JimWorld Gazette Issue #24 10/10/1997

Gazette - Issue #24 - October 10, 1997

--Time To Start Over On Meta Tags
-- Time To Tackle Traffic Reporting II
-- Snippets
-- Beware Internet Explorer 4.0
-- Tips From The Hitman - Part XIII

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g24

What a great response we had from the members of the Irish Internet Association. We've gotten lots of new subscriptions from our cousins 'over there'. We will be including resources for Irish web site promotion as we find them. One word of caution to Ireland's webmasters: Don't neglect the mainstream promotion tools. Your countrymen are using the big search engines and directories just like everybody else. If you focus on just directories for Ireland, you will not get full benefit from your promotion efforts.

Wonderful week for trying out new software. Downloaded the Beta version of the new LinkBot program which has always been a good performer. I looked forward to seeing the new advanced features. Ran the installer. It installed and rebooted my system. Took me a full day to get rid of it and reload Windows 95. Nothing would go out or into my system. Could have been just a coincidence, I guess.

TIME TO START OVER ON META TAGS

Have you paid attention to all my bitching about META tags and gotten each and every one of your pages META tagged for optimium performance? Good. Well done. Good webmaster.

Now go delete all of your META tags and start over. (No, seriously. This isn't a joke. I wouldn't do that to you, would I?)

Now that we all have our acts cleaned up and are SPAM FREE on our pages, the all seeing, all knowing folks at InfoSeek have decided to change the rules of the game we all play. We got rid of the 500 word TITLE tags, the 10 copies of the TITLE tags, the invisible word stuffing, the multiple META tags with hundreds of repeats and all the other goodies that spell SPAM. We are playing by the rules and life is good and fair to one and all.

We listened when they said 'Don't repeat your keywords more than seven times or you'll be sent to your room, and to the end of the list.' Now they say 'Don't repeat over three times or you'll be banished to the 1,000th page of results.'

That's the new rule at InfoSeek. Three repeats of any word in your META tag Keywords=. OK, we can live with that. We change all of our META tags to three repeats and we're safe, right? Safe? Yes. In good shape? No.

When you reduce your META tags to make InfoSeek happy, you will probably show up in the other search engines about three records beyond the end of their files. So what should we do?

I wish I had a good answer for you on this one. You are going to have to start by examining your referer log files and find out from them where you are getting your traffic. This is a critical step to take before you do anything in response to this Infoseek curve ball. The thing you don't want to do is optimize your site for Infoseek; discover that you hardly ever got traffic from Infoseek, and wind up losing most of your traffic that was coming from the other search engines. Remember, Infoseek is the only one that has switched to this new limit. The others may (probably will) follow Infoseek's lead, but do you want to give up most of your search engine traffic until then?

I know many of the other online information services (like VirtualPROMOTE) have spun up to high-speed on this development and are having their community members rush off and rework their META tags as if it were the end of the world. This is a big mistake. Your methodical reaction to this development will allow you to wind up with more traffic, not less.

Here is what I am doing. Maybe it will prove to be a good road for you to take as well.

Going through my referer_log file I found that I was getting the vast majority of my traffic from Infoseek based on 3 sets of keywords leading to 2 pages on my site. The first one was searches done for 'META tags' and VirtualPROMOTE's META tag page was listed first in the results. It is still listed in first position, but will probably fall lower when they reindex VirtualPROMOTE. So I have constructed a copy of the META tag page that conforms to Infoseek's new rules and I reworked some of the page to make it perform as well as possible just on Infoseek. I added it to the site under a slighly different name. Nothing in the site points to this new page as it is outside of the navigation scheme, but it points to the rest of the site. I then submitted it to be indexed and will wait a day or two to start fine tuning it to hold on to first position.

The other two keyword combinations that have been responsible for VirtualPROMOTE's traffic from Infoseek have been treated the same way. And my traffic is again flowing from Infoseek even better that before the change. I'm not saying what those keywords are, as they are a bit off the beaten path and I don't want any competition for them, so I'm keeping my mouth shut for once.

The real tip here goes beyond just the changes at Infoseek. The Web is a dynamic, constantly changing environment. If you rush into every fray with light-saber drawn and hack about in an effort to subdue each and every windmill, you will only be chasing your tail. You have to take the slow, methodical approach when reacting to the headline news that bombards you from every direction. The information you get is not necessarily wrong, but the advice you get frequently is. Slow down and figure out what is really going on and tackle the problem using your own intellect. You barely have time to do this stuff once. So do it right the first time.

While you are looking at the META tags anyway, check for the 'Plural Feature'. If you have words listed as singular and plural, when all you do is add an 's' to the word to make it plural, the search engines treat them as the same word. 'Site,Sites' is the same as 'Site,Site' which is 2 repetitions of the word Site. If you have to change the word farther, such as 'Monkey,Monkies' this is treated as two different keywords.

TIME TO TACKLE SITE TRAFFIC REPORTING - PART II

Now that you (hopefully) got up-to-speed last week on how servers keep track of activity on their machine by reading http://www.jimworld.com/traffic1.html we can start fitting that into you world of building traffic on your web site.

This week, let's take a look at the most basic of site activity management tools - the hit counter. I'm not talking about the bogus 'You Are The 102,098,345 person to visit this site since yestaerday.' type of counters that might immediately come to mind. These are of little value and are only used to brag about non-existant traffic to a site. That is why they all offer you the opportunity to start the counter at any number you want.

I'm talking about the newer breed of traffic counters that actually serve to offer the webmaster some useable information.

On the home page of VirtualPROMOTE I have been testing one such counter for the past 60 days. You will see it at the bottom of the page as a graphic that says 'Top 1,000 Web Sites'. If you click on it you are transported to The Hit Box web site developed by Web Side Story (great name).

The purpose of The Hit Box is to gather information about activity on subscribed web sites and show which sites have how much traffic, broken down by several categories of sites. Their service doesn't do a very good job of that. They don't screen the site to see that they are actually in the right category, so lots of people just look for the easiest one to get a high rating in. Hit Box also has no recognizable customer support. They do have various levels of autoresponder customer service reps. You can get an unlimited number of responses to your problem, but all of it is from autoresponders. None of it helps you.

What they do a great job at is keeping track of a whole range of information about the visitors that go to the one page on your site that you put this counter on (you can set up multiple accounts to have counters on multiple pages of your site, but you really don't need it.) After you put the button on your page, it immediately starts keeping track of how many page views have occured, how many were repeat visits, reloads, return visits within an hour and so on. It keeps hourly counts and projects total traffic for the day.

Their projections of traffic and their calculation of average traffic which is used to calculate their rankings of the top 1,000 sites are all buggy and not to be trusted. Their averages appear to be mostly random numbers.

But when it comes to tracking actual traffic to a page, they do a great job. You access the data with a Java applet that displays the data in charts that are beautifully presented and contain very useful information.

Take a trip to their site and click on one of the animated graphs next to a site name. You will see the data that is being gathered. Check out the Impressions Year-To-Date. http://www.hitbox.com/wc/world2.html

I said this is useful, even though it only tracks traffic to one page on the site. In the case of VirtualPROMOTE, I put the counter on the home page (and all of the copies of that page that are structured for the various search engines.) When I first started looking at the results, they weren't very meaningful to me. I knew that there were a lot more visitors to the site than were showing up. As I dug into it, the difference was that over half of the traffic that comes to the site never sees the home page. So while Hit Box might show 500 visits for a given day, I learned to equate that to the actual numbers I was getting from my daily log reports that broke things down a lot better.

So, if you don't have access to server log files, this type of hit counter can be a way for you to start getting a grip on the activity on your site. As you start relying on this level of information you will start wanting to know even more. That's the point at which you will move to a real server with a real ISP. They will offer you information that allows you to really manage your site. Until then, maybe this will help point you in the right direction.

If you already have access to server log reports, you may still find this type of counter to be useful. I have gotten into the habit of checking it a couple of times a day just to see how things are going. I know just about where traffic counts should be each part of the day and if they are too high or too low, it tips me off that something good or bad is going on that day.

Next week, let's talk about what kind of reports you can get from good server log files.

SNIPPETS

There's a new site just coming on-line to help webmasters find advertisers for their sites. It's called Advert Net at http://www.itdirect.com/advert/ and it's free for both web site operators and advertisers. There is the beginning of a webmaster member area that will point to resources around the net. Since they are just getting going, don't expect a lot from the webmaster area yet, but the reason to go there is to find advertisers! And that service is in place, so go list your site.

Personal Home Pages ONLY. The following directories that only list personal pages are good resources for our members that have personal pages, but they are also good for all of us to take a look at. They are generally very well done and prove that it doesn't have to be commercial to be outstanding. Most of us would be proud to have built any of these sites.

Submit your site to Housernet at http://www.housernet.com/ A beautifully constructed site that is doing a good job at drawing attention to personal web sites. Don't list your commercial site.

Sherlock Homes http://www.nitehawk.com/SherlockHomes/ is a searchable directory of personal home pages that is very active.

The Student Center at http://studentcenter.infomall.org/homepages/index.html is a searchable directory of student run home pages only. Everyone should visit to see how nice it looks and feels. They've done a very comfortable feeling job on this one.

Seek Personal Home Pages at http://www.personalseek.com/ is a searchable data base of personal pages only. Another very well done site.

Search Personal Pages at http://people.farfan.com/ is another nice directory of personal pages only. I like their slogan: 'The Little Search Engine That Did'.

BEWARE INTERNET EXPLORER 4.0

I've had so much mail about Internet Explorer 4.0 that I've decided to fly in the face of logic and tell you about it. I know that I will hear from 2 or 3 of the 'MicroSoft Can Do No Evil And What's Wrong With You To Keep Picking On Them When They Mean Only Good For The World' gang.

First comes this message from MJ Rotter at the Redding Cyber Mall
http://www.c-zone.net/mav1054/Classified/CyberMall.htm

"I uploaded and installed the final version of IE4.0. They did a great job with their new browser. Which leads me into the real subject of "this" paragraph. I took on the task of adding a channel (I'm going to asume you know about MS's IE4.0 channels). It took me for ever to figure out how to install a channel for my website. With all that wonderful information and tutorials that Microsoft gives you....NOT! You have to have a masters degree in computers to figure out what it is they want you to do...but that is typical of MS. However, fortunatly for me, one of the fellows that I have helped in the past, came to my rescue http://www.infosprts.com. I have it working now and I love it! When you recover from "typers cramp" buzz on over to my website and check it out, that is if you are using IE4.0. And even if your not using IE4.0, I hope you drop over to my site and give me a good look and give me any input, comments, suggestions, or whatever. Hey, I'll buy ya a cup of coffee, er...um...cyber-coffee that is, would that be java? :-)"

I should probably make friends with the guy at infosprts.com and see if he'll help me get mine up and running. I gave up.

Talking with a friend today, I got some scary comments about IE4.0. My friend's company has a network of about 20 Windows 95 machines and he started installing Internet Explorer 4.0 (the final non-beta release) on their machines. They wound up having to reformat 4 of the hard drives to recover from the registry problems that IE4.0 seems to install along with the browser. I've got enough problems. I don't want to reformat my hard drive and reinstall all on my software.

On the Microsoft Doesn't Play Well With Other Children front, you might want to drop by ZD Net at http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/special/sun.html to read both sides of the issue of Microsoft and Java. Lots of lawsuits and lots versions of the story.

Signing off now. Have a good weekend Bill.

TIPS FROM THE HITMAN - PART XIII

I think I made my point last week about proper business like timely responses to email messages. I noticed we had some other articles in the same issue of the Gazette that touched somewhat on the same subject. Now on to mail management.

The following copy may sound like I hold stock in Qualcomm, the software company that makes Eudora. I wish I did. The simple fact is Eudora just does a better job than any other email software out there. In particular I am talking about Eudora Pro or version 3.0 Many of you out there probably use the absolutely free version of Eudora, Eudora Light. This is a fine email software, and it is better as is than the versions of email software that come with the popular browsers (I may be wrong here, I have not tried the latest version of either Netscape Browser or Microsoft, I still use the 3.0 versions) But, that said, I think the best software for the management of large volumes of email without equal is Eudora Pro. For you holdouts still using something else, I will try to make my argument using some examples of how I use it on a daily basis, and how it helps me sift through hundreds of email and keep it organized. You can get Eudora Pro for about $50 from online software dealers.

First, and this is a biggie to me, there is the spell checker. Some of you out there may be blessed with the ability to type 100 words a minute with near perfect spelling. You are a minority, trust me. I know that proper spelling and the catching of annoying typos is really important to conveying a professional appearance in all correspondence. Since email is the key way most businesses on the Internet communicate with customers, after perhaps the "first impression" that they establish with a good web page, it is essential that you not destroy this first impression with an email message containing typos, and or misspelled words. For me, anyway the spell checker is a lifesaver.

The next BIG advantage in Eudora Pro is the ability to manage multiple email addresses, (several email addresses, such as sales@, info@, service@, webmaster@, or multiple domains) and to create as many individual mail boxes as you need. By this I mean you can create mail boxes to organize various types of emails that you receive, For instance I have separate boxes for each type of service I offer that is submitted by online form, I have separate boxes for the different resellers of my services and for the services I resell for others. That is just a start, I organize newsletters such as Gazette, I-Advertising I-Sales, Link Exchange, etc. etc. into their own boxes or folders (yes, you can create folders within mailboxes too) Now you ask, aren't all these mailboxes confusing? All that transferring of messages one by one as they come in? In a word, FILTERS! Eudora Pro has the ability to filter messages as they come in. What does this mean? Well for a start Eudora Pro will allow you to define exactly how almost any kind of message coming in is handled. For instance you can filter messages into various mail boxes by specifying things like sender, subject, contains, does not contain, appears, does not appear, along with 'and/or' and much, much more. The filter system lets you save incoming messages to mail boxes automatically, send replies to certain messages automatically, forward messages, mark message as read, or assign a high priority to certain message so they won't be overlooked.

The list goes on. I could write an entire series of article just on filters. Oh, and they will do one more thing that may be of interest to many of you. You can download pre-formatted filters from a number of locations that contain current lists of known email spammers. The filter will intercept the messages from these sources, mark them read, and toss them into the Trash Bin without your even needing to look at them at all. They just transfer to trash and wait for the day you empty the trash and send them to email hell. This feature alone will cause many of you to part with fifty bucks!

Next time out, we will get into some of the nifty features for categorizing emails within various boxes and folders to further assist you in prioritizing your mountain of mail so important messages do not just age till you are too embarrassed to even answer them! I will also discuss some of the creative ways of using all the goodies once we have covered all the basics.

Same Gazette time, same Gazette channel!

Hayden Mitchell
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