Web-Studio Blog

This is the blog of Web-Studio.co.uk to keep you up to date with our business and the interesting things we find on the Internet.

Friday, 20 June 2008

Creating a website favicon

You see that little icon in the top left corner of your browser at the beginning of a url? That is the favicon and is a way to make your website stand out in peoples favourites list. We are often asked how to to these and it is in fact quite simple using the right software.

We use Microangelo's Studio, part of Microangelo's Toolset, available from http://www.microangelo.us/. Normally we will create an image and then make sure that the background is transparent. We then export that image (we use photoshop for this) in png24 format. By using a transparent background it appears to look nicer in the browser. You will notice on ie7 that the url background colour can change when you click in it and has a grey look when it does not have focus. A transparent background makes it look good in either case.

Open up Microangelos Studio and import the png file. You can then automatically create a favicon. Use the size 16x16 and save as favicon.ico (ico being an icon file). Upload this to your website then in the <head> of your site use the code:

<link href="http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon"/>

There you go. You probably won't see it instantly as you will need to clear your cache on your browser.

Labels: favicon, web design

Wednesday, 21 May 2008

Getting your site submitted to Ask.com

Ask is a link based search engine which trawls the web through site links and indexes the pages it finds. There is not really a "submit URL" section but there is something else that can be done. This is a three stage process and will notify ASK that you have a website that you would like them to see.
Firstly you will need to ensure that you have the robots.txt file in the root directory of your website and this file contains the sitemap auto discovery directive
SITEMAP: http://www.YourDomainName.co.uk/YourSiteMap.xml

Then you need to ensure that you have a sitemap to put in the same root directory. This can easily be done for smaller sites by visiting http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which will create one for you. Download this and add it to your root directory. When this has been done you can 'ping' Ask and let them know you have a site that wants to be indexed. Type the below url into your browser to submit your sitemap to ask:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomainname.co.uk/yourSitemapName.xml

For more information have a look at their documentation http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml

Labels: search engines, website promotion

Monday, 12 May 2008

Describe each page properly

The Meta description of your website is an important area to spend that little bit of extra time on. It is used to entice people who find your site on the search engines to click on your link. Do not have the same description for every page.
This description will appear on the search engines under your page title (which is very important to get right!) so make it appealing and relevant.
More information on how Google advises you use your description:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264&hl=en#writegooddescriptions

Labels: descriptions, web design, website promotion

Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Taking a search engine view of your website

The first thing we look at when a client wants to improve their search engine position is the way a search engine views your website. We use a Lynx Viewer simulator which are freely available online. The Lynx viewer shows us the text on the website which could be indexed by the search engines. It also lists the links that the search engines could see and what anchor text is used within those links (the anchor text is the text used a link to another webpage). As you have probably guessed by now it is a word game. You need to ensure that each page on your website contains good quality text which is relevant to what you are trying to promote.

Test your own website and see if the text that appears contains the keyword phrases that people type in the search engines to find you.
http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php
If you are not sure what people will be typing into the search engines to find you then use our keyword suggestion tool in the webmaster tools section.

Labels: lynx viewer, website promotion

Sunday, 27 April 2008

Article spinning

Articles are one of the best ways of improving your search engine position. By adding your article to carefully selected article directories you can benefit from many backlinks into your website. The content of your article will be relevant to your website and the anchor text (text within the link which returns directly to your website) will be the keyword or keyword phrase you have targeted and is also relevant to both the article you have written and the website or website page it links to.
I must mention that if you are sending out an article with poor content then you do not really deserve to gain backlinks. Artcle syndication is about improving your website position and bringing in traffic from your articles, so make sure they are of unique content, relevant and interesting to read.
There is a problem though. Google has a duplicate content filter which will only act on a link back to your website on a few of them, if that. The way around this is called article spinning. It is a matter of rewriting the the paragraphs and headings in your article to be able to create many articles spawned from the origionla. Each article being unique in its own right and still interesting and relevant. This involves grammar changes, rewrting the sentences but keeping the meaning of each paragraph the same. Keeping the meaning of each paragraph the same then means that you can swap paragraphs between your articles to create multiple unique articles.
The benefits of article spinning is that you will gain many more relevant backlinks to your website, which will stay in the search engines longer.

Labels: link building, links

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

Link Building

Gaining links from other websites which are relevant to you, is a fundamental neccessity when trying to improve the search engine position of your website. The process of building incoming links is an ongoing procedure which takes hard work, diligence and knowledge of your field. It is just not worthwhile blasting every possible site with link requests. The sites you want to exchange links with must have a relevancy to what you do. It is not an automatic process using link exchange programs, it needs manual work to investigate which web pages would be relevant to yours. In fact, links from non relevant sites can do you more harm than good.

There are some great places to get good links, such as directories, social bookmarking sites and article directories. For those businesses that really want to build a good solid search engine position you have to go out there and look for them. In some cases you will need to pay for a link, you have to accept that. But time set aside every week or month, to investigate good content sites that you can ask for a link from is time well spent. When asking, ensure you communicate with a person, maybe by telephone or maybe by an email to an individual. Give them a reason to link to you. If your site is not up to par and there is nothing they see relevant on your site then why should they link to you.

Links can be gained by submitting articles and press releases. But these have to be of a good quality and of interest to the reader. Keep your website interesting and 'bait' people to link to your page, by either having unique quality content or something interesting that will keep them coming back. Blogging is a good form of link building, but again you need time to blog and your blogs must be of interest. Don't blog for bloggings sake, blog because you have something of interest to tell.

Don't forget the links which the search engines cannot see. Links in emails are also important, so use mailing lists to keep clients informed, again remembering to make the content interesting and relevant.

In summary:
Link building never stops.
Make sure that the site is relevant
Make sure that your site is worth linking to
It is a manual process, don't use link exchange programs
Ask someone by name to swap links.
Don't give up

29/4/08: Quick update
I have just seen this video on youtube, its very good. Chuck raps about link building.

Labels: link building, links, website promotion

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

Embedding Google Maps

Normally we do this by hand, but Google now have an online facility (in Beta) to help you create your own google map to embed on your website. It is a great way for clients to find you and add a bit of extra functionality to your website. You will have to sign up for a google API to put the google map on your site but this is fairly painless.
Embed Google maps onto your website »

Labels: maps, website addons