Why you don’t need an HTML 5 website… yet

Posted on December 16, 2011 by WebSanity

It seems that HTML 5 is surpassing Web 2 as the latest buzzword thrown around by web developers, and picked up on and misused by non-developers.

HTML is the language used to define what appears on a web page. Our job as web developers is to use tools to produce fixed HTML content for static websites, or write programming code to output HTML content in the case of dynamic websites.

The web standards body, after long periods of negotiation and discussion, release updated versions of the HTML standard, getting rid of outdated features and adding new features. This allows web developers to produce better looking/performing websites by having more features we can exploit without having to resort to tricks or extension technology such as Flash.

Something we have been waiting for for a long time now is the ability to embed videos in web pages without resorting to Flash to help us (in particular for those people with Apple devices that won’t run Flash). This is due in the HTML 5 standard.

However, although new web standards are being released, those standards have to be implemented by the browser manufacturers for them to work. Given that Microsoft seem barely able to implement existing standards you might be unsurprised to learn that their browsers are lagging well behind on implementing HTML 5.

Even if it weren’t for Microsoft’s lagging behind (and 50% of people still use their browsers), not everybody uses the latest versions of browsers, making HTML 5 a distant dream still. In reality there will be an awkward and long transition period before we can truly switch to HTML 5 and all its inherent benefits.

So, should you demand your web developer produces you an HTML 5 website? YES! But not yet…

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Social Media Optimisation – pinterest.com

Posted on December 9, 2011 by WebSanity

It seems sometimes that you’re running just to stay in the same place when it comes to social media. You’ve got Facebook, Twitter, Linked, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and many more to consider…

And here comes another one to consider: pinterest.com. If you’re selling a highly visual product or something niche or ‘crafty’ it might be worth a quick dabble.

Remember that social media is about being where your customers are hanging out, whereas SEO is about search engines pure and simple.

As with all online marketing, use your Analytics data to see what is working for you and to measure your results and focus your efforts.

My only concern with pinterest: a lot of the home page pieces seem to have been published  weeks ago: if it’s going to be successful it needs to keep its content fresh.

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Improve your SEO with Fresh Content

Posted on December 1, 2011 by gerald

WebSanity Internet Marketing logoWe’ve always said that it’s good SEO to keep the content on your site updated regularly – it helps your search engine rankings. A recent change to the Google search algorithm, affecting 35% of searches (according to Google), sees it rewarding fresh of content even further.

Now, more so than ever, it is important to consider a blog for your site. Can’t bear the thought of writing a diary of what your business has been up to – why not try writing:

  • Hints & Tips, e.g. SEO Hints & Tips
  • Comments on current industry news
  • Case studies
  • Free – and relevant – content, e.g. recipes

Use Google’s blog search to see what your competitors are writing about, and Google Alerts to keep abreast of industry news. Be creative!

It might be hard to get started, but the fresher your content the more likely Google will see you as being an authority, and the more likely you will rank better.

Help and advice on SEO in Cambridge, Huntingdon or Peterborough from WebSanity Internet Marketing.

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Free business advice for small businesses ends…

Posted on November 25, 2011 by WebSanity

Today marks the end of free business advice for small businesses in the East of England.

With the closure of Business Link East, SMEs will no longer be able to tap into support to help grow, or just sustain, their businesses. (Well, unless you consider information on a website and one free 5 minute phone call to be support).

Some things Business Link did always seemed wrong to me – such as co-funding development projects which other businesses had to fund for themselves. However, call me biased, but cutting business support and education has been the worse case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater I have ever come across. Have the government gone stark staring mad?!

One of the things that has disappointed me most was the total lack of action from small businesses. Sure, some whinged, that their free training courses were disappearing, but how many made an effort and wrote to their MPs or started campaigns or tried to get on TV or… well… anything? I think it might only dawn slowly on these people, and this country, what they have lost when it is too late.

I’d like to thank all the people at Business Link for the support I have received from them myself over time – and wish them well in their future careers.

On this, their last day in the office, maybe they will reflect on all the support, encouragement and advice they have given to businesses over the years and the massive positive effect they have made on businesses and peoples’ lives. If only the government and small businesses could do the same…

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Competitor Link Research – post Yahoo Site Explorer

Posted on November 23, 2011 by gerald

WebSanity Internet Marketing logoToday represents a big day for those looking to work on their  SEO in Cambridge, Peterborough, Huntingdon and beyond. A key, free link research tool provided by the Yahoo search engine has, after due notice, been retired. The Yahoo Site Explorer has been withdrawn as Bing and Yahoo have worked on merging their search technologies in a desperate bid to compete with the Google behemoth.

This site used to provide a means of investigating where your competitors got their links from, and thus indicated areas that you could research to see where you could get similar links from: a somewhat clunky but powerful link building tool.

To be able to keep an up to date list of who is linking to whom on the web takes a huge amount of processing – in fact it needs a system that crawls the whole web as regularly as possible, hence why a search engine is the perfect platform to produce such information. However, Google have never provided such data (they provide limited data about your own website if you are signed up for their webmaster tools) as they see as it as revealing too much information, and we haven’t heard of any plans for Bing to do so (although that might be one way of attracting more attention from website owners if they did).

So what next? There are various paid for link research programs, but the best FREE link research tool we have come across is Open Site Explorer from a company called SEOmoz.

This is a free, cut down version of a professional tool ($99 per month) which provides more information than was available from Yahoo Site Explorer, such as the ability to show only links that are ‘followed’ (‘no follow’ links are specially tagged as passing no credibility to the site they are linked to and are commonly used in blogs to stop spammers gaining credibility from positing links back to their own sites). The professional version also gives an idea of the authority of the site linking in and the anchor text linked on (both good for helping you determine the priority of sites which are worth trying to build links from).

I’ve never been impressed in the past by the quality of the data – SEOmoz buy spare time from Amazon’s cloud computing system to crawl the web, but they just don’t have the horsepower to crawl the web like Google’s hundreds of thousands of servers. However, with the closure of Yahoo’s site explorer, more people being pushed towards this tool and more people paying SEOmoz for their services, this data can only get better.

So, farewell Yahoo Site Explorer and hello Open Site Explorer; no matter what technology you use the key thing is to keep building links through whatever – legitimate – means possible.

The bottom line: engage with your potential audience wherever possible.

Help and advice on SEO in Cambridge, Huntingdon or Peterborough from WebSanity Internet Marketing.

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