Google has provided a unique tool that will let you tweak the search engine ranking positions of sites.

Google’s searchwiki shows up an arrow for promoting your favorite website, a cross for deleting them and a speech bubble for adding your own personal comments. The new scheme which was officially announced at the end of last week is designed to give the global search engine a more personal touch. Google will now let users completely re-shuffle the results in the search engine so their own favorite websites can get top positions and their least favorite websites get deleted all together!

Spokeswoman Marissa Mayer said that while the revisions won’t change the way that Google naturally ranks website they are not ruling out that if it does become really popular then it may change how they shape their search algorithm.

Is this truly the end for SEO?

The researches sent roughly 350 million email messages over 26 days, which resulted in only 28 sales. The response rate for the campaign was only 0.00001%. Direct mail campaigns aim for about 2.15% success rate.

However even though the researches said that the conversion rate was so low they claimed that companies like storm network could still be making up to £1.5 million a week. As the researchers only sent out 350 million emails they claim that the storm network could be sending out ten times as many emails in the space of a week.

Here at Pixel Internet we like to keep on the pulse of good web design. To look back at the web ten or so years ago is always amusing yet some things have remained constant through out the years of the web and they are namely the principals of what makes a site easy to use. We like to think that the Pixel site is user friendly and is easy to navigate but it is not easy to construct a site to suit everyone! Recent research has indicated that roughly 80% of things found ten years ago are still an issue today. Some of those issues have disappeared slightly because users have changed and 10% have changed because technology has changed. 
Some design crimes such as intro screens that simply get between the user and the core content of the site and web designers indulging in their artistic urges rather than usability have almost completely disappeared.

Usability and ease of site use are as important as ever these days and in order for a site to succeed you must adhere to the demands of the user at all times! In the grand scheme of things the net has not changed as much as people thought it would and things like usability are still as important as ever. If you make your site complicated and hard to use you could loose out on potential business! 

However, through our experience working with search engine optimization we have noticed that more and more flash files are becoming more powerful with search engine results. We have run numerous experiments on flash sites and content on the site normally gets cached within Google which is great. Yet there is one area that remains vague for flash and SEO and that is whether Google has the power to index each frame within a swf file. If you know flash then you will know that building a site on the program will require you to use separate frames. On each frame there is content. Does Google have the algorithmic power to index each frame? 

Usually we have noted that Flash sites which are spread across numerous html pages are more powerful because it is not asking Google to explore the depths of the swf file. This is only our opinion of course, what do you think??

Results of a new poll have suggested that search engine optimization (seo) will take first place in the ever-growing industry of marketing. The survey was conducted among 400 marketers and about a third of the people said that search engine optimization would be their preferred mode of marketing business online. Pay per click advertising was not that far behind as 26% of the people doing the survey voted for it.

The research carried out elaborates on these findings and displays that marketers realize the strength and potential of online Internet optimization. The pure financial potential of business through the internet cannot be measured.

Advertising online has never been so valued and search engine optimization can change a businesses performance. SEO is surely set to be one of the most influential forms of advertising and marketing.

There are a few points you should take into consideration before registering your domain name, and today we are going to outline what we think, are some of the most valuable.

1. Think about different domain extensions
Before you purchase ‘mydomain.co.uk’ you may want to check to see if .com and other variations are available. Lets say your opening a online shoe shop, ‘LindasShoes.co.uk’, your best securing  ’LindasShoes.com’ too, you wouldn’t want a competitor to grab the domain and start selling shoes! Likewise if  ‘LindasShoes.com’ is already taken, you may have to have a re-think and look for a differend domain altogether….

2. Check the domain names age
It’s worth checking the age of a domain too as an older domain name can fare better on the search engines.

Here’s a handy free too that will check a domains age.

Try it out and enter google.co.uk in the box provided. You will see the domain is (approximately) 9 Years and 7 Months old.

Now try again with google.com. 11 Years and 7 days old; this domain will carry more weight than the other as it’s an older domain.

In an ideal world both would be available for you to register and you could have the older of the two as you main domain. But of course with well over 94,000,000 registered domain names in the world, finding the one you want can be harder than you think!

3. Protect your privacy
When you register a domain name your private information can be made public to anyone performing a simple WHOIS Search. There are obvious downsides to this including abuse from spammers. Thankfully Pixel Internet provide you with the option to protect your private information with our Domain Privacy package.

4. Keep it short and simple
alongandcomplicateddomainname.com - can be hard to remember, likewise domainz.com with odd spelling can mean people can’t find your website. Of course if your business is ‘EZWorkshops’, then it would make sense to register a domain with the same spelling. But if you’re going for a domain name that incorporates your main keyword/phrase, try to keep it short, to the point and with the correct spelling.

5. Check whether your chosen domain name is available!
You can use our ‘domain search‘ facility on our website homepage to check if your chosen domain name is available. If it is…. register is quickly! .UK Domains alone are being registered at a rate of one every 20 seconds!

That’s it, our quick guide to choosing and registering your first domain, hope it helps!

Pixel Internet have recently updated a number of our most popular scripts all of which you can install from your Host control panel. These include:

WordPress - upgraded to V2.6.1

PHPCoin - upgraded to V1.4.4

Joomla - upgraded to V1.5.6

Locked Area Lite - upgraded to V6.0

Mambo - upgraded to V4.6.5

RoundCube - upgraded to V0.2-aplha

Website Search - upgraded to V1.5b

AWStats - upgraded to V6.8

ZenCart - upgraded to V1.3.8a

Openads - upgraded to V2.6.0

Web Calendar - upgraded to V2.9.3a

We think it’s important to keep our one-click install scripts up to date for our customers, even though this can be a very time consuming task, with some programmes taking several hours for us to complete the upgrade.

Remember that if you would like to suggest a script for us to install, you can do so via your customer feedback form found in your Control Panel.

(Hopefully from Pixel Internet!)

Now you want some help to make it look that little bit special!

At some point along the line, you will come to hear about Web 2.0

Now some love it, some hate it, regardless to which side of the fence you sit, it’s becoming more and more popular and there’s some clever peeps who have made the whole 2.0 experience that much easier, with Web 2.0 online generators.

Here are our top 10 (in no particular order)

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 1: Online Ribbon Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 2: Loader Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 3: Button Maker

T

op 10 Web 2.0 generators. 4: Web 2.0 Stripes Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 5: Web 2.0 Badges

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 6: Web 2.0Logo Creator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 7: Fresh Badge Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 8: Tab Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 9: Favicon Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 10: Web Button Generator

That’s it, our top 10 Web 2.0 online generators! If you think we have left any out, please feel free to comment below!

Top 10 SEO Tool. 1 IWebTool
iWebTool is a website offering a plethora of useful online tools, including a pagerank checker, backlink checker, search engine position checker and keyword suggestion tool to name but a few. Check them out.

Top 10 SEO Tool.2 CopyScape
CopyScape is a search engine dedicated to locating duplicate content on the web. Want to make sure no-one is stealing your content? Simply enter your website/webpage and it will search the internet and report back if it finds any part of your webpage duplicated on another site. A fantastic tool.

Top 10 SEO Tool.3 Google Analytics
Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting.

Top 10 SEO Tool.4 Google Rank Checker
This is a great free Google Position Checker tool that will automatically query Google’s search engines. It checks if your URL appears in the first 1000 results for your chosen keywords. If the URL is present, it will output what position it occupies.

Top 10 SEO Tool.5 Meta Tag Analyser
Designed by SeoCentro, this Meta Tag analysis tool helps webmasters analyse their website pages. This search engine optimisation tool analyses not only the Meta Tags but also tries to mimic the same spider technology as the search engines spiders them self! Awesome…

Top 10 SEO Tool.6 Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
This is a great free tool that allows you to take a peak at keywords and phrases that are being search for on the web.

Top 10 SEO Tool.7 SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimisation
This is another great website that offers a plethora of free Search Engine Optimisation tools.

Top 10 SEO Tool.8 SEO Check list
The SEO Check list brought to you by webconfs.com. This one is a must budding SEO beginners. With its unique point scoring check list you will be well on the way to producing a search engine friendly website!

Top 10 SEO Tool.9 SEO Tutorial
Another great guide from webconfs.com. This SEO tutorial will guide you through all the important factors needed to optimise your website for the search engines.

Top 10 SEO Tool.10 Free Google site map generator
phpSitemapNG is a free Google Sitemaps generator written in PHP, but also generates RSS-based, txt-based and HTML-based sitemap files. It will spider your website and also your filesystem (of course, as you prefer). You can download and use it for free, the licence is GPL.

NB: Don’t forget though, if you’re a customer of Pixel Internet, you can use our own free Google Sitemap generator supplied with all Pixel Internet web hosting plans!

If you feel we have left something out, or would like your own SEO web developement tool added to this least, please feel free to leave a message below!

We’ll this really the million dollar question and unfortunately there is no definitive answer, however we have listed what we think, are the top 10 SEO tips that you can implement yourself, which will ultimately help your websites visibility on the search engines.

SEO Tips 1. Develop Your Key Phrases
Begin by researching your key words and phrases. What products or services do you offer? Where are you located? What’s your area of operation? Perhaps most importantly; what would you search for? Try to put yourself in the mind of a potential customer.

SEO Tips 2. Optimise Your Page Title
The page title is one of the most powerful elements of your website that you can easily optimise. Ensure you use your important keywords, this will help search engines better understand the content of the webpage. Keep it short and to the point; some search engines (like Google) will only display as little as 66 characters including white spaces

SEO Tips 3. Optimise your Page Description
Description Meta, likely to be one of the first things (second to the page title) that your potential customers will see. Write a maximum 150 character description employing all your important key phrases. But most of all remember your trying to stand out from the rest, so make it clear, punchy and to the point.

SEO Tips 4. Write interesting, helpful and ‘human’ content
Now that you’ve written your page title and added your description and keyword Metas, it’s time to start the most involved process of all - writing your page content.

Quality page content is really a balance between grammatical license and readability – incorporating your target key phrases for use by search engines while still putting across a coherent message to your human audience.

SEO Tips 5. Remember those Alt and Title Tags

Adding Alt and Title Tags
Don’t ignore your Alt and Title tags, they can play a big part in your site optimisation.

The Alt tag is the text you see when you move your mouse over a picture or graphic. For example, move your mouse over this graphic of the Pixel Internet logo:

The Alt tag is very useful to screen reading software used by the visually impaired.

The Title tag is the text that appears when the mouse is moved over a text link such as this link here.

SEO Tips 6. BLOG!
Blogs can be a fantastic marketing tool below are just a few reasons why;

1. Structured content - Blog software such as Wordpress, with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to categorise content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.
2. Crawlable URLs - Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl.
3. Internal links - Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long phrases.
4. Inbound links - One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other - much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, which in turn encourages links and traffic.
5. RSS - Links to RSS feed URL’s that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
6. Fresh content - Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.
7. Active community - Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.

Look here for a great reason to get your Wordpress web hosting with Pixel Internet!

SEO Tips 7. Build up your inbound links
The best place to start any linking strategy is with web directories. The two biggest by far are Yahoo! and the Open Directory (used by Google). Being listed in these is an absolute must as they generate huge amounts of traffic.

There are plenty of other directories you should get listed in too. Global, local and industry-specific directories abound on the Internet. To find them run a search for ‘web directory’ on your favourite search engine. The directories that come up highest in the search rankings will probably generate the most traffic. You can also check these directories of directories:

• Website Directory
• Open Directory’s directory of web directories
• Search engine colossus
• Best Free Directories
• Internet search engine database
• Business Directory

SEO Tips 8. Build your website using clean accessible HTML
Here 5 great reasons why you should validate your website;

• Troubleshooting unknown problems - Sometimes, you may be encounter a coding or layout problem and have absolutely no idea what’s going or where the problem lies. Even though W3C’s validator uses advanced language, you can get a pretty good idea on where some of your problem areas are.
• Know what your website will look like - With discrepancies between browsers and Internet Explorer slowly losing its stranglehold on browsers, you should place importance on making sure your website looks identical to the way it does in your preferred browser. Of course, there are exceptions such as browser specific bugs. But do your research on those as well.
• Search Engines like properly formatted HTML - If you decide to open up a <p> or <h1> tag and never close it, that may have been a lost opportunity when a Search Engine spiders your website.
• Encourages Usability - For example, W3C doesn’t let a site pass validation unless all the images in the document have an alt attribute. eg. <img src=”my-goldfish.jpg” alt=”A picture of my goldfish” /> This can only help people with screen readers and search engines.
• Helps you understand coding basics - A validator will let you know if you’re using a CSS or HTML attribute that isn’t capable in some browsers. It will make sure that instead of using &, you’re using & instead.

SEO Tips 9. Be patient!
Getting good rankings on a search engine takes time and a lot of hard work, but most of all a bucket load of patience. There’s no quick fix so beware of companies offering such services. SEO and Internet Marketing can also become very addictive, you’ll find yourself checking the SERP’s (search engine results pages) daily, panicking because your have moved down two places…… WELL DON’T, otherwise before you know it all your hair will fall out and your once thriving social life will have all but disappeared.

SEO Tips 10. We said be patient!