My 2¢ Worth

ave you noticed how the English language is changing?

ith the advent of ever newer technology, folks have coined words that have become a part of our daily speech and, no doubt, will soon be added to the dictionary.

ake the slang term texting for example. Texting; a verb, meaning to type a text message (usually into a cell phone) and send it to the intended recipient.

hat kind of word is that? Why not just say send a message? Worse yet is the term texted.

ow, I admit I'm always the last person to embrace new technology and new words, but I doubt I'll ever be able to adopt those two terms into my vocabulary.

Feature Article

Search Engine Optimisation Pitfalls

by: John Hill E-gain New Media

On page factors - Is your website search engine friendly?

So you have a website but where is it on Google? Have you fallen foul of a penalty or have you overlooked one of the many common search engine optimisation pitfalls when designing your site?

Understanding what works for the search engines and what doesn’t when it comes to the content on your website can have a crucial impact on the relevance and/or page rank of your pages from a SEO perspective.

Here we highlight common mistakes that could affect your ranking on Google and other search engines.

Optimising for the correct keywords - Basically ‘Get real’ about what keywords you feel your website can be ranked for. If you have a ten page website in a highly competitive market then ranking naturally for the major terms will be close to impossible. Use the Overture keyword tool together with the number of results on Google to find out what keywords are searched for and how many other websites are targeting them. If you are lucky then you might even find a popular keyword that not many other websites are optimised for. Alternatively a good tool for this job is Wordtracker from Rivergold Associates Ltd.

Code validation - If your html code is not valid then this could make it very difficult or even impossible for a search engine to separate your page content from your code. If the search engine cannot see your content then your page will obviously have no relevance.

Frames - Even though most, if not all, major search engines now index frames and even with the use of the NOFRAMES tag you run the risk of your pages being displayed in the search engine results out of context. As each individual page is indexed separately, it is likely that your website visitors will not see your pages within your frame and will effectively be stuck on the page they arrive at.

If you must use frames then create a ‘Home’ link on each of your individual content pages and point the link at your frameset index page.

JavaScript navigation - If you use JavaScript to control your website navigation then search engine spiders may have problems crawling your site. If you must use JavaScript then there are two options available to you:

Use the NOSCRIPT tag to replicate the JavaScript link in standard HTML. Replicate your JavaScript links as standard HTML links in the footer of your page.

Flash content - Currently only Google can index Macromedia Flash files, how much or how little content they see is open to debate. So until search engine technology is able to handle your .swf as standard then it would be advisable to avoid the use of these. Again if you must use Flash then offer a standard HTML alternative within NOEMBED tags.

Dynamic URLs - Although Google and Yahoo are able to crawl complicated URLs it is still advisable to keep your URLs simple and avoid the use of long query strings. Do not including session IDs in the URL as these can either create a ’spider trap’ where the spider indexes the page over and over again or, at worst, your pages will not get indexed at all. If you do need to include parameters in the URL then limit them to two and the number of characters per parameter to ten or less.

The best SEO solution for dynamic URLs is to use Mod-rewrite or Multiviews on Apache.

No sitemap - A sitemap is the search engine optimisation tool of choice to ensure every page within your website is indexed by all search engines. You should link to your site map from, at least, your homepage but preferably from every page on your website. If your website contains hundreds of pages then split the sitemap into several categorised maps and link these all together. Try and keep the number of links per page on a sitemap to less than 100.

Excessive links - Excessive links on a given page (Google recommends having no more than 100) can lower its relevance and, although it does not result in a ban, this does nothing for your search engine optimisation strategy.

Be careful who you link to - As you have no control over who links to your website, incoming links will not harm your rank. However outbound links from your website to ‘bad neighbourhoods’ like link farms will harm your ranking.

As a rule ensure as many of your outbound links as possible link to websites that are topical to your field of business.

**************

John Hill - Developer, Designer and SEO Professional with E-Gain New Media (www.e-gain.co.uk) offering website design, search engine optimisation, PPC management and online marketing consultancy.

E-mail Button Link

If you would like to enable your visitors to launch their E-mail program with a button to send you a message, paste the following code in your HTML document where you would like the button to appear.

<form>
<input type="button" value="E-mail Us"
onClick="location.href='mailto:your-name@yoursite.com'">
</form>

This is the button just created with the code above.

You can customize the fields in red to reflect how you'd like the button to read and to your own E-mail address.

* Get these syndicated tip feeds for yourweb site, free. *

Second Article

Choosing a Billing System

by: Shirley Allen A&O Billing, Inc.

No matter what type of business you are in you want to get paid for your products and services by your customers and clients. Preparing itemised bills by hand used to be simple enough when you only had a few to do each month but it becomes a lot more difficult to do as your customer base grows. The time needed to prepare each bill means that billing often takes much longer than you would want and is open to increased human error, especially when the end of the month approaches.

A solution to this and other billing issues is to invest in a billing system. Obviously the amount of storage space needed is reduced with a computerized billing system as all the information can be stored on different storage media. Calculations can be done automatically with the figures being taken directly from timesheets. This ensures that all work completed for a particular customer is accounted for and included in their bill. The amount of data that needs to be inputted is greatly reduced when you have a suitable billing system that can extract figures from a variety of sources including timesheets and purchase orders for items particular to a customer's order.

When you are deciding on a billing system, you will obviously have to consider your company~s specific needs and the functionality you need, as well as its compatibility with other business tools. There is nothing worse than finding you are going to have to replace all your existing systems to be able to accommodate the new billing system. A bespoke billing system is often the ideal solution to this problem but time and money are the two main constraints. It can be extremely costly for a software house to design a tailor made billing system and the costs can be huge. Financial limits and implementation deadlines will obviously mean that some systems can be excluded immediately.

You need to consider a number of factors when researching systems. Obviously you want the system to produce the bills from your existing sources of information so you need to know how this data is input. The system needs to be easy to use, or you need to have suitable employees who are able to learn software quickly. If you can get hold of a demo version for a number of different billing systems you can begin to evaluate each one and produce comparison reports to help with the final decision.

Networking can provide valuable insight into billing systems that other companies use. It is important to listen to their experiences regarding ease of use, support from the company and consider how flexible the system is for the future.

**************

Shirley Allen is the owner and operator of A&O Billing, Inc. which is a premier resource for billing information. For more information, go to: www.aobilling.com

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