December 15th, 2006
This is a post to support a friend I play golf with who just happens to have the same surname as me but is not a relation. He runs a garden lighting design business and I have offered to help him with his web marketing.
Dave Milsom’s Garden lighting design website is http://www.gardenlightingdesign.com
I have also put a page about Dave and his garden lighting business in the shopping directory pages at my site
http://www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/s-garden-lighting-design.html
We will see if a bit of informed help can get his website listed and ranked in the search engines and generate any enquiries.
Posted in Consultancy work | No Comments »
October 9th, 2006
No sooner have I started my blog than I am getting attacked by spammers creating automated comments on my posts about gambling, drugs and sex aids among others!
They do not actually get onto the blog as I have it set for comments to require manual moderation first, but I do get an email about each one and have to delete them and it is getting to be a pain.
The answer is to install anti-spam software as a Wordpress plugin and the best one seems to be Akismet. This is obviously quite a big problem - here are some stats from Akismet page
238,397,660 spams caught so far
646,285 so far today (this is at 9.30 am UK time)
92% of all comments are spam
- Download the plugin and unzip to your local drive
- Upload plugin file to your WordPress
plugins directory inside of wp-content
(when I checked, it was already there)
- Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress.
- Enter your API key.
(register for a wordpress account to get one sent to you free by email)
Once working, it should automatically mark all spam comments and trackbacks as spam and delete them after 15 days. If any get through, mark them manually and it should learn from its mistakes.
Note that once you have got a wordpress API key you can use it to activate Akismet on all your blogs - click on the link in your profile that tells you Akismet has not been activated then paste in your API key.
Posted in WordPress | No Comments »
September 9th, 2006
I am not sure how fast the keith.milsoms.com website will get indexed so I have also put a “keith” page onto my Anything Left-Handed website and included some linking code that visitors can put into their own blogs or web pages if they are willing to help me.
The page is at http://www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/keith.html
If you want to help me win the challenge, please put a link to the keith.milsoms.com website onto your own blog or website - thanks!
Posted in Keith project | No Comments »
September 8th, 2006
Firstly I submitted the blog url to Google to make sure it has a record of it and get it indexed. It may pick it up from the submission of the milsoms.com domain or site map when I do it but I will submit it direct as well
http://www.google.com/addurl
I can check whether Google has already visited my blog by doing a search for
cache:http://www.milsoms.com/blog
If it has it will show the time visited and the cached version of the page (mine is not visited yet)
Go back to Google sitemaps page, make sure the blog url http://milsoms.com/blog has been added to the account (note that if you have verified the parent domain, the blog site will be automatically verified)
Submit a sitemap - the sitemap url is the RSS feed for the blog
http://milsoms.com/blog/wp-rss2.php
NOTE that both the site url and the RSS feed have the “www” removed even if it is there in the main site url - it has to be like this for it to work
Once the sitemap has been crawled, whenever it changes you can ping Google to tell them and encourage a re-crawl. This cost me a lot of money to find out, but it does work. The url for the ping to Google sitemaps is
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fmilsoms.com%2Fblog%2Fwp-rss2.php
It needs to have : shown as %3A and / shown as %2F (it is a coding thing they tell me!)
Update to this entry
Google sitemaps is having trouble with this and keeps showing errors, saying is is unable to read the sitemap (RSS feed in this case)
URL not allowed
This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location. [?] |
Url: |
[http://www.milsoms.com/blog] |
This seems to be a confusion between the domain address www.milsoms.com and the rss feed address milsoms.com/blog
Steps to check and correct it:
- Added the RSS feed http://milsoms.com/blog/wp-rss2.php as content to My Yahoo page and it is reading the feed fine
- Check that the google sitemaps account has http://milsoms.com/blog as a verified site - it is there but showing as NOT verified.
- Went through the verification process, choosing to create an html file called google33851e2920c031a9.html as specified (easier than putting a metatag into the Wordpress template header) - now verified OK.
- Back to sitemaps page, select the RSS feed and resubmit
Posted in Marketing, RSS | No Comments »
September 8th, 2006
I was talking with a friend and my son Tom about what I do and he said “if you are so clever, how come when I search for ‘keith’ in Google I don’t see you anywhere?”.
I explained that ‘keith’ was not one of my targeted business keywords but he still thought that if I was any good at marketing I would be able to become the number Keith on Google, and I guess he has a point!
So I took up the challenge and this is the story of what happened…
As of today, 8 September 2006, there are about 247 million results pages for a search for ‘keith’ on google.com and the number one slot is held by Rolling Stone Keith Richard - we’ll see about that!
This is what I have done:
- The game started at 10.00 am on 8 September 2006.
- Build a fairly simple web site about the name Keith and fairly heavily optimised for the keyword ‘keith’.
- I created a new subdomain keith.milsoms.com under my main domain as I think this will get it seen as a separate site by the search engines and get it a far tighter keyword focus.
- Each page has some Google Adsense on it so I have a quick flick through he pages to get the adsense spider to work out what the pages are about and put up relevant ads. I am getting a mix of ads on working at home, business planning, blogging, ancestry and music, but at least Google knows I am there (that may or may not help in getting the pages indexed and ranked but it can’t do any harm!)
- 14:00 8 Sep - Submitted the index page to about 100 search engines including Google (I am currently using the free version of Web CEO to do that).
- Set up a Google sitemap account for the site - first add the site to my Google Webmaster tools account, then choose to verify ownership of the domain by adding the metatag they specify to my index page.
- Create the sitemap to submit to Google - I use the free service at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to create the code, save it with my website pages, have a quick check to make sure it picked up all the site pages then upload.
- 15:00 8 Sep - Add the sitemap url to Google Sitemaps - in my case http://keith.milsoms.com/sitemap.xml
It can take a few hours for Google to follow the sitemap and spider the site, but refreshing the sitemap results page a few times seems to speed it up and mine was spidered in 2 minutes and all came up OK.
- 16:15 8 Sep - made blog entries for the site on 2 of my own left-handed Blogger blogs and pinged yahoo with the updates
- 16:30 made blog entry on my lefthandedchildren.org blog (Wordpress) and pinged the RSS feed to Yahoo plus pinged the Google sitemap link for it to Google
- Better have a link to the Keith site in this blog as well so here it is - http://keith.milsoms.com
- I have not actually announced this Blog or set up a Google sitemap link for it yet - I will make a separate entry about that later
- 17:50 8 Sep - put a link to the Keith site on the index page of Anything Left-handed (my own PR6 site)
- 17:55 8 Sep - put a link to the Keith site on the index page of LeftHandersDay (my own PR5 site)
That’s all for now folks - time for a beer!
Posted in Keith project | 1 Comment »
September 7th, 2006
I have developed my own CSS based template that gives me a clean layout and flexibility to control all the site colours, fonts, links, spacing etc. from a central CSS file. The CSS layout also allows me to get all of the important page content near the top of the code rather than being blelow loads of table settings and the navigation links - important for search engine spiders and page ranking.I
wil talk more about templates later and maybe make them available to others as part of the handbook - I have bought and used loads of other peoples templates and never really got quite what I wanted so I have taken the best of all thwenothers and tweaked then to get what I think is a really usable, good looking and SE Optimised site template.Critically
, my template allows me to build other template pages that are “nested” within it whcih is great when using variuos page building software as any changes I make to the global template or style sheet will be replicated right through the live site, even the pages built with the automated systems (more about this another day).
I use Dreamweaver to build my sites so it is always easy to add new pages based on the template and any changes to the template will update in all site pages based on that template.
So, having chosen the most appropriate template, I copy it into a new local directory for the site and then edit it to make the following changes:
- Choose an appropriate header graphic from my collection, edit it to change the text and site url and any colours I want changed, save as an original .psd and also as a .jpg in the site images directory (I use a standard site of 700 pixels wide in my site templates to keep things simple;
- Change the image link and target url in the template. Target url is the main domain as a full url, e.g. http://www.milsoms.com - it has to be like this as it will later be used in various sub-folders so a relative address would be no good.
- Select the main colours that will be used for the site (usually taken from the header graphic) and specify them in various places in the CSS file
- Change the target urls on the page - breadcrumb trail, home link, footer copyright link
- Change the default page title, meta description and meta keywords (they are editable areas and can be changed on individual pages built from the template later)
- Obtain or create an image to go beside the main Google Adsense large rectangle
- Create a new Adsense channel for this site and recreate the adsense code (link block, rectangle and search box) making sure the text colours match the rest of the site. Note that both the background and border colours in the Adlink block in the left menu panel need to be changed to match the background colour
- Set up a Google analytics account for the site and change the tracking code in the template. it can take a while for Google to visit the site and check the code (up to 24 hours) so leave it for a while then make sure it is showing as ticked and receiving data.
- Create a basic index.htm page from the template and upload to check that the Google tracking is working
- Create a sitemap.htm page from the template and give it a heading etc. No content yet as it has not been created but there is a link to it from the home page and I do not want any broken links on the site.
Upload the index and sitemap pages and associated files (images, stylesheet) and see how it looks. Correct any problems with the template and re-upload.
That’s it - we are ready to start building more pages.
Posted in Website development | No Comments »
September 6th, 2006
Having set up my web space, I needed to get the domain name to point at the space and this is done by changing the DNS records at the site that hosts the domain (that is, the domain name rather than the actual space for the web site).
You get the correct nameserver records from the web space provider (HostGator in my case) and they look like this
NameServer1: ns237.websitewelcome.com
NameServer2: ns238.websitewelcome.com
Just type these into the appropriate boxes with the domain name host and it will tell everyone that your URL now points to the new web space. (there are lots of different nameservers all round that maintain a current database linking site names to web space IP addresses and it can take up to 48 hours for the new relationship to propagate everywhere).
Posted in Website setup | No Comments »
September 6th, 2006
I already owned the domain name milsoms.com and have recently started a hosting account with HostGator that allows me to host as many domains as I like for a low monthly charge. I have used a lot of hosting companies before and they all seem to want to charge extra for every little feature or facility you need to have.
my experience so far, HostGator have got everything loaded into the basic account, including CGI, PHP, MySQL and loads of additional resources and scripts you can load using the amazing “Fantastico” facility - this lets you install things like WordPress (which I have used for this blog) with only a couple of clicks. It also has various FAQ, Forum and Help Desk facilities which will no doubt come in handy as I develop this project.
You have full control over your domain space and can create an unlimited number of sub-domains as well as folders within the site, e.g. http://domains.milsoms.com
These are a good way of organising “mini sites” or separate chunks of content as the search engines can treat them as a separate site and you get more focused content. Also, they can be accessed by a variety of URLs of someone gets the syntax wrong…
domains.milsoms.com
http://domains.milsoms.com
www.domains.milsoms.com
http://www.domains.milsoms.com
all work fine!
I was getting web space from UK2 but it was costing £50.00 per year plus extras for what I would consider essentials like CGI and email POP boxes - now that is all included for nothing (as I was paying the basic monthly charge for other sites as well).
Click here to find out more about HostGator yourself if you want to host multiple sites
have actually signed up for the hosting reseller package so that I can provide hosting for other people as well. At the moment I am just doing this for friends and family but there is a chance to make it a commercial part of the milsoms.com business and i will be following it up to see if I can get it working.
BTW - the Google spell checking is working really well!
Posted in Website setup | No Comments »
September 6th, 2006
I have researched spell checker plug ins and there are a few about but all seem to have some sort of problems. It seems the best solution is to use the Google toolbar spell checker as it works fine in the WordPress writing window. The toolbar is well worth getting anyway as it has other useful tools and the PageRank indicator (just search for “Google toolbar” in Google and get the version for your browser (I have used it OK with IE and FireFox)
When you click on the “ABC” icon in the toolbar it highlights any errors with red and underline and offers alternative spellings, or you can just edit to correct it or add new words to the dictionary. Once fixed, the word stays green until you are finished.
Works a treat! (except it seems to make the text cursor disappear so you can’t see where your insert point is?)
Posted in WordPress | No Comments »