Another new business is about to lauch somthing the ecommerce world has not yet seen! Myself and a fellow programmer are about to roll out the first one out in the next couple of days.

Without giving to much away the new system called mixitcom! I think breaking news will be appearing here very shortly!

Everybody knows that website statistics are a funny things. Do you believe them? or install two different programs just to make sure? Tracking your unique hits on the Internet I believe is very important, it could be make or break of your website. My hits are usually targeted around web design Preston and SEO Preston as these are my two main keywords.

It might sound quite silly targeting very niche areas of your business, Why not target SEO. If somebody from London was to request SEO it would be difficult to conduct genuine business with problems always getting in the way i.e. communication breakdown, meetings, availability it’s not a nip round the corner or a quick 10 minute drive.

What are the benifits from targeting your niche

Many SEO companies will work with many clients, knowing your niche is worth its weight in gold. The Internet these days is riddled with low quality, repeat content which offers no positive gains. If you know your niche you know what is happening and when it’s happening, this alone is enough to draw visitors in. It could be the launch of a new watch, watch repairs, health supplements or even glucosamine.

Conquering your niche on the keywords, could be more easy to achive than first thought. If you know what is happening then plan. If you know which area you want to target then plan. Making simple changes to the <title> Your Tile Tag </title> tag this will achive the results, just add a location i.e. “Preston” see below the difference this makes!

For example

SEO in google produces Results 1 - 10 of about 262,000,000 for SEO

Target your niche

Results 1 - 10 of about 715,000 for SEO Preston

Usaually you can find me No. 1 in google for SEO Preston, but only recently I have changed my title tags to include more locations including Liverpool, Manchester and Lancashire.  So their might be a slight difference but i know i will still be in the top three.

You can get a taste for the site here at pay as you go seo if you have any questions or would like further details please contact pay as you go seo through the contact page on this website.

New online ventures need to take into consideration before launching a new website.

Domain Age

If you going to buy a domain name for a new business try and buy a domain name with history. Basically if its already been in google or cached!

A great tool is The Way Back Machine this will tell you the age and show what the domain looked like over the years for example http://web.archive.org/web/*/martynb.co.uk somebody purchased my domain in 2000.

Why does your domain name need age?

When you launch a new website now you will sit in the search engines sandbox for 6 - 12 months this is because your website is new you usually wont be released on any keywords the sandbox can last over 12 months many people think it due to the mathematical algorithm being worked out other people think its a period of time deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence.

Well from reading the title of my post you might think I’ll be appearing on Dragons’ Den but unfortunately not. This morning i received the phone call at the last stages, telling me that i would need to apply next year. Quite shocking really when the person I was speaking to didn’t understand the concept of the business. It got very frustrating when trying to explain what the business did.

Many success stories come from this program, but also failed attempts can turn in to a success from this program for example Rob Law, so I think I will have to follow in Rob’s footsteps.

My idea will be launching on 7^th June 2008 so you will have to watch this space.

Imagine buying a newspaper from the local shop, the newspaper is folded in half this relates to above the fold! In website terms, its the area of content before you scroll down. This content must be the important content if you don’t catch the attention of the visitor here you might loose them all together. This area of the page is possibly the most valuable in terms of buying the visitor.

Absolute Link

When your linking to another page within your website this can be done two ways, either absolute or relative so what’s the difference.

An absolute link shows the full URL for example;

<a href=”http://martynb.co.uk/SEO/SEO_Consultant.html”>SEO Consultant</a>

A relative link only shows the possible directory and page;

<a href =”../SEO/SEO_Consultant.html”>SEO Consultant</a>

Which is the better?

I always use the absolute link as this can prevent canonicalization and hijacking! (more coming on these two)

Authority

This could be possibly the most important one I will mention, Authority. You need this to rank well in the search engines. Authority is broken down into 5 basic parts.

• Link Equity
• Site Age
• Traffic Trends
• Site History
• Unique Content

If you have all five if these you should be showing great results in the search engines, if not then something is wrong.

On the internet many websites which share great information on SEO if you have any questions please feel free to contact me

My usual plan in Asda, when she hits the clothes department I hit the magazines and have a quick flick through my usual magazines. I usually read CSS but I’m sure they get 1 copy a week as it’s never instock! So I hit the Tesco’s selection to cut a long story short.. the usual laptop buyer, pc advice, boost vista… apart from the one I didn’t catch the name of, I had a quick flick through the pages apart from 90% being adverts for web hosting, domain names, SEO Companies. They had an interesting topic on Mozilla Firefox this being the bookmark add-ons available. I use Mozilla Firefox 99.9% of the time when I’m browsing the net. It’s so simple and so easy control which is what I like, unlike Internet Explorer.

They listed about 30 if not more bookmark add-ons, I would have purchased the magazine but £6.99 for 30 plugin , and reviews on unlimited hosting for £2.99, and guaranteed results in SEO “I think not“

So driving home I thought what add-ons do people use, I use quite a few browsers to make sure websites look correct in each browser.

My add-ons in Firefox look like this below!

Yes very simple but this is the way i like my browser, i have at least 15 profiles setup on my Firefox browser for various clients and plugin’s they need!

Setting up a profile in Firefox is so simple. I have been using Vista for about 7 months now.

First Step.. Close down all Firefox browsers

Click the start menu and place you cursor in the search box and type;

firefox.exe -profilemanager

Then click the above!

This will then bring a box up saying

Now you can create as many profiles as you like, this is ideal if you have children, they don’t have a separate login or personal files, they share the same desktop as you, different browser.

Anyway getting back to formatting my laptop I will be reinstalling all my programs and nearly 90% of they are open source some of the program I use are just as good as off the shelf, if not better than the big companies Adobe and Microsoft.

For my graphic i use an open source program called GIMP this is like Photoshop but doesn’t cost the £500 + with results being the same, it should takes a little time to get to grips with but i would suggest trying it!

For my word processing and spread sheets I use a program called Open Office this again is the other option to using MS Office offering great results if not better!

Only recently I found an image program for checking images in a gallery format this works better than the one found on vista and gives you options on basic editing the program again is free to download and come from Google the program is called picasa

I have listed the basic three which I use daily, for a great list on all open source program

I went on facebook only 30 minutes ago nothing much has changed since i last went on, i asked my partner would she like to use my laptop to check facebook her answer was no nobody has updated for a while.

Facebook.com relies on users to make the website popular, basically the more users update and contribute to facebook the more other users being “friends” check for status updates..

Facebook.com i think is heading in the direction of myspace. What happens on myspace these days?…..

I don’t think social networking will be over but what comes next..facebook is very limited in what you can do. It reminds me of a christmas present that you always wanted, but after 30 minutes you get bored.