Before we dive into the sections below, if you are serious about improving your search engine ranking you need Google’s (free!) Webmasters Tools, it is your command centre for SEO. If possible also add a submit a sitemap to you webmaster account at Google - this will automatically supply Google with a complete list of the pages on your website. WordPress users can install the Google XML Sitemap plugin which takes care of the sitemap.xml creation and submission. If you need any assistance setting up your webmaster account or sitemap please contact us.

Website code

If you have a good website developer most of the SEO achievable by code should be taken care of during the creation of the site. If you are currently getting your website built, ask your web developer what steps they are taking to ensure your site will have the best chance of ranking highly on search engines. Below is a brief checklist of good SEO practises for web development, ask your web developer and see how your site stacks up!

URL Structure

Your URL structure should contain relevant keywords, separated by dashes and it should be as short as possible (5 words is good!), eg:

• BAD: http://wot-not-to-do.net/?p=142&variable=876134784372468264
• GOOD: http://domain.com/short-concise-keywords/

Page Title and Meta

Your page title and meta should be well formed, ie: page title should be concise and contain relevant keywords, the description meta should be helpful and unique on each page, the robots meta and canonical urls should be used where relevant, also location latitude and longitude may be helpful for some sites. WordPress users should download the fantastic SEO all in One plugin which takes care of most of this for you. If you would like to check your page titles and description meta Google site:domain.com (exchange domain.com for your domain), this will give you a list of site pages as Google sees them.

• BAD: Really, Long, Stupid, Title, Like, A, Thesaurus, Entry, Most, Of, Which, Gets, Cut, Off, Anywa…
• GOOD: Page Title Containing Keywords – Site Title

Content Structure

Your page content should be well formed with modern, semantic and standards compliant HTML, ie: header tags should be used appropriately, menus should be lists, images should always have alternative text etc. For the untrained eye good quality code can be hard to spot … even then code quality can be subjective, but here is a couple of simple tests you can do for your site which may give you an indication of the quality of the code.

1. Validate your website pages at http://validator.w3.org/. If your site validates or gets only a few errors it’s a pretty good sign your web developer has taken care when coding.
2. View your site without stylesheets. Without stylesheets your site should look like a well structured Word document; with the most important headers the largest, sub-headers correctly nested, navigation and sub-navigation should be presented as lists etc. As with the first point, this does not guarantee search engine optimised code but it should indicate whether your web developer is using modern, semantic HTML.

Page Speed

Your site should be optimised for speed. This means your website images should be compressed (there is great programs such as ImageOptim for the mac which squeeze images to the smallest size possible), your icons should be combined into sprites, your stylesheets and javascript should be combined and compressed where appropriate, javascript should also be placed in the footer if possible. Google has recently announced that site speed is a metric in the search page rankings, it is only a very small component of SEO but these are good practises nonetheless and having a snappy website improves the experience for your users.

If you are uncertain your site is using the best practises outlined above you should contact your web developer, or feel free to contact us for a professional opinion of your site.

Website content

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; producing quality content as regularly as possible is the single best thing you can do for your search engine page ranking. In fact, for 99% of sites out there, producing content is the only way to reliably improve page ranking; this means writing articles or uploading photos or creating videos … find a way that you feel comfortable communicating with your audience and go for it. Let’s look at SEO from the reverse angle for a moment, what does Google want to deliver to their users? They want to deliver the most current, relevant and authoritative content on the internet – by adding regular posts about a particular topic you are signalling to Google “Hey! I’m someone who knows a lot about this subject”.

Writing lengthy blog posts can take a lot of time and you may wonder what on earth you would talk about week after week, but producing content does not have to be intimidating, here’s some examples;

• Post pictures: If you are a designer or a creative this should be a no-brainer. Nearly every mobile phone has a camera and there are multiple ways for you to easily upload and embed photos directly to your website. Every time you see something inspiring, interesting or “challenging” snap a photo, tap out your thoughts in 25 words or less and post it.
• Microblog: Posts do not have to be long to be worthwhile, for example: “Azaleas must be popular this spring, we’ve sold 16 this week already!” gives potentially useful information (or perhaps a starting point for discussion) and if you’re a flower store you’ve just added ‘azaleas’ as a potential incoming search term.
• Re-use questions from your clients: If a client or potential client asks a question it’s likely others will find that information useful also, use your answer as a starting point and flesh it out a little for your website. (This post itself is a fleshed out frequently asked question!).
• Pay someone else to do it: For some businesses it may be worthwhile and appropriate to outsource the copy writing to a freelance writer. The cost will obviously vary depending on the writer and the topic but you should expect to pay around $20-$50 per article.

Google’s Webmaster Tools gives you a way to monitor the keywords on your site. A keyword’s significance is calculated not only on the number of times it is used (keyword density) but also on where it is used, for example, keywords in the url and page title are given greater weight than those used in a blog paragraph. Making use of the alternate text for images is also a great way to boost certain keywords. The anchor text of incoming links also counts towards keyword significance (and can be misused).

You should be aiming to fill the top 5 or 10 Keywords (as calculated by Google) with your most important search terms:

Link building

I am not talking about paying some dodgy operator to spam online forums with your website link, black-hat methods like this are counter productive as search engines will penalise your site if they find you engaging in link farming or exchanging links with unreputable sites. However, there are some legit methods you can use to increase the number of links coming to your site which will in turn boost your search engine ranking;

• Submit your site to online directories, such as DMOZ and Google Local. Also, do a search for other directories that are related to your industry and submit your site. There are some directories, such as the Yellow Pages where you can pay for a website listing… depending on your advertising budget this may be a worthwhile option, however in general I would not advise on paying for a directory listing.
• Take a look at your business-to-business relationships, if you have close relationship with another business there may be an opportunity to exchange links which in turn helps both parties.
• Participate in forums and blog discussions. Online forums will usually give you the option of a signature which is placed at the bottom of every post you make, this can be a great way to build incoming links particularly if the forum or blog is related to your business.
• Write an article for a well known news or blog site. Many blogs will accept articles and give the author a link back to their website, this can be a worthwhile proposition in many cases because the authority of the publishing site will be passed onto the authors site.

Not all links are equal. Search engines use complex algorithms to devise the ‘authority’ of any given website, the most famous is PageRank created by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Essentially it means is that a certain website may have less links than another but if the links it does have are from ‘authoritative’ source then it will likely have a higher PageRank.

One such section is kilbot labs, a sandbox where I will be testing code snippets and giving examples of current best practices in web development. If you have an interest in web development please take a look at the various lab articles and join the discussion in the comments section!

These two companies show little sign of slowing down, but I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that 2010 will be the year that users begin to move away from social networking sites and back to the ancient art of blogging. Here’s why …

Two things will happen in 2010;

1. Facebook will go public.
2. Twitter will be bought (probably by Google after a bidding war with Facebook) .

It is not the action of going public or being bought that will turn users away – but the news reports of huge sums of money being paid for our content should be a penny-dropping moment for a lot of people. Let’s say Facebook raises $5 billion in an IPO (even in a depressed stock market this should be a relatively conservative estimate) that values each user at roughly $15 per user or $40 per active user. If the creators of Twitter cash out for the bargain price of $0.5 billion that values each user at $40 per user. $40, $15, hell, even $10… doesn’t the thought pop into your head, “Hey, that’s my $10 goddamn it!” And in a round about way it is.

If you are writing a note about your favourite foods – why shouldn’t you get paid for the weight loss ads? If you’ve just finished a really good book – why shouldn’t it be your affiliate link to Amazon? Even without the advertising and monetising angle … why should you be building value for a third party when you could be investing equity in your own business or in your own brand?

In 2010, I predict we will see old blogs revived and new blogs created by people keen to take control (and take advantage) of their own content. Status updates will originate on personal websites and then be broadcast to Twitter and Facebook or directly to Google. Photos may be hosted on Facebook or Twitpic or Posterous but the reference and discussion will take place on the blog. Farmville won’t be a pixelated pig, it will be a short video of a backyard and a poll on what to grow this season. OK, that last one may be wishful thinking.

Facebook and Twitter will still be important platforms – Facebook will still be a valuable tool for friends and family to keep in touch and Twitter will still be useful for unearthing the latest news stories and gossip – but the most active and prolific content creators on these sites will seek to change the focus back to their own personal websites. Indeed, some would argue this is already the case for Twitter – it’s role in marketing and link building has eclipsed it’s early life as a way for geeks to meet up at SXSW.

“What are you doing?” Come to my blog and find out.

eBooks are about to become very popular
We already have the Kindle from Amazon, Stanza for the iPhone and products like Sony’s eReader, but at the moment these are mostly the domain of tech geeks. Next year we will see a slew of devices which will help push eBooks as a more mainstream way of reading books. Apple is rumoured to be releasing a Kindle like device, and other hardware manufacturers are jumping in with their own versions of tablet/media devices.

Offer PDF and EPUB formats
Independent authors should offer at least two formats; PDF and EPUB. PDF’s should be offered as an all purpose solution, if all else fails the user can open the PDF on their computer or most users will be aware of work-arounds to get the PDF to display on their preferred device. However, for a better reading experience authors should also offer the EPUB format, this is currently compatible with a large range of eBook readers and will reflow text to the size and dimensions desired by the user (ie: PDFs currently lack this feature, page sizes are a fixed dimension with a fixed number of words). The world of eBooks is still relatively young with many competing formats, but I believe EPUB stands the best chance of becoming the eBook standard just as MP3s have become the open standard for music files.

You can create professional looking books in EPUB (for free)
There is a new, free program available for creating eBooks in the EPUB format called Sigil. At the moment Sigil only imports TXT, HTML and EPUB documents, this might mean a two step conversion process for most independent authors, for example;
1. You’ve got the book written in Microsoft Word or something similar
2. Export an HTML version
3. Open the HTML version in Sigil and fix any formatting issues
4. Export as EPUB file

Sigil is very new, but a very promising open source project… I imagine it will not be long before a version is released capable of importing MS Word documents natively along with other common word processing formats.

Amazon provides a great marketplace for books
As well as offering the book for direct sale over your personal website, independent authors should also look at selling their work on Amazon. Amazon charge an ongoing fee and take a chunk of the sale price, but they have millions of eyeballs each day so it is very compelling marketplace. To sell on Amazon they require you to join the Advantage program which is $US29.95/month, they also take 55% of the List Price … which I think is steep, but probably not that much different from a brick and mortar bookstore.

Free the words!
Many authors are seeing benefit in releasing an eBook for free in order to establish an audience or to expand their existing base of fans. Sites such as Feedbooks will let authors publish their work for free and gives instant distribution to a range of popular devices, such as the Kindle.

More resources:
EPUB format description on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB
Sigil ebook editor: http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Amazon advantage: http://advantage.amazon.com/gp/vendor/public/join
Feedbooks guide to self-publishing: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/self-publishing

When you extract that zip you will see a folder named Classes and inside that a folder named XMLRPC, drag the XMLRPC folder into your project. You will also need to grab NSString+XMLExtensions.h and NSString+XMLExtensions.m and drag them into your project.

That’s all the required files for the XML-RPC framework and now implementing is fairly straight forward. You need to put the following to your header file:

#import "XMLRPCResponse.h"
#import "XMLRPCRequest.h"
#import "XMLRPCConnection.h"

and to your .m file you need to add something like:

- (NSString *)loginToServer {
  NSArray *args = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"test",nil];   // the param(s)
  NSString *server = @"http://example.com/xmlrpc";         // the server
  NSString *method = @"loginUser";                        // the method
  XMLRPCRequest *request = [[XMLRPCRequest alloc] initWithHost:[NSURL URLWithString:server]];
  [request setMethod:method withObjects:args];
  id response = [self executeXMLRPCRequest:request];
  [request release];
  
  if( [response isKindOfClass:[NSError class]] ) {
    return nil;
  }
  else {
    return [response valueForKey:@"key"];          // the response key
  }
  return nil;
}

- (id)executeXMLRPCRequest:(XMLRPCRequest *)req {
  XMLRPCResponse *userInfoResponse = [XMLRPCConnection sendSynchronousXMLRPCRequest:req];
  return [userInfoResponse object];
}

You need to enter the appropriate values where I’ve commented, but this bare bones example should get you started. You can see more examples by sifting through BlogDataManager.m file in the WordPress for iPhone project.

http://www.kindermemories.com.au.

The problem – 12,000 old emails
I have kept pretty much every email since 2003, that’s when I set up my first POP3 account to download mail to my desktop. Previous to that I was using webmail and had to carefully pick and choose which emails to keep so that I wouldn’t go over my 200Mb limit. Downloading all my email to the inbox worked fine until 2005 when the volume of emails I was receiving increased dramatically, space wasn’t a problem but the usability of my email client dropped significantly – Outlook just didn’t like searching through a few thousand emails at a time. I switched to Thunderbird which generally handles search better, but it too became swamped, so in 2006 I began moving my old emails into folders marked 2003 Archive, 2004 Archive etc and exported them to an external hard drive and that was that… until I need to quickly retrieve an email from 2005, in which case I import the archive then search then delete … ugh.

So what I needed was somewhere to stuff all my mail, it had to have quite a bit of room because my archive mail and current mail was already tipping 5Gig, and it had to be searchable, fast. And for this GMail fits the bill perfectly.

The solution – GMail
Obviously we need a way to get the mail into GMail, ideally Google should include an option to import your mbox or pst files and suck in all your email at once … but they don’t have that option yet, so we will have to use a slightly more painful, but nonetheless effective solution: IMAP.

You have probably heard of IMAP and POP3 as ways to get your email from a server, there are differences between the two protocols, but put simply POP3 is used when you want to download and remove email from a server and IMAP is used when you want to sync your local email with the server email. Using IMAP we can get GMail to ‘sync’ with our archives and suck up all that email.

Step 1: Make sure IMAP is enabled in GMail by going to your settings menu.

Step 2: Set up your favourite email client (Outlook, Thunderbird etc) to access your Gmail account. There are instructions on how to set up a range of email clients on the Google Support website. Make sure your email client is not going to store a copy locally which would defeat the purpose. Mine is set to not download messages over 1kb.

Step 3: Once GMail is set up on your email client you can add folders, for example, 2003 Archive, 2004 Archive etc. In Thunderbird my folders looked like this:

Step 4: Drag and drop your email into the appropriate archive folder. You could try dragging whole folders at a time but I found this troublesome; every now and then GMail would throw up an error which means you have to start again. I found it safer to drag and drop a few hundred emails at a time, starting with the smallest emails and then working up to the large ones. Email over 10Mb might have to be done in smaller batches still, and there seems to be a maximum size limit of around 30Mb; I had one email with attachments that was 36Mb and it threw an error everytime … I guess at that size you should be archiving the attachments separately.

The syncing process is not terribly fast so it will require a little patience (it took me about 2 days to get all the email up, chunk at a time), but eventually you should have something like this:

2.69Gb, around 12,000 email messages, easily searchable and stored for free.

Most impressive for me is the upgrade to the rich text editor, WordPress still uses TinyMCE but they’ve upgraded to v.3 which seems to have ironed out a lot of the bugs. Anyone familiar with the old rich text editor will know it was frustrating at best, for most clients I would switch it off and tell them write in code view… not the best solution but much easier than trying to explain/teach the quirks of visual mode.

I haven’t had a chance to put WordPress 2.5 through it’s paces, but let’s just do a quick test. Here’s the code:

<table border="1">
  <tr>
    <td>Row 1</td>
  </tr>
  <tr class="alt">
    <td>Row 2</td>
  </tr>
</table>

And the display:

No great woop there, but in previous versions of WordPress the rich text editor would have deleted (yes deleted!) any table rows with a class selector – try explaining that to a client. Then there was the endless quirks of mysterious p tags, disappearing line breaks… a nightmare.

At first dig it seems that WordPress 2.5 (and TinyMCE 3) have addressed most of these problems and that alone is worth the upgrade. Perhaps even worth the extra time you’ll need to find your way around the new admin.

• Stripped out the old table-based layout and started from scratch with a fresh, modern design.
• Installed WordPress as a content management system for easy updating.
• Integrated Google Calendar and Flickr to increase community involvement.
• Brought members and participation to the fore with feature boxes and quick links.

We think the results speak for themselves, so please check out the Waterkeepers Australia website and help protect Australia’s precious waterways.

http://www.waterkeepers.org.au/

http://www.gisbornegolf.com.au

http://www.pressuredynamics.com.au

On a semi-related note, Whirlpool.net.au is having their annual Australian Broadband Survey, you can give your view on the state of broadband in Australia by going to http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/. The survey will take around 10 minutes to complete.

The Kilbot Factory has released a brand new site for Brooks Hire Service. The site uses a Content Management System for easy site updates and expansion, standards compliant XHTML and CSS, and quite a few keyword tweaks to get the best search ranking possible.

Google fills first and second places, which fits with data collected on my sites. Yahoo are next and then MSN.

Interesting to note Yahoo tops the rankings in the United States. I would suspect the figures are a little skewed to the type of web user would would install the Alexa tool bar.

The Kilbot Factory was contracted by Mintox Design to create a Content Management System for Melbourne artist Brett Coelho. The CMS allows Brett to add, edt and delete the content and also add new galleries so that the site can expand in future years.

The Kilbot Factory was contracted by Mintox Design and Ewen Coates to provide an interactive Flash animation for three of Ewen’s installations.

Click here to explore the installations.

The Kilbot Factory has launched a development site for Mailbot, an online application for HTML emailing. The project is currently in alpha which means the scripts are still being developed, but we hope to make the service available to everyone early next year, once all the bugs have been ironed out.

Why would you use Mailbot?

• You wish to send emails with images, styled text and links.
• You wish to track your emails to see how many are opened.
• Your ISP or host limits how many emails you can send an hour.

The Kilbot Factory is quickly becoming the comedian’s web designer of choice. This month we have released a site for Melbourne comedian Sam Simmons.

The design brief was 1980′s meets 1800′s so we went with daggy wallpaper, graffiti and Victorian furniture. The site includes a simple content management system for updating gigs, stories and pictures.

The Kilbot Factory worked with Melbourne designer Tammy Nicholson to create this lively site for Justin Heazlewood a.k.a. The Bedroom Philosopher. The site uses WordPress as a Content Management System and was created with cutting edge PHP, XHTML and CSS (check out the disjointed CSS rollovers on the home page, no javascript! : ).

The Kilbot Factory has released a new version of Tim Minchin’s web site to coincide with his tour of the UK, which includes gigs at the renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

The site still uses WordPress as a back end for the content and we have added Gallery2 for photos so Tim can keep in contact with his fans.

Keep an eye out over the next few weeks as we add more content and some nice flash curio.

This site design will be tweaked over the coming weeks, but we would appreciate any feedback on the current layout. Please send us a message on the feedback page, or leave a message in the comments.

Working with Mintox Design, The Kilbot Factory provided a customised membership login and database, credit card validation, pagination and printer friendly pages, automatic mailouts and other PHP services for the Career Compass web site.

In April 2005, the Kilbot Factory created a small interactive Flash animation to help promote Tim’s upcoming Melbourne International Comedy Festival show. The animation features snippets of Tim’s comedy show and was part of the internet advertising we did for the show.