Clarihon blog

• Welcome to Clarihon Web Service’s blog

For those who perform their own web site ‘tweaks’ to improve their search engine rankings here are a few basic thoughts about how Search Engines work and guidelines to follow:

• Google and other search engines (SE) don’t index a web site – they index each of it’s pages individually. When you perform a web search it’s a specific page (OK, often the Home page) that appears in the results
• The SEs base their indexing on what they think the web page is about
• The SE’s get the likely main subject of a page from a combination of visible and invisible factors on a page and, for best results, they both need to be focussed on the same, single word or phrase (the ‘search term’)
• The search term should be aimed at a likely word or phrase that you expect (or know) your target audience to be typing in when they search. For example we target ‘Web Design Liskeard’ on one of our pages. Not many people type this into Google on a daily basis but when they do, we appear on the first page.
• The visible parts of the page that matter are the main page headings (H1, H2 and H3 tags etc in the page code) and the text. Including the search term within these headings and at least three times in the text (for 250 or more word pages). Putting the ‘search term’ in bold at least once within the page helps
• The invisible (to browsing visitors but not SE indexing ‘spiders’) parts of the page are the Title, the Description and the Keywords. Google and most other SEs place a lot of importance on the title but little nowadays on the description and keywords
• Adding visible and invisible descriptions to menu options and images on a web page containing the search term usually helps
• Google and others SE’s can’t read images. If a page is made up mainly of images then Google will fail to extract, and index, most of the content
• The site should contain a text-based menu or navigation system so that the SE indexing spiders can ‘crawl’ across the whole site by reading the links between the pages. If the menu and inter-page links are formed by an image-based or Flash menu this won’t be so easy.
• A Site map of the pages within the site will help the SEs index all of the site. A special format of site map (XML) can be submitted to Google and other SEs to make it easy for them
• SE’s now place a great store by the number and quality of links to a page from other web sites. The more relevant to your web site and the more highly regarded by that SE, the more weight it will put on a link. A link-building process is important to the long-term success of any SE-optimisation strategy

Here at the Clarihon offices in ‘Chateau RFG’, like a lot of people, we share our data.

We could have set up access between the hard disks on each of our PCs or we could have set up a ‘server’ machine in one of our offices and accessed it via our wired and wireless network. For a while we had selected the latter solution and I had a second box-tower PC sitting by my desk. It helped keep me warm in the winter but too hot in the summer and always added to the noise levels – even with quiet fans and silencing foam inside it.

A better solution, I think, is to use a Network-attached storage (NAS) unit. It’s a box holding one or more hard disks (the same sort you have in your PC) and sits on an office or home network. The disks are accessible through the usual Windows/MAC file interfaces and act as additional ‘drives’ on your PC. The data is accessible from all PCs on your network unless you restrict access using the security tools they have. Some also have media streaming capabilities built in so that you can play MP3 files, video clips and photos using remote ‘media players’ around the office/home.

We’ve got the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo box. It holds two disks with capacities from 100Gb to a Terrabyte (1000 Gb). If you ‘mirror’ them like we do you have a good measure of protection from a disk failure. This means that all data written to the box is written to each of the two disks identically. If one fails you can replace it without losing the data. By connecting an external disk drive via it’s USB port we can schedule regular automatic backups too – just to be extra safe.

There are many different makes and versions available from specialist PC companies to PC World. Our regular sources (www.scan.co.uk and www.ebuyer.co.uk) both supply a wide selection of them.

If you’re an Outlook user (as opposed to Outlook Express) for e-mail, here’s how to back up your e-mail and contacts etc. The instructions for 2003 (cos that’s what I’ve got) are below but you should be able to adapt them easily enough for other versions. If not, perhaps you shouldn’t be using a PC? (OK, a bit harsh perhaps [ ] ).

Before starting make sure that you’ve emptied any Spam folder and the Deleted items folder. It’s also a good idea to remove any attachments that might have been with the e-mails – especially images, sound clips and and movie files. You can do this by going into the e-mail and selecting Edit, Edit message from the top menu. Save the file somewhere where you can find it later, remove it and save the e-mail. This reduces the size of the e-mail ‘backup’ file that will be produced.

From the main menu (Front screen or Inbox) select File, Import and Export.

From the options provided select Export to a file, then Personal Folder file (.pst)

Make sure the top-level (usually Personal Folders) folder is selected and the box at the bottom, Include subfolders, is ticked.

At the next screen pick the location where you want to save the file and a unique name for it – with the date included for ease of use.

As it’s a new file you can ignore the ‘Duplicate items’ options and press ‘Save’. If you’ve selected all the right folders Outlook will then start exporting all the folders one by one to the file you specified. When it’s finished you’ll have a large file that will be anything from several Mb in size to something of several hundred Mb in size. Don’t forget to copy this somewhere safe – another disk, CD, DVD etc.

If you do this every month or so you’ll be able to go back to e-mails that have been accidentally deleted (unless recent of course) and also reduce the size of your mail file. This will speed up Outlook too.