Southern Africa 4×4 – Off-road Trips & Vehicle Mods

Having recent aquired a Nokia N70 I finally had a chance to browse the web from my mobile phone. Using Flickaswitch as a benchmark I compared it to a number of popular websites. The Conclusion: you cannot beat css based webpage design. The navigation should be in the form of an list. And proper use should be made of H tags so that the user can destinquish headings and important text. Images should be kept to a minimum and the important information should be kept near the top of the page so that you dont have to scroll dow forever.

Ive never posted from an Airport before so here goes – sitting at Gatwick on my way home to South Africa. Connect for free through a voucher from pcpro mag. Nice!!

Ok whats been happening in the world of serach marketing recently? 

Matt Cutts has posted some very nice videos with him talkinhjg about SEO ect.

With the recent interest in click fraud, Google have introduced a new feature in the interface showin info on the number of invalid clicks(if any) they have picked up.

Port Shepstone 3G

For the next few months I will be working via 3G from Port Shepstone. Port shepstone luckily has pretty good 3g coverage from vodacom. So i can do my work with a reasonably speedy connection. Goodbye 8meg UK Broadband and hello 384k 3G South African Connection

When choosing a hosting company many webmasters look at certain things such as the amount of space, included bandwidth and whether it has features such as PHP and MYSQL. From a Search Engine Marketing point of view the actual geographic location of the servers is also a very important factor.

Google uses two criteria to figure out what country your website would be most relevant to. When a user searches for “mobile phone contracts” from google.co.uk they would obviously not want results returned from websites from the USA. Therefore users may check the UK only results radio button. Firstly Google will consider if the site has a country specific domain name such as .co.uk or .co.za. If it is a generic .com it will detect what country the site is hosted in using the ip address of the sites host.

So always make sure that you are letting the Search Engines know what country your website is based in. Not only will fewer results be return for a country specific search with the greater chance of ranking, users will also be returned more relevant results. It is always a good idea to contact potential host and find out exactly where their data centres are as some do not volunteer this type of information on their websites.

Adding New Content To Your Website

Search engines spiders use the length of time between updates to your site to calculate the frequency with which they spider your site. It is therefore a good idea to have a section on each one of your pages that you update every week. An excellent example of this is a news section or blog that you can write a news story to keep your user up to date. The added benefit of this is that your site will grow by one page each week with the result that bigger site = greater authority.

With each update Google rolls out they are attempting to sift out the spam and return the most relevant and authoratative results possible. Therefore many techniques just don’t work anymore.

For instance bought links are very easy to pick up and having a significant amount of unrelated reciprocal links are now detrimental to your site. This is because the Googlebot has different crawl priorities and site with irrelevant links are just not getting crawled as they used to.

What is the best way to get your site ranking in Google? Remember Google wants a site and the links pointing to it to develop naturally. It wants people to find a site and because of its quality content, link to it. So make sure your site has good quality useful content and then maybe contact webmasters of authority sites and ask them for a link. If your site offers something useful to their readers they will be more likely to link to your site as it enhances the experience for their visitors. Also don’t forget about RSS feeds. By having an RSS feed you will open new avenues for people to link to your site and for Google to find its way to spider your site.

With Google Bigdaddy update many web
masters have been complaining that google is returning old pages from
their sites or has dropped a significant amount of pages from its
cache. In a recent post Matt Cutts shed some light on why this may
be?

Most of the sites effected seem to be those that have
engaged in dubious link exchanges with non relevant outbound links
i.e. A website about surfing having a link to a site about Linux. He
states:

“As these indexing changes have
rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges
and link buying/selling. ”

“think this is covered by the same
guidance as above; if you were getting crawled more before and you’re
trading a bunch of reciprocal links, don’t be surprised if the new
crawler has different crawl priorities and doesn’t crawl as much. ”

“Some folks that were doing a lot of
reciprocal links might see less crawling ”

Therefore the conclusions we can draw
from this is that Google places more and more importance on the
quality and relevance of linking. Reciprocal links are not a good
idea! Especially if they are to and from completely irrelevant
sites.