Recently Forbes published an article on How to build a killer small business website. The author took the time to speak to one of the leading figures in SEO, Rand Fishkin where he was quoted saying

“For many businesses, a Web site is the first way that your clientele will look at you–even if it’s just to find your address and phone number,”

“The quality of your site is often a measure of the quality of your business.”

Unfortunately towards the end the journalist decided to try and add some advice of her own saying:

“Finally, for those launching a new site, be sure to prime the pump first before going live. That way you can take steps to move up in the search ranks even while making final tweaks behind the curtain.

Simply ask your site host to attach meta tags–hidden programming code easily read by search engines–that include your top 20 keywords in order of importance to your business. The tags will drive traffic to your site when people search those keywords. Create a greeting that says something like “This site is under construction, but we will be up and running shortly.”

By the time you officially launch your beautiful, bug-free site, it will already have marched up the search stack.”

This advice completely inaccurate, Meta keywords have been redundant for years, even the Meta description is redundant when it comes down to ranking the website. Search Engines like Google have been primarily a link based algorithm for a long time now, meaning it is very unlikely a website will rank for competitive terms without decent back links.

There are also a large number of on-site variables that need to be considered in Web Design, however the journalist failed to mention any of these.

Via: Blog Storm

We have now updated the news system within Dolphin Management to include a new updated text editor which should improve the editing options for news items.

The RSS feed that is generated from the news items has also been improved to be more robust, preventing any issues with invalid characters. While the majority of invalid characters are removed we recommend avoiding pasting content from MS Word directly into the text editor. Word adds extensive amounts of its own code which can cause issues when rendering the page in a browser.

When a news item is added Dolphin Management now pings Technorati, NewsGator, Feed Burner and Google Blog Search. This should help improve indexing of new news posts.

It has only been one day since the Beta of Google Chrome was released for download and it would appear hackers have already found an exploit in it that will allow executable be downloaded automatically to the user`s computer without any prompt

The exploit is relatively simple and just involves using JavaScript to create an iFrame pointing to the executable to be downloaded.

The exploit was published on Milw0rm

Satellite pictures help to shed light on bovine navigation skills

A pair of German researchers are crediting Google Earth for enabling a new discovery into the hidden powers of cows. They used the Google mapping tool to observe around 300 heards of cows around the world.

What they found was, in general, cows prefer to face north. Of the 8,510 cows observed on Google, some two thirds had aligned themselves in a direction facing magnetic north when grazing or resting.

Much of the credit for the discovery went to the use of Google's satellite images. Other animals, such as certain species of birds and most bees possess a similar trait which helps guide migration.

However, this discovery is believed to be the first such in large land mammals. The researchers also noted the phenomenon in roe deer.

"Amazingly, this ubiquitous phenomenon does not seem to have been noticed by herdsmen, ranchers, or hunters," the researchers wrote.

Source : www.vnunet.com

Today will see the release of Google's new open source web browser called Google Chrome.

The Beta launch of Chrome was announced in an official blog post called A fresh take on the browser.

At the moment the exact features and functionality of chrome are sketchy at best however they have released a cartoon that indicates a focus on security, stability and usability. One interesting feature is that if the browser experiences a bug, which would normally crash other browser such as Internet Explorer completely, it will just close the tab/window that is experiencing the problem.

The browser is open source and will allow plug-ins allowing 3rd parties to develop the browser further and extend its functionality in a similar manor to the popular FireFox

Many experts within the industry are viewing this as the most blatant attack on Microsoft yet.

Please not that the windows servers we use are currently being upgraded to use PHP version 5.

If your website is not developed by Dolphin Promotions and you are using PHP scripting then you will need to ensure your code is compatible with PHP5.

The following links will advise you as to the likely impact of this move and steps that you can take to minimise any possible problems with your scripts.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.incompatible.php

Please note that if we have not developed your site we will only be able to provide minimum support for adjusting your code. Any extensive support will incur costs.

We are sorry that there maybe limited phone support for our customers today. We are currently moving in to our new offices in the centre of Blackpool Town which means we have limited access to phones and computers for the day. If you are unable to get through to a member of staff please leave a voice mail and we will return the call within an hour.

Please not our phone numbers will not be changing and all post can be sent to either of our offices.

In order to maximise the profit our clients receive from their e-commerce websites we have now implemented a new feature allowing the user to export their product database into an RSS 2.0 XML file that is compliant with Google Base.

This will allow users to upload their product database onto Google Base where the products will be listed under the product search.

One of the main advantages of this is that an individual wishing to buy an item will frequently be quite specific about what they will search for. For example if you wanted a Sat Nav you would likely find which one you wanted first then search for that specific model.

If you decide to search for a Tom Tom 720 you will be provided with the usual Google results along with 3 results from Googles product search. This can lead to a relatively quick and cheap conversion compared to the likes of Pay Per Click and SEO.

If you are currently using our Dolphin Management System and would like to have this new feature implemented please contact us on 01253 808 346.

If you are not a client and are interested in getting a new site using our bespoke e-commerce and content management system please phone us on 0845 869 58 50 or send an enquiry via our online form.

We have recently been developing a new statistics tool for our own sites and sites operating on the Dolphin Management System. We are currently in the final stages of testing the new tool.

Over the past few months we felt that other statistical packages based on JavaScript can be too complex for clients that do not spend 24/7 on the Internet. Even for our SEO experts we found we would use other JavaScript tools like 103bees more frequently as they provided a simpler interface and a quick insight to where traffic was coming from. The other concerns we had were that JavaScript based statistic tools can cause performance issues on a website as it requires the browser to download more code from another server. These severs frequently receive large amounts of traffic and can cause issues with page load times on client sites.

Therefore we have decided to skip the middle man. We spent the last couple of days developing an ASP based statistical tool which performs similarly to 103Bees. The new tool will now count:

Sessions received (A count of individual users visiting the site not just page hits) Natural search engine hits including the search engine the traffic came from and the keyword used. The page within the search engine the hit came from, allowing you to track rankings much easier. A facility to differentiate between natural organic traffic and Pay Per Click traffic. The Count, Address and User IP of all hits from non search engines. IP Address of the last 1000 hits and future features will include filtering IPs (e.g. your own computer) or flagging IPs that have been identified as potential Scammers/Hackers etc. Conversion tracking. Tracking the key terms and domains that provide the highest volume of sales or enquiries. This can be done either by total value of sales or Search Traffic: Enquiry ratios helping the client focus on the most profitable keywords and areas of the business.

If you are client already using out Dolphin Management system feel free to contact us on 01253 808 346 or via email at info@dolphinpromotions.co.uk.

If you are not a client and are interested in getting a new site using our bespoke e-commerce and content management system please phone us on 0845 869 58 50 or send an enquiry via our online form.

Google's acquisition of DoubleClick has turned the company into double the online advertising juggernaut that it once was, with a total advertising market share of 69% according to Attributor's study.

Google enjoys a 35% share of advertising to unique users while DoubleClick enters the Googleplex with its own 34%. Combined, the two forces serve advertising to just about 2.2 billion unique users (that's one third of the world's population if we counted all of those users as unique people).

More information from the study:

1. DoubleClick and Google dominate overall market share capturing 35% and 34% of unique users, respectively.
2. DoubleClick owns the head and Google owns the tail. For sites with over 1MM monthly unique users, Doubleclick has a 48% share, a 3x advantage over 2nd place Yahoo. For sites with less than 100k monthly unique users, Google has an 8x share advantage over 2nd place MSN.
3. Professionally produced content is widely proliferated across highly trafficked, commercial sites, representing an untapped opportunity for publishers to increase their revenue through content licensing, ad revenue share or link-building.

Source: Search Engine Journal