Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Cuil - the future of search...again

With search eninges being the gateway to knowledge and power on the Internet and with the massive amounts of money that can be generated through controlling this, it is not surprising that there are young pretenders jockeying for positioning.

Search engines live or die by the information they can provide. If you search for something and don't get what you want you will go somewhere else. If you search and find spam the search eninge will get a bad name and will lose market share, money and the eyes & ears of a legion of fans.

Cuil is one of these young pretenders. It claims the largest index (120) billion pages and it is developed by former Google search engine developers. The budget for the search engine was arounnd $30m which pales next to Google's billions but small & nimble is often an advantage in the Web 2.0 world.


Verdict:

Results are laid out pleasingly in columns with pictures to give an added sense of what is happening.
Form a small sample, results seem less spammy.

Behind the scenes with search engine optimisation

There are many methods that a search engine optimiser can use in order to help their site to gain more favourable rankings. By far the most important part of this is building links. This effectively channels some of the importance from other sites into your own. This influence (or Page Rank as Google call it) flows through links and, as a general rule, the more links there are to a page, the higher the Page Rank for that page.

In order for the work of link-building to be put to best effect, it is important to channel the influence your pages carry properly. This can be done with the rel="nofollow" attribute. This attribute is used by search engines like Google to prevent link spam and it allows you to tell search enignes not to follow a particular link and thus to assign a greater importance to the other links on the page. If you nofollow the links on your site that lead out to sites that you don't want to give influence to or the links that do not contain your keywords, then the links on your site that link to your content using the right keywords for thaat content in their anchor text will be given a far greater level of importance by Google.

Wikipedia is an exponent of the nofollow attribute. In order to stop people from changing Wikipedia entries in order to gian links to their websites, Wikipedia used the nofollow attribute on all external links. This means that people interested in external resources from Wikipedia can follow the links if they so choose but the search engines will not and will not give any extra importance to the sites behind them.

An example of the practice of using the nofollow attribute in a business context can be seen at Tintisha's website. The site is optimised for the keyword speaker stands and so links that do not relate to speaker stands or to any of the other keywords that the site uses are nofollowed. This means that the site can use navigational elements to help people find what they are looking for but inform the search engines that the deeper content on the site relates to the keywords you deem to be correct rather than those that anyone else thinks is right.

In order to see this in action, you can either use your browser, click on View & then Source Code. This shows the code that goes to making up the web page you see. You can then search for the word "nofollow" and see which hyperlink it pops up agianst.

To save time, however, if you have a Firefox browser you can download the Search Status plugin that puts some useful optimisation tools into the browser. Once installed, you see an extra bar. If you click on the 'q' on the bar and select 'Highlight nofollow links' you will now get a visual representation of nofollow links on a given website. Nofollow links will be ighlighted in pink and you can see how people use this attribute and get a sense of how to harness it.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

St James Systems Facebook Group - Are you a Fan?

In an attempt to drag ourselves kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, St James Systems have created a Facebook page as a showcase for the company and its work. the page, which can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/St-James-Systems/20350889982?ref=ts includes pictures, recent work and this blog.

Facebook is an important social networking medium with over 60 million members at the time of writing and St James Systems would urge any other company interested in gaining business over the Internet to do the same.

If you would like to talk about the benefits of an Internet marketing or search engine optimisation campaign then give us a call on 0116 2836699. For now, however, go along to www.facebook.com/business and sign up for yourself.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Tintisha.com

St James Systems are working with Tintisha.com on a project that has changed the look of the site and increased its profile on the Internet.

A blog has been introduced to keep customers and those in the audio visual industry up-to-speed with what is going on, a forum has been installed which will aim to answer the questions of anyone who uses audio visual electronics. The site has been revamped and St James Systems have begun optimising it for the word speaker stands and for many others.

Yesterday, 10 times as many people visited the site as when St James Systems started working with Tintisha at the beginning of June.

The aim is to make Tintisha.com the online market leader for speaker stands and gadgets. St James Systems aim to increase the level of traffic visiting the site and the conversion rate (turning those that visit into customers).

Peterborough Cathedral - Website Design

St James Systems are proud to announce that they have won the contract to redevelop the Peterborough Cathedral website. St James Systems will be maintaining the current website until the new site comes on stream. The new site is expected in October.

St James Systems are excited as phase 1 of the developement is an exciting project including new content management tools and phase 2 will introduce some web 2.0 elements, allowing visitors to get involved and interact in a way that is not being done on any Cathedral website.

New Websites - An update

We have been putting a number of new websites online recently and we wanted to show you a couple of them:

Harborough Tiles - Bathrooms, Bedrooms, Kitchens & Tiles: www.harboroughtiles.co.uk

This site has a flash-animated gallery and some information on the different facets of the business.

Louise Wilson Voice Imaging - Voiceover services: www.female-voiceover.co.uk

This is a relatively simple website but very effective. Louise lives & dies on the sound of her voice so we've put up some recordings & we've included a comprehensive FAQ so that her potential clients can feel confident in her.