Keep in mind the average page size is not only the size of the HTML but also adding the external CSS, JavaScript and images. Which could dramatically increase the amount of data the users are downloading. So I started looking in the compression options of Apache 2.0

First I looked on the official Apache page, but as usual the data is probably available but not very user friendly. So after some testing and crashing I found out the following procedure which seems to work fine to enable compression per Virtual Host.

Firstly enable the module that supports compression by executing:

:> ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/deflate.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.load

This will instruct Apache to load the needed library (module) for compression using GZip. The second thing you will need to do is add the following lines to every single Virtual Host you want to use compression on.

    <Location / >
      SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
      BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
      BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
      BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    </Location>


This will enable the compression for output (everything sent to the end-user) but not for incoming requests, which in my case is enough compression for right now. It also exludes some browsers that do not support compression.

Now restart or reload your apache by running the statement below and your website should support compression. This will make the loading of pages faster, though the client software needs to decompress the pages from this point on.

:> etc/init.d/apache2 reload

If you have any trouble enabling compression just leave a message and I’ll try and help you where I can.

We already new that files with .exe, .dll and .lib were being filtered from the search results. Which I think is a good thing, as it protects the visitors from potential harm. But just a few days back I got word that Google is now also banning or blocking pages ending on .0.

Some examples are:

• The wikipedia page Web 2.0 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0) ending in .0 is no longer showing up in the search results, rather the page ending in 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2).
• The Seomoz page for Web 2.0 has disappeared from the results. Instead the summary page is listed.

After some chatter about the issue around the internet and blogs Matt Cutts wrote a quick entry in his blog as to why they have been removed from the search results. Read it at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dont-end-your-urls-with-exe/.

So for know try to avoid ending Url’s with .0 or any of the already known blocked extensions.

Well there are a few ways to find out what the people visiting your site are interested in. When you have this information you can start refining the content on your website. If you for instance wrote something about a Ferrari. And you get a lot of visitor searching for ferrari tires, you may want to add some content about that.

Finding the needed information
Lets first go into where you can find the information you will need to refine your website. No matter how, you will always end up trying to pursue your visitors to give more information then they might like.

One way of doing this is by using polls or questionairs. This is a very useful tool, but with one major drawback. If you don’t already have a steady visitor base it won’t work. How often have you entered a website and clicked away an anyoing popup asking you to answer some questions. Most new visitors don’t like questionairs.

A second way is by tracking every move a visitor makes on your website. This will provide information on how they navigate through the site. Which in turn indicates which information they find highly relevant. Big downside is that it requires a lot of disk space. Even worse you have to make some type of mention of this in the privacy policy. Last drawback is that it doesn’t provide information on what the visitor was looking for when he came to your website.

The third and far better way, at least I think so, is to log how the visitor came to the website. Some questions could be:

• For instance did he originate from a search engine. If so what keywords did he search with. What could he be looking for.
• Was the visit from my own website. If so did he use a search feature and what keywords. If not what related page did he come from.
• Was the visit from an external website. What is the content of that page. How does it appeal to the visitor.

This logging can be done quite easily as all the information is stored in the HEAD information sent by the visitors web-browser. (Please note that you can’t fully rellie on this as it can be manipulated). Various other tricks are available as well to get this information, but more on that in a follow up article about data mining.

Using the information to refine the content
Now that you have the information you still need to put it to good use. So lets asume that your website is about cars. And it has a section on Ferrari. You have a lot of content on the various cars. But you don’t have information on the various parts of the cars.

Now in your data-mining (the steps described above ) you find out that a lot of visitors come to your site through search engines. But they are looking for tyres that are for the Ferrari 250GT. Initially when creating the website you never thought this might be useful information.

After making this discovery you could decide to add new content to the pages of the various cars with details about the tyres. How they perform and which are best for which models. By doing so you appeal to your visitors as they now find information they are interested in.

A second type of discovery you may encounter is that your website structure (including navigation) may be wrong. For example people looking for the tyre information never found the content on the website. But it does exists. This may mean they just can’t find any navigation to it. Keep in mind that most visitors only spend a few seconds looking for ‘useful’ information before moving along.

So make sure your information is easy accessible!!!!!

Now that you now some basics of refining your website you can start. But start with some small things first, just to try it out.

So what is it you noticed. Is the text wrong. Does it not appeal to you. Or do you simply don’t like what they say. Maybe even all of the above. It really doesn’t matter since any would drive you away from the website. What does matter is why did it feel off.

Discovery of the problem
In most cases you will have found one simple problem. The creator of the website forgot to keep his audience in mind when writing all of the text. Or maybe he didn’t even consider you part of his audience (bad him ). But what does this mean to conversions of that website. Well for one you will be unlikely to buy anything because you probably don’t trust it completely.

Knowing that text could cause problems with your targetted audience what is it that makes the text on a website right. Well the following list could make a text unattractive for your readers.

• Wrongly using complicated words,
  Using difficult words may be hot in your niche, but it won’t attract the John Doe from the street. Most of them don’t even understand what they are reading. Something that won’t help you selling products to them. Always keep your audience in mind when writing texts.
• Using he, she, you incorrectly,
  This is especially important in other languages then English. If you look at German for example they have ‘Sie’ or ‘du’ which both means you in English. But one is polite and the other isn’t. Make sure you know which your audience prefers and stick with it. Don’t do half with ‘Sie’ and the other have with ‘du’.
• Missing call to action,
  One of the most common mistakes is that the text doesn’t tell your visitors to actually do something. If you want them to buy something don’t stop at how good it is. Also inform them of how to buy it (and don’t use ‘Buy now’, thats just wrong in so many levels).
• Annoying calls to action,
  On the other end of the scope is a to agressive call to action. This will rub your visitors the wrong way. Making them anger or dislike you. Both not good things if you still want them to buy.

Solving the problem
If you know the problem then you can solve it. Right…..

Well not necessarily. The problem may be a bit more complicated. You may not know your audience well enough. Prehaps your audience has changed over time. So make sure to keep updating your information about the visitors of your website.

If you have something to say about this article, don’t hesitate to comment….

Just recently I read a post that adviced against using this service. Now I’ve always been a sceptec in other peoples advice, especially when it comes to SEO. But they do make several points.

A clipnote version would be:

• You don’t know if you have indexing / linking problems
• Pages that aren’t worthy may be included in the index, which again prevents you from finding out they aren’t worthy
• Search engines loose the natural way of flowing through the web

I think they are right on all of these points. You can use the sitemaps to check the indexing status of you’re website, but I wouldn’t submit a XML file with all my pages to it. That will only work against me in finding potential problems.

I just noticed that Google has recently included a similar service in the Webmaster section. In the past they didn’t release much information on who is linking to you. This new tool was actually released on February 5th as I read on Matt Cutts blog today. I was actually pleasantly surprised that the Webmaster Tools gave a better indication then the “link:www.domain.com” version in the search engine.

Granted it probably is still hiding most of the inlinks Google is counting in their algorithm, but it helps getting an indication of how your website is doing.

You might think that you as a company will never have to deal with any such problems. But you are wrong. If you are making money online, then your company may become victim to these type of scams sooner or later.

I hear you think that it’s not important. But realize that when ISP get wind of the fact that e-mail scams are going around for your company they may decide to block you. And what’s the use of you e-commerce if you can’t mail your users. Not to mention the risk of your customers actually falling for the scam and getting ripped off.

If you are victim of phishing then you should always take the following steps:

• Make a clear note on the front-page of your website about the scam e-mails circulating.
• Explain to users what you will never do (e.g.: ask for their password in mail)
• Update the policies of the website to include detailed steps on how users can identify scams

A final word: keep track of all e-mails that are sent in your name. You may just prevent phishing or other scams against your users.

In the past I’ve talked about how to do some small optimizations on your website and how you can track your successes. Now it’s time to look at if and how you can raise rankings by using a blog. I now that there are a lot of SEO companies that claim to use blogs to do just that, but is it possible??

Having a blog can definitely be a positive experience for your users. It gives them the change to share their thoughts. Gives them some more insight into your company or goals. But does this also mean increased rankings.

After all now you’ve started a competition between your blog and your website. You want your website to rank good, but will the blog start to outrank your website. It’s likely to! Especially when you start optimizing it. And corporate blogging is even more difficult, as is explained in ‘A Lot of People Have to Die for Corporate Blogging to Succeed’.

Are you still interested in starting a blog. Then read ‘Optimizing blogs for the Search Engine’ written by Shari Thurow for some pointers on how to optimize it. I also suggest you read the article ‘Email vs. Blogs’, which will help you in what to write and what not to.

One of the problems I’ve encountered is the fact that AJAX can make a website a lot more user friendly. An easy example is when you display a snippet of a text. If the user then clicks on the ‘read more’ link a new layer will be placed on top of the existing one with the full text in it.

I believe that this helps in usability as it makes clear what the full text belongs to, and probably more important what the context is. The big down size of this type of development is that search engines don’t like it.

Why is easy. Search engines have very poor support for JavaScript. Just imagine how this new technique using AJAX will impact the search engine rating. Huge parts of the content will be less accessible for the search engines. Which in turn could result into poorer rankings due to less content.

Faced with the choice between enhanced usability and features or pleasing the search engine I think I have to choose for the first of the two. I do believe search engines will play a big role in a websites success. But I don’t believe we developers should sacrifice features for increased rankings in search engines. Visitors should still come first!

When receiving an e-mail what do you do. Going to open it straight away? Perhaps you look who sent it or what the title is. Most of these things you will do without knowing it. Next time you receive an e-mail think about what made you open it.

From some experience with newsletters I know that most people will automatically delete any e-mail that does not look important or that’s from a sender they don’t know. So when writing a newsletter these are the first things to be aware of:

• Can the reader see the e-mail is from my website
• Does the title describe the content as well as raise the level of trust

Notice how this is only about the title and the sender. It’s important to raise interest in the content of the e-mail by just using the title and sender’s address. But that’s not all, if only it were.

Just like with any online content is king. But what does that actually mean! A lot of people will have different opinions, but mine is as follows:

• The content of the e-mail is written for me,
  Which means that if you are writing for a general public don’t include difficult words specific to your niche. But the same is true for the opposite. Writing for you niche then use these specific words as it will raise people’s trust in your expertise.
• Not to flashy,
  I know that I hate e-mails that look as if they were meant to be webpages. I think Clickz is a great example of how not to do it. They write for marketing people, but are just copying their webpages into the e-mail. Mind you if you are writing for a movie or music website you will automatically use more graphics and HTML in your newsletter then someone writing for a automobile website. Just try and balance it.
• Don’t use online styles or pictures,
  Not everyone reads their e-mail whilst connected to the internet. So don’t use images in the e-mail that are not embedded in the e-mail, or your readers may never see them. Same holds true for the stylesheet, don’t link but embed.

I personally always try to take these pointers in mind when writing for a e-mail or a website for that matter. It would be a shame if you ended up on blacklists just because people report your e-mail as spam!