Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

A new virus threat has been identified that could affect any version of Microsoft Windows. It is particularly dangerous in that it can be carried in an email attachment and can be tripped from simply visiting a web site that contains the virus. For more information see

Info on Microsoft Virus
Be sure you are using anti-virus and that it is up-to-date and avoid unfamiliar web sites.
Microsoft plans to have the patch to fix it on 1/10/2006. For more see.

Misses

VOiP – Vonage lost a big lead by spending for advertising instead of service improvement and endorsing as a company to a very unethical set of core values. See vonageproblem.htm.

The Government – Both Executive and Administrative branches rolled over and died. They, like Vonage, were driven by unethical values and money. Congress votes 223 million to build a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. (Read the full article. Congress didn’t vote to build the bridge, but rather voted to give them the money to do it. The Washington Post title is misleading. That doesn’t save anyone’s political neck.) At the same time, Congress can’t build extra lanes for congested Interstates in Oregon. Both of my senators and my representative voted for the bridge to nowhere. Maybe they should move to Alaska. And Bush has a long, long, long list of misses. The Republican party has died.

The Search Engines – CNN advertising, which is driven from Yahoo, leads their advertising with ads for a company that has poor ethics. So they make lots of money for the advertisement; but who wants to advertise with Yahoo when you can’t trust their advertisements? We are pulling our own ads with them.

e-Commerce – currently protects the seller but not the consumer.

Spam - Our spam load continues to increase, even with filters on the host and our own system. The latest is some joker with a site selling watches with a whole colledtion of different domain names making it difficult to block him. The FTC, of course isn’t doing anything with the blokes. In Germany they find them $65,000 a spam. Who will you vote for next fall?

My Motorola cell phone went dead three times this year. I’m on my third phone. The last time it failed all I had to do was reboot (does Microsoft own Motorola?), but the cell phone didn’t tell me that. After it didn’t ring for a few days, a support store showed me how to reboot and find the 12 lost messages that had been left.

Broadband is overpriced. New Orleans is leading the way with free WiFi, but other cities are afraid of the broadband companies and not offering any free WiFI – including my own city of Portland, Oregon.

HDTV - Most of the HDTVs sold now are not really high resolution. The display is tricked down to the lower resolution, more like a DVD quality. It still looks great, but you aren’t getting all the pixels.

Hits

VOiP – If you avoid Vonage, you can save about 30% on your telephone by going to VOiP. There are almost no surcharges and long distance is often free.

With the Government non-functioning, thanks to someone that imported Venezuela gas and was selling it in New Orleans at about 33% of the current retail price. What does this tell you about the oil companies and President Bush? And thanks to many, many people, organizations, and corporations that did take responsibility in helping the people on the Gulf Coast during the Katrina disaster.

Search Engines - In the search engine war between Google, Yahoo, and MSN – the consumer will win. Most people trust the organic (free) listings. Why pay for advertising and compete with unethical companies?

e-Commerce passed the 30 billion mark in sales over the Christmas holidays. That’s a 30% increase from last year.

Stopping SPAM - We load the spamming domains and IPs to an online and uncopyrighted database on one of our web sites at http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm. We invite hackers to lanuch viruses, trojans, and DoS at the IPs and domains, destroying them. This has gotten to be a very popular page (PageRank=4) and gets lots of hits. One guy threated to sue, but we sent copies of his email (which violated the CAN-SPAM) to his state attorney general. We haven’t heard from him any more.

My blogs have doubled the traffic on my web sites that last month. There are over 19 million blogs out there now.

HDTV - Some of the newer HDTV sets and a few of the leading HDTV manufacturers (Toshiba is one) use a new and special chip in their televisions that gets the promised HDTV resolution. Be wise if you are purchasing HDTV. Find out who is using the chip and then make your purchase as a wise buyer.

Which languages are the most popular on the Web? Which languages are growing the fastest on the web. See: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

Over 100 million users have now downloaded the Firefox browser. About 16% of our own November sessions on our web site were using the FireFox browser. That means if you are trying to reach a cutting edge demographic, your site better work in the Firefox browser. Unfortunately, many sites break when using Firefox. That can translate to lost customers. It is more than an issue of your site might look bad in Firefox. It may not work at all.

The breaking primarily occurs with interactive aspects of the site: JavaScript menus, shopping carts, polling scripts, registration forms - that kind of thing. Here is a site that breaks in Firefox (courtesy of Marketingsherpa.com):
http://www.digitallife.com
Try the menus. (Also, the referencing Marketingsherpa reference may disappear soon.)
The Digitallife site works find in IE. This type of breaking when examining a site with Firefox is not unusual.

The secret of capturing that 16% (or whatever) of those entering your site using Firefox is to be sure your site works with the web standards as defined by the folks at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C.

Here are our suggestions for doing this:

1. First, check your statistics on your site to see what percentage of users coming into your site are using Firefox, or Mozilla. (Mozilla is the company that makes Firefox).
2. Be sure you have a DOCTYPE tag on each of your web pages that defines the standard you are using. You can see an example by looking at the source code for our home page and looking at the DOCTYPE tag for the first line in the code. Start your code the same way.
3. You can get a free program to check a web page for its compliant with standards at:
   http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
   Use it to verify your coding. Also, Some editors, such as Dreamweaver, do some level of validating your code.

4. Download the Firefox browser (which is free) and check your web pages using it. You can download it from:

   http://www.mozilla.org/

The advantages of using a Firefox/standard site:

• You will capture those users who fomerly found your site broken.

• You will get better search engine optimization. Some engines don’t index sites with broken code too well. They want sites designed for the standards, and use the DOCTYPE metatag to define what standard they should check your site against.

These two are definite. MarketSherpa also reports you will gain decreased development and maintenance costs, lower bandwidth costs, faster download times, and mobile device viewing

If you are looking at our site - we have had one blog comment on our site needing more Firefox compatibility. There are over 800 pages in it. Checking all of these and editing as necessary is a time consuming task. We will try to work top-down, but don’t expect us to check even the top levels quickly. We do want, however, to keep our users happy.

Here are several notes on our search engine optimization insights this week:

1. We successfully got a client to a #2 position in Yahoo out of 53,000 indexed pages on a popular keyword phrase. Her Google position is coming up but is slower as the links build. Our search engine optimization book tells how we did this.

2. Our web traffic has doubled since adding the AI-driven
   Darcy to our website. We are training her to close sales. This Darcy page and the page about our Vonage problem, are the two hotest pages (most hits and visitors) on our web site after the index page.

3. If you have tried to sign up for Googles new Google Analytics to track your web statistics, you’ve probably discovered that they are overloaded with signups. We use a commercial program of the Urchin they purchased, but may switch to Google Analytics if they can every get it going.

If you ask Darcy (http://www.netadventures.biz/darcy.htm) if she likes coffee, she has no way of knowing if coffee is a person, a city in Europe, something you eat, or something you drink. You may get a weird answer. Ask if she drinks coffee, however, and you will find drinks, coffee is defined as a concept and she can give you an appropriate reply.

A search engine such as Google is also an AI machine, and can determine the concept from looking at a large number of replies to previous queries on coffee. In fact, Google is working hard to enable their engine to track the history of your searches (and other tasks you do on the web) to enable it to better understand the queries you submit. Even with this, however, at the present time Google is severely limited on understanding your questions because it has to work from such a broad base of knowledge and there isn’t enough computer power to resolve this at the present time. Adding more Linux servers on Google is not the answer. Amazon does some of this by tracking the history of your purchases and recommending books based on this.

There is a solution, however, if you design the AI engine to address a small knowledge base, and this is exactly what IBM is doing with their Web Fountain project. In fact, IBM won’t even tell you much about who their customer base is for these engines. John Battelle in his book The Search tells us you can put a platform like WebFountain on a site with a friendly interface on top and a small company or individual can get in on the party and beat Google at their own game.

Isn’t this where Darcy is going? Follow the logic here. The companies that succeed the best on the Internet are those that address a niche market. For example, trying to start a web site to sell books puts you in competition with Amazon and a dozen plus other companies doing the same thing. But a web site selling books related to ancient Egyptian history is targeting a niche market and could well succeed. You could also add a very targeted AI engine to this niched site that would pull in its weight in gold.

Same thing with a breeder selling Abyssinian cats. Suppose the database stores the concept and reply as:

You ask the question,
and this drives the reply from the concept.

Our web traffic quickly doubled when she hit our home page. Why not contact us and get Darcy or one of her variations on your site?
http://www.netadventures.biz

Here are Evan William’s ten rules for web startups:

http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp
Great stuff.

What are the top ten mistakes people make in designing web sites? You know, they really haven’t changed that much the last few years.

Check out the list from Jakob Neilsen: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html, a leading web site designer today.

To have a successful web site, you need to constantly monitor the statistics relative to the site. You need to know the number of hits various pages in your site are getting. You need to know how many sessions you are seeing each day, the number of visitors, the number of repeat visitors, how long they stay, on what page they enter the site. You also need to know what are the keyword phrases they use to get to your site, what search engines, what is the conversion rate, and what is the return-on- investment (ROI).

On of the more popular tools for getting statistics on a web site is the commercial Urchin tool. This is what I use for monitoring my own statistics. It used to cost $199 a month. My host provides it at $10 a month. What if I told you you can get it now for free?

Google purchased Urchin Software and has just announced the Google Analytics service. Instead of selling it for the $199 a month, they provide it free - it doesn’t cost a dime. Explore the service at:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

What does Google get by giving you this extraordinary service completely free? Very simple - they can watch your traffic, your sales, and better target your search results from that information. If you are willing to share this information with them, this tool is yours.

Once you have signed up for the tool, Google will give you a snippet of JavaScript code. This code has to be put on each page of your web site that you wish to monitor. That’s it.

If you wish to use the tool, you will find there is a bit of an overload. Google underestimated the number of people that would want to sign up. Be patient. Also remember that as you add new pages to your site, be sure to add the code snippet to them as well. In particular, it should be on the entrance page and any page that asks for conversion.

Google Analytics monitors the performance of your banner ads, sites that refer to you, e-mail newsletters, and both organic and paid search engines, so you can track how visitors were referred to your web site and what they do once they arrive at your site.

You can use the statistics that Google Analytics gathers with its reports and graphs to determine, for example, how effective your different ad campaigns are and how your should change your web site to improve sales conversions.

Google Analytics can monitor the usage of a site of any size, including the those of major corporations which are often visited hundreds of millions of times per week.

If you don’t want to share your data with Google, Google sells a Web analytics software package, called Urchin 5, which has fewer features than Google Analytics. Its base module costs $895. You can extend its functionality with optional modules.

Google has gotten city permission in Mountain View, CA to start installing their WiFi network. This is their first step in making the San Francisco area wireless.