.txt file. Search engine robots/spiders look in the root of your domain for this file that tells them which files in your site should NOT be ‘spidered’. In this way, a single file can guide them through your website and allow you to have specific pages or directories excluded from the search engines database.
Content
One of the most effective ways to increase the amount of traffic to your website is to offer more quality content.
How does more content bring more visitors to your site?
Many websites are really just company brochures that have been placed on the web. These types of websites usually have five or six separate html pages with a moderate amount of text on them. Whilst it is possible to optimize them for a few keywords and achieve some ranking in the search engines, because search engines strive to rank the most important websites against a search query, this type of site will find it difficult to achieve high ranking against larger sites, especially in a competitive field. More content means more potential relevance to keywords or phrases, as long as its quality content.

What is quality content?
Depending on the type of products or services you offer, there are many ways to build quality content for your site. Here are a few starting points:

• Product Reviews
• Background information on products/services
• Questions and answers/FAQ’s
• Forums
• Guest articles

Whatever you do, keep it focused on your keywords and phrases, although this may happen naturally if you have thought out and structured your additional content properly.

Keyword density
This is just as it sounds - the ratio of instances of the keyword(s) you are trying to promote against the total number of words on the page. Ideally, 2% of a web page's words should be the targeted keywords. Any more could be detrimental and the ideal scenario is where keywords on your home page are individually linked to internal supporting pages like the examples suggested above.

Myths and tricks
In the old days, Search Engine optimization may have been relatively crude, and there were tricks to increase rankings. These days, however, trying to trick a search engine into ranking you highly will usually result in them not ranking you at all. Here are some things to avoid:

• Repetitive use of the same keywords or phrases
• Writing invisible or barely visible text in your pages
• Doorway pages
• Persistent re-submission of your site

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.