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Getting Hits

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the basics of generating traffic and web site promotion

This is a beginner’s guide to web site promotion and search engine placement. Its main advantage is that it will not overwhelm somebody new to this arcane technology. Don Sellers begins with a simple explanation of search engines and what they do. He tells you how to get your site listed, how to understand which links give the biggest hits, and how to get listed with the top search engines, such as Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Excite. He also explains the subtle differences between the major players in this field. [His baseball metaphor is catching].

Getting HitsHe describes how to set up links both to and from other sites, and where to submit your site for free web promotion. He lists plenty of submission sites, announce sites, and how to use them. His lessons on netiquette in newsgroups and mailing lists will be helpful for newcomers to these areas of the Web. He assists you in targeting which newsgroups you should list your Web page with, and identifies some of the pitfalls of using this method of promotion.

He also includes some interesting suggestions for offline site promotion – creating your own press releases and getting listed in magazines for instance.

If you want to spend money, he has sound advice on banner advertising and how to pay for key words, as well as how to analyse the statistics of web logs to interpret the results. Finally there is a useful listing of free and commercial resources to help you.

His overall advice is that there are no easy shortcuts. Success will come from testing and refining your site regularly to stay competitive in the medium.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Getting Hits   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Don Sellers, Getting Hits: the definitive guide to promoting your web site Berkeley, CA: Peachpit, 1997, pp. 178, ISBN: 0201688158

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Optimizing Windows

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advice on improving power, performance, and efficiency

This guidance manual is far more comprehensive than its title suggests. Although the main focus is Windows, it deals with optimizing all operating systems, plus offering tips on speeding up the boot process, freeing up memory, disk partitioning, and generally squeezing the best performance out of your system. David Farquhar’s approach is reassuring and friendly, and he provides commonsense reasons for each of the changes he recommends.

Optimizing Windows He starts with simple suggestions for freeing up disk space by deleting temporary files, obsolete programs, desktop icons, and all those fonts you never actually use. He’s keen on disk defragmentation, and points out that when Windows says it’s not necessary, that’s because its definition of 0% or 1% are so wide. He also recommends disk partitioning, and for each improvement he explains how to use a resident Windows tools utility if there’s one available, a commercial utility if it’s not, or a share/freeware program for which he gives the URL.

For instance, he describes a clean-up and optimization procedure using three of the utility programs he recommends – Norton Utilities, Fix It 99, and Nuts and Bolts 98. Then the same for a couple of uninstallers.

He also covers upgrading from Win95 to Win98, though so rigorous is his search for maximizing performance that much of his advice is focussed on what not to accept during customized setup. He ends with advice on hardware upgrades – memory, hard drives, video cards, even motherboards.

You can ignore the gaming and multimedia in the title. This is for anyone who wants to make sure their computer is running as well as it should. And it’s not just for optimizing and tweaking: it will teach you about the Windows operating system, as well as the underlying architecture of the PC.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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David L. Farquhar, Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics, and Multimedia, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2000, pp.278 ISBN: 1565926773

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Search Engine Optimization

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how to maximise page rankings with search engines

I bought this book on search engine optimisation (SEO) because I trust Peter Kent’s work. His best-selling 2000 work Poor Richard’s Web Site was well-written, clear and friendly advice, and he spells out technology in a way which is easy to understand. He starts out here by explaining how search engines do their work, then provides a quick overview of how to optimise pages. This is an intelligent approach, because the details of SEO can become quite complex, and people fixing their own sites rather than paying an SEO agency will want to get on quickly with the job.

Search Engine Optimization The process is one of gradual adjustment and refinement. It involves choosing the best keywords, creating good content, making submissions to the SEs, and generating incoming links. Each of these topics is then explained in greater detail. He always offers suggestions of free software and services where possible, and the resources mentioned are all listed at the book’s own web site. The only paid-for software he recommends is WordTracker which helps you to identify the most appropriate keywords for your site.

Most of the advice is perfectly straightforward and easy to follow – though it requires a great deal of your patience and time. It involves giving pages accurate descriptive titles, creating content which matches the description of what’s on offer, and avoiding tricks and anything which tries to put one over on the search engines

On the use of frames he is quite unequivocal. Don’t do it! But just in case you have done so, and can’t really change your site, he shows you how to eliminate the worst problems. The same is true for dynamic pages generated from databases, and for cookie-based navigation systems.

But then just to prove that he’s not being unnecessarily stuffy, he does have a chapter on how to trick the search engines – albeit after listing several reasons why you should not use them. These include stuffing keywords, making text and links hidden on the page, duplicating pages, making doorway pages, plus tricks with redirects and cloaking.

Next he deals with the business of submitting your site to the search engines – putting a lot of his emphasis on creating a sitemap. Once again he gives lots of convincing reasons why you should use the free submission systems and avoid the paid-for services.

He explains the way the system of page ranking works and why it is important that the pages of a site contain as many links as possible. This leads naturally to the difficult business of finding people who will link to your site. We get several link-swap offers a day on this site, but most of them turn out to be from what are called link farms – which search engines don’t like.

By the time he reaches the shopping directories he has to admit that all this link-building and site-promotion is a labour-intensive business. So there’s a section on how to get other people to do it for you!

© Roy Johnson 2010

Search Engine Optimization   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Peter Kent, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, Indianapolis: Indiana, Wiley, 4th edition, 2010, pp.382, ISBN: 0470881046

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Speed Up Your Site

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tips and techniques for improving download times

According to Andrew King, the best way to get people to your site and keep them there is to provide speed, feedback, clear navigation, and fun. His new book Speed up your Site is essentially a series of guidance notes and techniques for shaving every ounce of excess fat from your web pages. This means trimming everything which is not necessary, shortening every bit of code, and compressing the pages wherever possible. It’s intermediate level technically, but anybody with a web page or two could learn something from what he offers – and his instructions are clearly written and well illustrated.

Speed Up Your SiteHe starts out with a chapter of evidence to support the notion that “without feedback, the length of time that users will wait for web pages to load is from 8 to 12 seconds” – though in days where people are increasingly on broadband, these figures seem a bit high to me. One of the novel concepts he introduces is the idea of ‘flow’ – a state of being when we are at one with the activity at hand. What this means in Web terms is that we will go back to those sites where we get rapid feedback.

It becomes really interesting when he embarks on HTML optimisation. Since most people have sites written in HTML, this advice is very useful in showing you how to minimise code and shrink pages.

Every byte counts – Think fast and small

Next he shows how to update pages from HTML to XHTML as well as how to deal with style sheets. He shows how to minimise file sizes as well as how to make the most of the latest CSS-2 conventions, such as replacing JavaScript with CSS-2 rollovers, and how to compress the instructions in the code.

For those who want to tackle really advanced techniques, he shows how JavaScripts can be compressed for speed and even scrambled (obfuscated) for security. He even shows his principles at work in a series of site make-overs.

The latter parts of the book deal with how to optimize graphics and minimize the size of multimedia files, and there’s a very good chapter on different forms of file compression.

For those like me who are a bit intimidated by the more advanced strategies, he also has lots of advice on improving your chances with the search engines by choosing meta-tags and keywords that count.

This is an excellent book for intermediate to advanced users – people who already have a web site, but who want to make it more efficient. Be prepared for a lot of work – but he shows you clearly what to do.

© Roy Johnson 2003

Speed Up Your Site   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Andrew B. King, Speed up your Site: Web Site Optimisation, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2003, pp.496, ISBN: 0735713243

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Web Site Measurement Hacks

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tips and tools to help optimise your online business

If you take a serious interest in your web site, once you’ve got over the obsession with how it looks, you’ll want to know how it performs. And if it includes any element of e-commerce, you’ll undoubtedly want to know how to improve that performance. Eric Peterson’s guide Web Site Measurement Hacks is a technical guide to doing that by measuring what is going on – and that means hard figures, the number of visitors you get, and what they do when they arrive at your site.

Web Site Measurement HacksThe first and most important thing is to know the definition of terms in this arcane world – to know the difference between ‘hits’, ‘visitors’, and ‘unique page views’ for instance. He explains these issues really well, and emphasises that you need to understand the technical details if you want to increase your site traffic. Although some of his suggestions are aimed at businesses with big money to spend on web site optimisation, I was glad to see that he included the cheap and even free options available for small and start-up entrepreneurs. This includes programs such as Analog, which I have used myself in the past.

He explains how to understand and analyse web logfiles, and how to get a more accurate picture of which human beings are visiting your site by excluding from the results robot searches and other data which has been pulled from cache. For those who are really technologically ambitious, there are instructions on how to build your own web measurement application, along with the necessary core code and the location of free downloadable add-ons.

As the book progresses it becomes more technical. First he deals with JavaScript page tags, then how to use one-pixel hidden graphic ‘bugs’ to learn more about what visitors do on your site. He also covers learning from errors – that is, understanding (and rectifying) the broken links and the pages which are not delivered on request to your visitors.

After that, he switches to explaining the details of online marketing. This involves a close examination of terms such as ‘click through rate’ and ‘cost per conversion’, as well as how to measure the effectiveness of banner advertising.

Most of his recommendations are sound. On the optimization of web page size he mentions the free service offered by Andy King (author of Speed Up Your Site). I ran a few pages from the site you are visiting now through his analyzer and learned a lot about possible improvements.

The later stages of usability become more and more complex. The hacks he discusses here are for people with serious e-commerce ambition who are prepared to spend time and money on making their site(s) more effective. They include features such as measuring the demographics of your site visitors, analysing their behaviour patterns, and gathering data on their engagement with the retail process.

This is a book which deals with both the technical issues of maintaining your Web’s infrastructure and the business implications of interpreting the data it generates. It’s a technology companion that any serious web entrepreneur will welcome.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Web Site Measurement   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Web Site Measurement   Buy the book at Amazon US

Eric T. Peterson, Web Site Measurement Hacks, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005, pp.405, ISBN: 0596009887

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Website Optimization

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speed, search engine, and conversion rate secrets

Andy King scored a big hit in 2003 with his first book Speed Up Your Site. It’s a guide which still has its own live web site where you can analyse the effectiveness of your web pages. His latest magnum opus Website Optimization goes way beyond that in scope and depth. It’s a guide to maximising every aspect of a website and its performance. It’s an amazingly practical manual, with page after page of ideas, suggestions, and strategies for getting your pages more widely known and read.

Website Optimization On the whole, it’s not too technical, and he supplies snippets of code only when necessary. All the tips are within the grasp of anyone who is used to running a web site, and along the way he explains the principles of search engine optimization (SEO) as well as briefing you on how SEs treat your site. This is an up-to-date account of how search engines such as Yahoo and Google rank your pages and deal with search requests. He also presents real-life case studies in which he shows ‘before and after’ makeovers of professional sites. These are most instructive in that the ‘before’ pages look attractive and professional enough – until their underlying weaknesses are analysed and rectified. The improvements give what are claimed as up to fifty times more site visitors per day, and in the case of a cosmetic dentist the need to employ more staff and move to bigger offices in Philadelphia.

The first half of the book deals with search engine marketing optimization, which can be expensive as one enters the world of paid advertising. But the second concentrates on things which anyone can do and afford – making pages smaller, lighter, and faster by trimming off the surplus fat. In an age of faster and faster broadband connections, web users are simply not prepared to wait more than a couple of seconds for a page to appear – so you’ve got to make important pages lean and speedy:

Web page optimization streamlines your content to maximise display speed. Fast display speed is the key to success with your website. It increases profits, decreases costs, and improves customer satisfaction (not to mention search engine rankings, accessibility, and maintainability).

All of these issues are dealt with in detail – and I particularly liked the fact that he was prepared to repeat some of the techniques when they occurred in different contexts. It’s not always easy to grasp some of these technologies in one simple pass. Especially as – in the case of optimizing images – he explains no less than sixteen possibilities for cutting file size and speeding up downloads.

He’s also keen on the optimization of style sheets and shows an amazing variety of techniques for creating what he calls ‘CSS Architecture’. Here too there are no less than ten strategies explained which offer cleaner, tighter, coding and the use of structural markup to beat browser peculiarities and rendering delays.

Most of his explanations are clearly articulated, but occasionally he lapses into less than elegant repetition and jargon, which could deter the inexperienced:

By converting old-style nonsemantic markup into semantic markup, you can more easily target noncontiguous elements with descendant selectors.

Fortunately, this sort of thing only happens occasionally.
There are some very nifty tricks for creating buttons and rollover techniques using style sheets, which saves the time to download a graphic files button, and thus once again speeds up page rendering.

He puts in two chapters on advanced web performance and optimizing JavaScipt and Ajax on your site which I have to admit went beyond my technical competence. But then it’s back to terra firma with understanding the metrics of your site’s performance – that is, knowing how to analyse the statistical data returned by website analysers such as Google’s Analytics and WebTrends.

I’ve never been able to understand before what page ‘bounce rate’ was until it was explained here – and I was astonished when I saw the results from some of my own pages!

As the search for more detailed information and for planning campaigns goes on – so the process becomes more like a science. There are graphs and formulae scattered around these pages to prove this. It’s the same for Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). All I can say is that if you are in this league, Andy King is your friend, and his advice is here thick on the ground to help you.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Website Optimization   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Website Optimization   Buy the book at Amazon US

Andrew King, Website Optimization, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2008, pp.367, ISBN: 0596515081

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