Google – Local SEO top tips

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Local SEO

Here’s quick list of factors that will help your business rank as a “Local Business” with Google. These are all important points that will help you rank at the top with Google local searches.

Click here to read more Local SEO articles

General Local SEO information

  • What are customers looking for?
  • Use Long tail keyword expressions along with Keyphrases
  • Avoid Jargon
  • Create posts for questions asked locally
  • Check what your competition are doing
  • What is your users’ intent? What is the purpose of their search term?
    • Informational Intent – just more information
    • Navigational Intent – user wants to get to your site quickly (e.g. contact page)
    • Purchase Intent – Looking for pricing and comparisons
    • Transactional Intent – Ready to Buy! Make sure you page offers purchase
Continue reading “Google – Local SEO top tips” »

How to guarantee your website is ranked in Google

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quick tips top search engine optimisation ranking

Technical Article: Make sure your website is at the top of the search engines

If you want to get your website to rank at the top of the search engines, follow this in-depth article.

Here we explain detailed SEO Instructions on how to make sure you have all the correct SEO techniques.

Continue reading “How to guarantee your website is ranked in Google” »

Quick Tips on Using Keywords – Be seen on Page One of Google

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quick tips using keywords to rank well in google and bing

Let’s start by defining what Keywords are… keywords are those words and expressions that people use within the search engines to find stuff.

They are usually looking for either Products or Problems (how to, where do I, what is the, etc.). Taking a step back it’s important to realise what all the major search engines do. Search engines have software programs that reach out into the web space and try to find everything that they think will be interesting to the public when they search – not only interesting – BUT also RELEVANT. Continue reading “Quick Tips on Using Keywords – Be seen on Page One of Google” »

Quick Tips on getting Ranked on Google – Title Tag

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SEO Title Tags MindMap

This article forms part of a series of quick tips for search engine optimisation on this blog. Please also see Quick Tips for OnPage Meta Descriptions and Quick Tips for OnPage Meta Keywords which explain more details about OnPage SEO Techniques for Search Engine Ranking.

Continue reading “Quick Tips on getting Ranked on Google – Title Tag” »

Quick Tips for OnPage SEO META Description

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meta description tag top tips from micro update

Using the Meta Description to best advantage on your website

The META Description tag is always placed in the HEAD section of your webpage and is not visible on the actual webpage.

Continue reading “Quick Tips for OnPage SEO META Description” »

Quick Tips for OnPage SEO Meta Keywords

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quick tips using keywords to rank well in google and bing

Meta keywords are part of your onpage search engine optimisation techniques that you should build into every page as part of your website design process. Onpage SEO is an important part of ensuring that your website ranks well within the major search engines. Continue reading “Quick Tips for OnPage SEO Meta Keywords” »

Top SEO Tips for Business

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quick tips top search engine optimisation ranking

This post concentrates on Top SEO Tips for business to make sure that your onpage and offpage SEO is complete. These techniques will ensure that you are doing the right things with the search engines and Google. Before you start any complicated SEO techniques you should ensure that all the items in this post have been completed for each page on your website. Google ranks relevancy to the search term entered by the user on the search page. Your web page or blog post should talk about the subject searched for and ensure you answer their question, completely and accurately with good relevance to their query. Continue reading “Top SEO Tips for Business” »

How to beat your Competitors with a Web Competitor Analysis

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competitor web analysis by micro update based in devon

Before any effective Ad campaign or website design or re-design you should analyse your market and your competitors. This is obvious in the business world and is even more important when it comes to your online presence. Micro Update will complete a competitor analysis COMPLETELY FREE as part of our web creation process. Continue reading “How to beat your Competitors with a Web Competitor Analysis” »

Find out who is linking to your website

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human search techniques

Ever wonder who’s linked to your Web site? Just go to altavista webmaster. As you can see, this page uses the powerful engine technology of AltaVista to perform some helpful searches. The first search simply displays all the links that AltaVista has to the pages in your Web site. The second option allows you to locate pages that link to your site. Continue reading “Find out who is linking to your website” »

What do people search for using Google

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human search techniques

What do people search for…?

When you write content for your website you should always remember the golden rules of what people use search engines for:

Continue reading “What do people search for using Google” »

Solid SEO Advice That Ranks You Higher In Search Engine Results

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micro update web design devon

Search Engine OptimisationSearch engine optimization is something any company that desires to have a successful web presence needs to do right. Whether your website is selling yourself, your company or a product, you need it to work. This article has some great tips on how to make search engine optimization work for you.

Continue reading “Solid SEO Advice That Ranks You Higher In Search Engine Results” »

Free web analytics program – analyse your web log files – Piwik

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Piwik – Web analytics – Open source


piwik is an open source (GPL license) web analytics software. It gives interesting reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the language they speak… and so much more. 

piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

1. the features are built inside plugins: you can add new features and remove the ones you don’t need. If you are a developer, you can easily build your own plugins!
2. you own your data. Piwik being installed on your server, the data is stored in your own database and you can get all the statistics using open APIs (publishing the data in many formats: xml, json, php, csv)
3. (NOW AVAILABLE!!!) the user interface is fully customizable, you can drag and drop the widgets you want to display, create the reports you want

4 Tips for creating your killer blog content

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micro update web design devon

top tips for creating blogs that rank well with the search engines

FOCUS on PROBLEMS, PASSIONS and FEARS

What is it that people are searching for? Normally they are searching for answers to problems – like:

  • How do I …. find a hotel venue with a marquee.
  • Where do I… go to get a free eye examination.

THINK: What is it that bugs people? – then write a post with the solution!

RESEARCH the Competition

  • Look at Google and enter the questions people may be asking – what problem do they have?
  • Check the total number of results – look for NICHE questions that do not have millions of hits – but would attract people to your website.

Do your KEYWORD RESEARCH

Ok, we are definitely falling into the space of SEO specialists here, but simply look at the competition, look at their articles, check out their keywords and phrases and if it works for them…

Finally:

FIND YOUR CONTENT

This does not necessarily mean re-inventing the wheel. Look on EzineArticles and do a search. Look at what other people are writing and think about creating a post with the “TOP 10….” or “The Best way to ….” etc.

Remember keep it short and succinct – People like brevity. Throw in a picture or two, keep to bullet points and on track.

Once you’ve done all this, write your article and make sure you add in all the OnPage SEO stuff

Screenscraping

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micro update web design devon

I recently had to look into ‘screenscraping’ information from one website to another. In this instance it was taking products from eBay into Opencart shopping system.

Of course should be very straightforward you would think? There are loads of products out there that say eBay to Opencart. There are some issues:

  • Opencart v3 is not supported very well…
  • eBay structures change
  • eBay layout out information differently on a regular basis
  • Integration tools do not map the information correctly (this is a biggy!)
  • eBay to other shopping cart software solutions are VERY slow and most (if not all …) do not support HTML descriptions that are now available in Opencart v3 (more of this later!)
  • eBay’s long description is actually added to the page via an iFrame and not that easy to get at – also it allows the user to add all sorts of HTML that would not look consistent on a shopping site.
  • Plus a lot more!

So having gone through various ‘trials’ of integration tools, including:

  • Expandly (not very good support for OC v3) – does not map across HTML at all, misses MPU and other stock numbers or at least miss manages the field mapping – plus too many other things. Literally spent days on this one!
  • Linnworks
  • About 5 others…

Eventually I came up with the following list of tools.

We will go into a little detail with each one


SixBit management tool to integrate eBay with Other tools

Sixbit software tool to integrate eBay to other systems and manage eBay

Ok, for what we wanted, this software is superb! Yes, you have to pay a monthly fee (which is very reasonable BTW). BUT, you get a full client management tool that offers the following:

  • Integration with Amazon, eBay and ETSY
  • Excel and CSV import and export (this aspect is very very good!)
  • Pick list management
  • Packing list management
  • Shipping management
  • eMail management
  • Full reporting
  • Dropshipper management
  • … and a lot more

So, don’t WASTE your time like WE did with trying to scrape products and other information from eBay and the like. Use THIS TOOL to get the information, management your products and if you want to export so that you can import into OpenCart or any other shopping platform.

BRILLIANT… if you want to get products in and out of other systems from eBay and Amazon you do not need to read on – get this!!

SixBit software just does the job thanks!

Scraper (chrome plugin)

Scraper chrome plugin

Chropath (chrome plugin)

Web Scraper by Martin Balodis (chrome plugin)

Advanced  Scraper by Agenty ($Commercial and trial version available)

Agenty

Data Miner ($Commercial and free version **)

** At the moment the free plan gives you 500 pages/month. The count resets monthly if you don’t exceed the 500 page limit in any given month. If you do exceed the 500 page scrapes in a given month your account will be automatically locked indefinitely. Then you can unlock your account by upgrading to any of our paid plans.

Data Miner

Other products to consider would be:

  • Greasemonkey scripts
  • Excel spreadsheet formulas

The process

I decided the best approach was to work out either the ‘xpath’ or ‘css’ structure of the eBay listing page. This was actually quite easy using the free chrome plugins.

Test markdown with WordPress

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micro update web design devon

Minimalist Markdown Editor

see syntax for this document here: <https://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/extra/>

download the jp markdown plugin

Continue reading “Test markdown with WordPress” »

How to predict the TRAFFIC/HITS you will get to your website

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How to predict website traffic to your site

Hopefully everyone knows that ranking in #1 on Google gets a LOT OF TRAFFIC and CLICKS. This guy has written a great article that shows you how we get this data and then use it. Continue reading “How to predict the TRAFFIC/HITS you will get to your website” »

Using Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook 2010

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Post from Google support for integrating Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook 2010

There has been a lot of interest in when a version of Google Calendar Sync would be released that supports Outlook 2010. As some of you have already noticed @salocorgan 🙂, we’re happy (Google that is…) to announce that support for Outlook 2010 is now available! This latest release (version 0.9.3.6) supports the 32-bit version of Outlook 2010 only. 64-bit turned out to be harder so we don’t have it ready yet, but we didn’t want to hold back the 32-bit-supporting version in the meantime.

We just posted the official announcement to the Gmail blog today:
If you have any issues, please post them to the Sync section of the forum:
Happy syncing!

Google Calendar Sync now supports Outlook 2010

Posted by Alice Brown, Google Calendar Team

Making sure that your calendar is available to you whenever and wherever you need it is important. That’s why Google Calendar works with a number of desktop applications and mobile devices including iCal, iPhone and iPad, Blackberry, Android, Nokia/Symbian, and Windows Mobile phones. Google Calendar Sync for Outlook is also available, but one thing was missing — until now.

Google Calendar Sync now supports Outlook 2010 — our top feature request. Outlook 2010 comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and currently only 32-bit is supported. To start syncing your calendar with Outlook 2010, download Google Calendar Sync version 0.9.3.6. Once you install it, a Settings window will appear. Enter your account’s email address and password, choose your sync optionand sync frequency, and you’re done! (Note: If you’re already using Google Calendar Sync, you’ll still need to download and install this new version in order to be able to sync with Outlook 2010. If you need help, take a look at our getting started guide.)

Mobile Website Development

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Mobile Website Development

Do you know how to create a mobile website? Or more importantly, do you know what a mobile website is? Domus Dish has covered this topic quite a bit, but in case you’ve missed it, a mobile website is what smart phone users see when looking at your webpage from their phones. There are many differences between mobile and traditional websites, which is why your website may not work for many smart phone users.

    KeePass – great password tool

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    KeePass Password Safe – generate and keep all your passwords in one secure place
    Today you need to remember many passwords. You need a password for the Windows network logon, your e-mail account, your website’s FTP password, online passwords (like website member account), etc. etc. etc. The list is endless. Also, you should use different passwords for each account. Because if you use only one password everywhere and someone gets this password you have a problem… A serious problem. The thief would have access to your e-mail account, website, etc. Unimaginable.

    List of top things to do to secure your Joomla website

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    Top things to do to secure your Joomla website

    Updated: 3/2/2011 (you can now download and view this as a checklist document for your reference and guidance)

    Here’s my list of the top things to do to make sure that your not leaving security vulnerabilities in your Joomla website and that it runs smoothly each and every day…

    • FIRSTLY MAKE SURE YOU ARE RUNNING THE LATEST RELEASED VERSION OF JOOMLA. Login to your Joomla site and look at the version number. If you are not running the latest version, download it and update your site straight away! At the time of writing this (Feb 2011) there are two major versions of Joomla. 1.6 is the latest brand new release and version 1.5.xx. If your site is using a 1.5.xx version make sure you upgrade to the latest version in that range e.g. 1.5.xx to 1.5.xx – do not jump to version 1.6 without a lot of testing and looking at the implications of doing so!
    • If your database tables in MQSQL for Joomla have ‘jos_’ as the prefix, read this first tip:
      Download EasySQL (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/hosting-a-servers/database-management/2867) and rename the database prefix of our databases within MySQL from the jos_ prefix (if everyone wants more feedback on how to do this leave me a comment and I’ll create a blog entry 🙂 )
    • Create a spreadsheet grid showing all your Joomla websites against modules / version installed in each site with dates and links to latest versions (this should be reviewed and signed off every month) Continue reading “List of top things to do to secure your Joomla website” »

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