Resources from the web site of Well House Consultants on the subject of Search Engine Optimisation. We provide
How to get good placement with search engines - and
how to have the search engines index the right pages and
send you the right traffic!
Articles and tips on this subject | updated |
4121 | Has your Twitter feed stopped working? Switching to their new API From my inbox...
"Got to keep your wits about you with this internet lark haven't you? Discovered the twitter feeds had disappeared from all my sites! Did you know Twitter had changed their APIs and the old ones no longer work!! Not seen anything about it until now..."
Yes, you do have to keep your ... | 2013-06-29 |
3746 | Google Analytics and the new UK Cookie law 1. If you run Google Analytics on your web site, up to 4 cookies are stored in your browser.
2. UK law now states:
Cookies or similar devices must not be used unless the subscriber or user of the relevant terminal equipment:
(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes ... | 2012-06-02 |
3670 | Reading Google Analytics results, based on the relative populations of countries We get a lot of traffic on our web site, but where does it come from? Our raw log files tell us a great deal, but there is just so much data there it's very hard to manage, so we're using Google Analytics as well. I'm delighted to read reports of xxx visitors from Sweden, yyy from Romania and zzz from ... | 2012-03-31 |
2000 | 2000th article - Remember the background and basics Entry number 2000 ... little did I look forward to my two thousandth article when, in the summer of 2004, Lisa suggested that I should join that trendy group who were starting their blogs. But here I am, in my fifth year of posting, averaging more than one article per day.
Why has it lasted? Perhaps ... | 2010-10-08 |
2686 | Freedom of Information - consideration for web site designers The Freedom of Information Act in the UK has proven very useful in some of the things I've been doing with regard to public transport services in Wiltshire - though more in an analysis after the even of what happened rather than in a more positive, forward looking way. But there's another side to the ... | 2010-10-08 |
2107 | How to tweet automatically from a blog How to Tweet from a Blog
I'm using the MoveableType Blog software for "The Horses's Mouth" ... and I want to tweet my subject line for each new post. But I'm lazy, so I have set it up to happen automatically.
1. I post my blog entry in the usual way
2. I have added the following script at /home/wellho/tweeter/blogtweet ... | 2010-06-26 |
2748 | Monitoring the success and traffic of your web site If you're looking after a shopping centre, a major store, or a specialist shop on Bank Street, you'll want to know roughly how many people you've got "in", roughly what they're doing, and whether there's going to be a rush in a few minutes. And so it should be with a website - be it a virtual shop where ... | 2010-05-04 (longest) |
2552 | Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? It's been said that on some web sites these days, the majority of traffic isn't users at a regular browser at all; instead, it's robots that are indexing the page (such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Yandex and others), and malware that's looking for holes through which to inject content on to other people's ... | 2010-01-06 |
2562 | Tuning the web site for sailing on through this year A web site needs to be kept alive, updated ... not only with content, but the organisational sails need to be trimmed from time to time to ensure it keep sailing sweetly along. I've spend much of today - "the lull before the storm" I suspect, with people back at work tomorrow, making small adjustments ... | 2010-01-03 |
2428 | Diluting History Our web site keeps a dynamic log of accesses to our main URLs, together with key words and phrases associated with the URLs. It's a lot more than a web access log, as images such as this one are indexed under "Fish Pass Chippenham" as that's the "alt" tag that's associated with the image on some of ... | 2009-09-27 (longer) |
2330 | Update - Automatic feeds to Twitter Anyone who follows updates to this blog via Twitter (http://twitter.com/wellho) may have noticed that the feed stopped a couple of days ago; that's about the time that Twitter was down for a few hours and reporting abuse. ("It wasn't me, Guv - honest!")
It appears that the --basic option in the API ... | 2009-08-09 |
2324 | What search terms FAIL to bring visitors to our site, when they should? My web log files, with careful analysis, tell me what search terms brought people to our pages. But what I would really like is to find commonly searched terms which should bring people to us, but do not ... so that I can optimise the site for them. And of course there's nothing in the log files to ... | 2009-08-06 |
2137 | Reaching the right people with your web site On today's final PHP sessions, we discussed search engine optimisation ... and came up with this list of things to consider with your site with regards to getting yourself well ranked with the search engines (which is talked about a lot), and ranked in such a way that your page is offered when you want ... | 2009-04-28 |
2106 | Learning to Twitter / what is Twitter? Have you come across Twitter - http://twitter.com. I expect some of the folks who read here will have done so!
Twitter is a "microblog" - a message of up to 140 characters that you can update as often as you like ... and that message is called a tweet. Boris Johnson, Barak Obama, Steven Fry all twit ... | 2009-03-29 |
2065 | Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others Our web site is not best suited to off-line browsing these days - it may be flexible, but if you want to take a copy of it, but it onto a CD, then browse away from the Internet, please resist the temptation. Why is it NOT a good idea to 'blind mirror' us?
1. The Changing nature of our web site. Our ... | 2009-03-04 |
2045 | Does robots.txt actually work? If you put an entry into your robots.txt file to ask the various robots to disallow (cease crawling) certain files and directories, do they actually take note of your request ... considering that it's a purely voluntary standard ...
Three or four days back, I excluded some old map pages which were being ... | 2009-02-17 |
2019 | Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? Our web site logs are getting a lot of requests containing "babycaleb" and "fortunecity" ... looking for URLs such as these:
/resources/ex.php4?item=http://babycaleb.fortunecity.co.uk/picture.htm?
/resources/ex.php4?item=http://64.15.67.17/~artatgig/caleb.htm?
and said to be from an Internet Explorer ... | 2009-01-31 |
1982 | Cooking bodies and URLs With over ten thousand different web pages on our web site, the issue of finding the right resource has become just as big an issue as having the right material available in the first place. Listings by article type and number (example) are great for crawlers / bots, and for staff checking page by page. ... | 2009-01-11 |
1984 | Site24x7 prowls uninvited Wanting to get an idea of where our traffic comes from on a typical Friday evening, I took a look at all visiting IPs to one of our websites over a 15 minute period and found the IP address 72.5.230.111 which I didn't recognise. A reverse DNS lookup points me to a domain called site24x7.com:
Dorothy:jan09 ... | 2009-01-10 |
1971 | Telling Google which country your business trades in I have a solution the the question I asked last September - which country do the search engines think we are in?. It seems that Google takes the top level domain name if it's geographic ... and otherwise it uses the IP address of the server to give it guidance. But there's another was of tuning this, ... | 2009-01-05 |
1969 | Search Engines. Getting the right pages seen. "I've been visited by a robot - what do I do about it?" I chuckled at the question when I came across it yesterday when looking up the Robots Exclusion Standard ("also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol"). The answer given was "do nothing" and I would agree - almost. Or I might suggest "Celebrate".
Why ... | 2009-01-02 (longer) |
1015 | Search engine placement - long term strategy and success "Whenever I search for anything in Melksham, I keep coming back to your site". So say some of our friends; new contacts tend to be along the lines of "So YOU are the ones behind that web site I keep finding".
We encourage the search engines to index our pages, and we know that many of our technical ... | 2008-12-21 |
1793 | Which country does a search engine think you are located in? Search engines have moved forward dramatically over the past few years. We used to laugh when Well House Consultants was the top hit - in the world - for "Birth Notice" - but I suspect arrivals were very frustrated indeed to find that the article in question wasn't really a birth notice at all. These ... | 2008-09-15 |
1344 | Catching up on indexing our resources The amount of material that gets added to this site in each month is incredible, and if I let it go much longer that that before catching up on indexing my blog articles, images, and forum posts the task can become almost unmanagable. A hectic time left me wonding how I would manage to get all these ... | 2007-09-11 |
1029 | Our search engine placement is dropping. A year ago, if you did a Google search for Birth Notice, you would be sent to the Well House Consultants web site here, but now we're not even on the top page.
Search for Clock Image and you would come, top hit, here, and under Vancouver Skyline you would find us right at the top here. A search for ... | 2007-01-17 |
165 | Implementing an effective site search engine Our web site started small - perhaps half a dozen pages about 10 years ago. Since then it's built up from 6 to 60 to 600 to (now) approaching 6000 pages as we've added extra services such as our solutions centre, our open source help forum and its archives, and the daily diary of which this page forms ... | 2006-06-05 |
How search engines work.
Designing you site with search engines in mind.
General and site specific search engines.
Helping search engines know how to index you.
Getting you site seen in preferance to your competitors.
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