ALCANDER NEWSLETTER

31 January 2004

 Issue 4

NEWS ITEM IN BRIEF

LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION

ATTENTION : THE DATE FOR Robin Nobles and John Alexander's visit to the UK has changed (see below).

Two of the industries' top leaders, Robin Nobles and John Alexander are coming to London 19th to 23rd April 2004

01-01-04

read about this story

Google Alert Automatically Tracks Your Favorite Topics.

22-01-04

New e-mail worm breaks infection records

27-01-04

Ask Jeeves makes its first profit

29-01-04

Google unhappy with rude copycat

31-01-04

WEB PROMOTION

Benefiting from On-line Discussion Forums

Participating in on-line discussion forums is a highly recommended way of promoting your business. The main reason for this is that they are an excellent way of setting up relationships directly with another person.

In order to get the best from these forums, you need to track down the ones relevant for your area of interest, generate plenty of traffic and are not full of spam.

The Open Directory is a good resource for tracking down reputable forums (as all entries are checked by a human). This link will take you directly to a list of forums for a variety of subjects or you can try this forum directory. Otherwise, an intelligent use of Google's advanced search is the best way of finding a forum to suit your purpose. Not to be overlooked is the Usenet discussion forums. Topica is a free service that allows you to find, manage and participate in email lists and discussion groups.

When posting on the forums, try and act as a real person i.e use your own name rather than some cute pseudonym. You may wish to consider even including a photograph of yourself.

By including as many relevant keywords as possible, you increase your chance of someone finding your contribution through the search engines or the search specific to that forum.

Where possible (i.e. it is not always allowed), include a signature with an embedded link to your own website.

To include a forum on your own website, aborior is strongly recommended.

CUSTOMER RETENTION

Ways to Localise Your Website

In each issue, we will review either a) new ways to keep your customers interested once they've found your website or b) ways you can collect information about your website visitors - information you can use to devise new content for your site to help retain different kinds of visitors.

This month we look at ways you can localise your website.

Over 50% of users of the web speak a foreign language. This is a good reason for increasing the reach of your website by using a translation service.

Here is a sample of useful resources which address this important issue :

Babelfish
InterTran
Google's own translation tools
Free Translation
WorldLingo

If you are looking for a complete language service for businesses, Executive Languages are highly recommended.

A slight twist on the above are language identifier services such as one known as Fuzzums.

In our first 7 issues, we look at the 7 BIG mistakes in web design. We've now reached the fourth in this series, and we are going to look at....

The Search Engine War : Resisting Anger

There is fierce competition for the top spots in the search engine rankings, and if you are on a limited budget you may not be able to afford to bid for highly competitive keywords. But it is important to not let this get to you i.e. one must stay calm.

The truth is that the "Search Engine War" is not fair and letting anger set in will lead to your defeat. Such anger normally results from believing that you must get the #1 position, whereas being in the top ten still gives you very high visibility i.e. you are on the first page. Most search engine users will look at all the results on the first page.

Rather than getting flustered, use the search engine results as an opportunity. Here are some tips :

Some of those higher ranking sites will be complementary sites rather than competitors. Approach them and request a reciprocal link.

Investigate what keywords your competitors are ranking well on, and try and build those keywords (as long as they are relevant) into your own web pages. Give them prominence (without spamming the search engines), build them into your meta-description and the "alt text" associated with any images on your site.

If we ran a web award scheme, we would give out awards to the following web sites. We have placed each "award" in one of 8 categories. Who knows, one day we may run an official awards website. One way of getting ideas for compelling websites is to look for inspiration from other compelling websites. The categories below are subject to change.

Arts & Entertainment :

www.masterandcommandermovie.co.uk

8 Bafta Nominations and an excellent website.

Humour

Cartoon Stock

Quality gag cartoons.

Business/Commercial:

Wemyss Ware

Highly collectable Scottish pottery.

Science and Technology:

ScienceDaily Your link to the latest research news

Creativity :

Lumiere Graphics

Innovative website design

Webmasters Resources :

TopStyle

TopStyle is the premier CSS/HTML/XHTML editor for Windows.

E-commerce :

WebGroove

Creators of user profiling software.

Educational :

Bagheera

A website for our endangered species.

Why restrict your searching to Google? Each month we look at other ways of searching the Internet.

How about this for an appealing concept? A Voice Activated Search Engine! Searchlimo is officially launching in February.

As all readers of the Alcander Newsletter are aware, there are billions of websites. It therefore comes as no surprise that search engine results are getting longer. Web users are looking for ways that they can organise their results and relieve themselves from information overload.
One recent, ambitious entry is a major update of Groxis' Grokker, a useful addition to any major search engine. Grokker 2.0 organises results into a map of graphical objects. Users drill down on each of these objects (each labeled according to their context). Another search engine which display results visually is kartoo.

Read about terms or definitions before we get around to putting them in our knowledgebase (www.alcander.co.uk/knowbase.php)

linkrot : When outgoing links on a website become invalid due to Web pages previously accessible at a particular URL are moved or deleted.