The Knol edge

This is not a piece about what it takes to become a black cab driver in London. For that you need something like taxiknowledge.

Instead this is about Google's new authoring tool Knol - half way between a blog and a wiki with ultimate control of the content held by the author initiating the piece. It's causing something of a stir in SEO circles as there appears to be some evidence that Google is favouring Knol pages over more established web pages offering the same content. Whether this is just a short term setting of the algorithms to give their fledgling service the best launch, or whether it is a longer term bias on Google's part, one thing is clear - a little bit of Knol edge could go a long way.

Reviewing our reviews

We've stuck our neck out a bit and asked people that have recently signed up for the free reviews of their web site to give us feedback about the reports they received.

So watch this space.

It's a brave move in the sense that our reports pull no punches. However, our motivation has always been to highlight the opportunity rather than criticise the current position.

If you think it would be useful to get an opinion about what you could do on your own site from the perspective of SEO or Competitive positioning please follow the links to sign up for an assessment.

And when we've given our view, come back here and give us yours.

Show me some id

Dynamically generated web pages will have a url containing a query string that might look something like this:

www.test.com/somedirectory/some.php?id=41&pageno=1

Taking the example shown above, the default set-up for the FlySoup tracking code will show some.php as the page visited in your stats report.

What most subscribers with dynamic/content managed sites will want to know is the specific id and page number in order that a more granular interpretation of the stats is possible.

location.search will do this for you.

To get the full query string make the following change in the tracking script:

look for and change wa_pageName=location.pathname; // you can customize the page name here

to read wa_pageName=location.pathname+location.search;

In an ideal world, your web designers would also use URL rewriting to provide a more intuitive URL so that as well as the script returning the full query string it does so in plain English rather than id=41&pageno=1.

How to avoid being a statistic

When was the last time you, or somebody from your company, visited your web site. It's quite possible that you represent one of the most frequent of returning visitors.

When analysing your traffic via FlySoup you probably don't want your own visits to muddy the figures. To avoid this you need to add your own I.P. address to an exclusion list. You do this by clicking on the '>Exclude IP Ranges From Tracking' link under the 'Account' '>Setup' menu.

Bear in mind if you are accessing your FlySoup stats from different locations - your desk bound office workstation and your laptop at home for example - then you will need to exclude both sets of I.P. addresses.

Your I.P. address is a a series of two and three digit numbers in four groups, separated by full stops. Like this, for example: 195.99.172.141 (an I.P. address that referenced The Equal Opportunities Commission mentioned in an earlier post).

How do you find your I.P. address?

FlySoup makes it easy to find and add the I.P. address of the machine you are currently using to access your stats. For a start it tells you what your I.P address is. So when you click the link to add a new range, simply put in the I.P. address it gives you as a starting address and for your finishing range address use the same number with the last digit increased by one. So if the last number was 141, make it 142.

This is all you need if you are the only one in the company accessing the site. If there are many people in the company who might reasonably be expected to be trawling the site on a regular basis then you will want to make the range wide enough to accommodate all the local I.P. address variants.

Any future traffic from I.P. addresses you have nominated in this way will be ignored and excluded from your stats.

You say potato...

... and I say... Maris Piper... spud... mash... yam. On the web, more than anywhere, it's a case of 'one man's meat is another man's offal'; or words to that effect.

Chances are that many of the words your prospects are using to find your product or service are not the same as the ones you use on your web site to describe your business. And if the search engines don't recognise your site for the phrase being searched, then you won't be returned in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Consequently a percentage of your potential traffic will pass you by.

You will of course get some traffic. Everyone does. But are the words and phrases you've chosen the one's that are going to deliver lots of relevant traffic. And if they are terms that people are searching on in abundance, are you going to be fighting your way to the top of the search engine listings in the face of an impossible number of competing sites.

In an ideal world you would want to focus your attention on just those phrases that are searched on in volume and yet provide little in the way of competition from other sites.

Finding the right words to express yourself.

Google Adwords Suggestion Tool is free and a useful starting point for finding alternatives to phrases that naturally spring to mind. And it will give you approximate averages for the previous month as well as longer-term average search volumes. It also gives an indication of 'adword' competition. But this doesn't really help that much in determining keyword targeting for the organic search listings.

For this you'd be better off using something like Wordtracker. It's one of the many tools we use in helping our clients arrive at a useful pool of phrases to build their content around.

The benefit of a service like Wordtracker is that it allows you to measure search volume and organic competition for phrases across a number of search engines so that you can end up with a cluster of phrases for which you will have a good chance of ranking well in the SERPS.

What you do with the words once you have them is another story.

By this time next year we'll all be millionaires.

That includes you, me and everyone else in the English speaking world.

Growing at a rate of one word every 98 minutes, experts have predicted that the English language will include a million words by the 29th April 2009. So that makes us all word rich but possibly lost for exactly the right word at the right time.

Just think of all the new words people will be using to search the internet. Will your web site be found for any of them?

We've been working with a number of clients to review the language they use on their web sites and more importantly the language their prospects are using when searching for their services. Most can confidently expect to be found for their company name or domain name but for many that's about as good as it gets. Which means, at best, they're preaching to the converted and only attracting those who are using the search engines as a navigational aid.

How do you rank highly without sacrificing the design of your site?

There is a widely held fear that in order to be visible to search engines you also have to be pretty unappealing to the average human visitor.

Content filled with keyword saturated copy and link text may leave you feeling that the site won't be worth the visit after a Search Engine Optimiser has had his way with it.

But, if you're not in the first three pages of results offered up by a search engine, you're not being seen by many visitors.

Assuming you want visitors to your site and you don't have money to promote your web site through mainstream advertising channels such as television, radio, press and poster campaigns - then Search Engine Optimisation is going to be an issue.

It's been said that a good web site needs to be visually arresting and capture the viewers imagination within 5 seconds or less. And for it to rank well in Search Engine Optimisation terms it has to have the level of content and supporting text of a fairly weighty brochure. Potentially uneasy bedfellows.

Compromise is inevitable but there are many things you can do to minimise any negative effects.

At one level, what it boils down to is less code and more content. Use CSS rather than tables and avoid the exclusively Flash-based homepage.