Face Book

I’ve never been a fan of face book because its too much of a distraction, though its a dam great tool for capturing eye balls for advertising. I might do a social networking platform one day. Its something I have thought about before but have never had the time for such a massive project, besides I need to update my programming skills first to even attempt such a technically challenging project.

Anyway, I have succumb to commerical pressures and now have a Face Book page. Whilst logged into FaceBook to view my profile, Click Here

whose your target market?

Before we get in to the hard stuff, you first need to consider what sort of market you are aiming to target with your site. Its better to build a dating site that specifically targets a group or range of people with similar interests than just doing a generic dating site that appeals to everyone. There are already too many large generic dating sites with multi-million pound budgets that any new site cannot even hope to compete with.

One method I use for creating a niche is that I write 5 lists of words; Location, Gender, Age, Status and Activity Related. An example of a very short list might be:

Location (Geo): UK, England, English, US, Americans, American, States, Florida, France, French, Germany, German, Russia, Russian.

Gender Related: male, man, chap, guy, bloke, Women, woman, girl, lady,
Age Related: Teen, adult, pensioner, youth, mature, old, young, virgin, 30somethings
Status Related: Single, married, available, separated, looking, friendship

Activity Related: Drinking, Dance, theatre, eating out, clubs, music, concerts, films, staying in, horse riding, football, pop music, computer games, quiet pubs

From this group you might consider targeting “young sing male concert” goers looking for girls that are into the same thing. Or 30Somthings single again’s looking for friendship wanting to meet for a drink in a quiet pub.

By using lists of words It helps you to discover new markets that perhaps you initially wouldn’t had thought had otherwise. Its a good idea in spending a substantial amount of time at this stage as the subject or niche you choose will have a pivotal role of how your web site will perform for its life time. You want to spend time on this stage, because ideally you want to have a strong brand identity and after a while your site advertises itself through word of mouth or has a loyal affiliate manager following that are promoting your business for you.

For this tutorial I’m going to use the niche of “single 30Somethings looking for other club goers from the UK”. At this stage you may want to consider whether you want to target a particular gender (I don’t) and you’ll notice I’ve decided to specifically target a particular country. In practise this could be a little too much niche like, where as in the real world of on-line trading it would make more sense to open the side up to a slightly wider audience.

<strong>Interpreting Google Results</strong>

You may think you know how to search Google, having done so for years. When you are looking for a brand name or an idea you have to learn to interpret the results in a slightly different way. Its not just about what results you can see, but also those they are not present. After all, you are looking to fill a gap in the market and not to duplicate another site exactly, since you will fail in your aspirations of having a successful dating site.

Go to Google Search and now search for the keywords of “single 30 club uk dating” (excluding the quotes).

<a href=”http://www.sinsearch.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/googleserps1.jpg”><img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-383″ title=”googleserps” src=”http://www.sinsearch.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/googleserps1.jpg” alt=”" width=”500″ height=”284″ /></a>

The search results includes mainly two types of web sites; existing dating sites and club/music orientated sites. This is perfect because you have the opportunity of promoting the site to two core audiences and a multitude of secondary audiences related to Music and club culture.

Another important thing you should be looking for is to see if the keywords you have used returns search results that includes advertising from the same or related industry. You can see from this results page it features an advert from match.com at the top of the page, plus also a screen full of ads down the right hand side. This should tell you something! It tells you that many dating sites consider this collection of terms to valuable to pay for advertising for.

If you read any on-line marketing book about using Adwords to promote your site, they always suggest trying to find the golden egg – ie, a popular group of keywords that no one else has thought of and use them in your Adwords campaign since the pay per click unit price will be very small. This is fine for Adwords, but in reality if you decided to base your site using the keywords of “uk dating” then you have a very small chance of getting your site to number one before you retire in 20 years time.

To be successful you need to pick a group of keywords that sit in between those that are the most popular and those that are the least popular as seen my Adword advertisers as this gives you a fair indication of how successful your web site may be in the future.

The number of search results that has been returned during your analysis is something that you should look closely at. If there’s to many then its a good indicator that the search criteria needs to be narrowed and therefore you perhaps you need to tighten your niche. If on the other hand hardly any results are being returned then its a fair indication that its not going to be popular enough and therefore not draw the sort of interest you are hoping for.

In the example above, Google is returning 299,000 results which would make it pretty easy to make it to number one without much effort. You can quite easily just create a web site, link it from a couple of locations and be number one in Google within weeks. When I am looking at creating a new niche I am generally looking for a wider audience of around 1.5 million results in the search results page. Though it should be said that I would also use “single 30 club uk dating” as well and create content that specifically targets that particular set of keywords to ensure as wider spread of traffic as possible.

If you particular search returns in excess of 10 million results then you certainly need to narrow your niche to something that gives a smaller number of results. At this point you could chose to narrow it by selecting to target your site to a particular genre of music that is played at certain clubs where the 30 somethings hang out.

RSS Feed Submission

Many bloggers including myself find it quite tedious as every time we do an update we have to go through the process of manually telling all the feeds and directories about the new content. It is a very repetitive task and since I have an injury, excessive keyboard work would put me in a lot of pain for several weeks, and you can imagine it’s something I try to avoid. Word press automatically sends out a ping to a list of directories whenever an update is done, however blogger appears not to do the same and so I have taken it upon myself to look for an alternate solution.

I am not a big supporter of automated submission software as you don’t really know if a submission was successfully done or not. Also, many blog directories will block automated submissions and won’t necessarily be reported by the software that you have just purchased. Another good reason for not using automation software is that it is overpriced for what he actually does. Of course, there are people willing to pay the price as they are looking for ease of use rather than peace of mind. I am look for a tool that would make my life easier but at the same time to know that when I pressed a button to submit my feed, I can see it was successively done.

Today I installed a new piece of software that is very simple to use and doesn’t do this submission as such. What it does is to store the values of form boxes and then when you go to the various web submission pages, it pre-fills the forms so that you only have to do press the okay button to send the information to the server. This means you get to see whether the submission was successful or not. Unlike with automated software you get peace of mind by doing it yourself, without all the repetitive strain injury of excessive typing.

You can configure the program to add your own feeds, meaning that you do not have to rely on the author to update the database of engines. Simply speaking, you just set a profile up that contains information about your feed and then visit each web site listed in the right-hand panel and the software automatically pre-fills any registration or submission pages and then you click okay. That is all there is to it. It is very easy indeed.

The software itself is very cheap at a mere $30 which in real money is less than 15 UK pounds. I prefer paying this tiny amount can pay it to the $250 plus that is being charged for many of these auto submission applications. For more information about rss planter visiting their website by clicking here

Cat Cam – Feline Photography

Cat Cam is a brilliant idea. Take a mini-digital camera, connect it to a timer controller, stuff it into a plastic wildlife proof case and strap to a cat. Then send the cat out on its journey whilst the Camera takes pictures of where your cat has been and what its been up to. Then when the beast returns, you take camera off your cat and upload the pictures from its memory card to your PC.

I must point out you should use an appropriate collar so it doesn’t strangle itself if he/she catches the camera on something like a fence. Badly fitted collar or straps can be lethal.

I would had liked to see a smaller camera and so its not so bulky for the cats. Perhaps a device like this could include GPS at some point and so when you lose your cat, you could track it down without all that embarrassing asking complete strangers if they have seen this “black cat” and it looks like every other black cat. I know from personal experience how heart wrenching losing a pet can be.

The Cat Cam is in its early days, but I will be watching its development with interest. I see sidelines, like toddler Cam and of course slave cam, the ultimate in personal control.  lol

Strange SEO Phone Call

I had an odd phone call from Leicester, UK. The guy on the end had an extremely strong Indian accent and I found it difficult to understand him. He was saying that he had seen me on a certain web site and he was looking for someone to do his e-marketing. He did know a fair bit with what he was talking about, though I did get a feeling he was still rather pumping me for information on terms of how to increase his organic searches.

Search engines fascinate me, Google fascinates me since its not just a search engine in terms its not just about keywords, but its programming as a phonetical aspect to it. Have you noticed if you type a mis-spelt word into Google or a word that sounds like another one and it returns a different word in the “did you mean” link. The challenge of coding for what something sounds like is a highly complex task.

If Google uses phonetics then I wonder what would happen if during the optimisation stage you used not only primary keywords but also phonetics and commonly mis-spelt words related to your content? I never tried it, though its possible that using voice recognition to write everything, I may unintentionally end up testing this one day!

I found out the guy with an extremely strong Indian ascent appears to work for a company with a .net domain name that could easily be confused with another company with a dot com. It looks like the site has been coded to standards expected by search engines in terms there has been use of appropriate header and name tags. Specifically, the document content, Alt, title and meta tags are confused and are full of stop words.

The pages titles are very badly written and I’m not surprised {company name} is having difficulties. The first keyword used in a meta tag is very important indeed and under no circumstances should it ever be your brand name, unless you are such a massive name that you already have very good brand recognition. (ie people already know you). If people don’t know you, then its highly unlikely they’ll be searching by your brand name. Using the brand name in position 1 of the meta doesn’t help to establish a new brand, on the contrary it just makes your site harder to find.

When choosing keywords for a web site; what you are actually looking for aren’t words you WANT to associate your site, but words or phrases that are already being used that can be related to your pages. This often means by slightly rewriting content in order to have the correct ratio of keywords between the title, meta and text. If you have a too high ratio of keywords then your site will be penalised as being a possible spam-dexer. If on the other hand this ratio is too low then you may well be missing out on possible revenue making opportunities. The trick is getting that balance and I won’t pretend its an easy thing to do – Its not.

An over optimised web site is actually just as bad as a site that has been badly prepared for the web and de listing is a regular event. I stay within the guidelines and always work steadily building traffic by using valued content. You cannot short cut the process or fake it. What is the point? Why not just put in a bit of effort to make decent content.

company.net using this as a main company then when someone else owns the .com (a major web host in the states) isn’t a great idea either. Google will always point to the .com first. In my experience, if the dotcom isn’t available and you’re not an organisation then use a different name.

Sometimes, people make the simplest of mistakes when they start their business will have a dramatic negative affect on visitor numbers, making the process of SEO a difficult and expensive one.

Domains on Blogger

I bought a domain name for a blogspot site I have some time ago, thinking it would be a good thing to have. In reality it probably makes very little difference whether you have your own domain or not on blogger.

To associate my domain name with a blogger account, you basically log into your domain registrar account and create a CName Record with the alias of ‘www’ to point to ghs.google.com. This was a problem as in Domain Monster itself it already had in it a A Record with an alias of www that points to an IP address of the holding page. You cannot actually delete this A record and nor create a CName record using the www alias since its already being used.

So, to solve this problem you simply leave the A Record in place and create a sub-domain CName Record which can be used to point to your blog:

1. Log into domain registrar.
2. Click the “Manage DNS” option
3. In the Add Record box, select “CName” from the drop down list.
4. In the Alias box type in the sub-domain you wish to associate with your blog. For example ‘blog‘ and thus when I typed blog.yourdomain.co.uk is used it goes to your blog.
5. In the Address box enter ‘ghs.google.com‘
6. Click the Add Record Button

Now you need to log into your blogspot account and tell Google the sub-domain to use for your blogger. Some say, you need to wait 24 hours, but I found that I didn’t have to wait more than 15 minutes.

1. log into Blogspot and from your dashboard select settings for your blog.
2. Under the publishing tab select Switch to: Custom Domain. Fill the Your Domain field with blog.yourdomain.co.uk and press Save Settings

Wait 10 minutes and your blog will be ready.

Start your own dating

I’m not going into this in massive detail since it falls outside the scope of this article as it a very complicated process of setting up a dating web site.

There are some home truths you need to hear before even considering this route. Firstly that you will not see any profit for at least 5 years or until you have a substantial member database of hundreds of thousands of people. Secondly, you will be investigating all your money into it for years to come with no and little return as you compete with the big boys. Unless, you are targeting a new niche with a ready audience that are willing to pay then I would avoid going down this road. If on the other hand that just wants his/her own web site and are approaching this as a labour of love then you can’t think of this as a business, so expect a negative balance sheet for along time.

So what do you need to get into this business:

1. A Concept or target market in mind – Even an idea will do.
2. A Domain to use for your business.
3. Hosting for your data web site.
4. Dating Server Software.
5. A Developer to customise your software.
6. A large marketing budget every year and lots of patience.

Meta Tags

You can control what a search engine uses as the title and description by using “META Tags”. The main four that are used are – Title, Description, Keywords and Revisit-after. These contain snippets of information about your site that aid indexing robots when they visit your server.Meta tags are extremely simple to use and implement. All you need to do is paste them in the *HEAD* part of the HTML document (web page). For example:

*META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”webmaster, scripts, revenue,”*
*META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Free Scripts, New Sin”*
*META NAME=”revisit-after” CONTENT=”14 days”*
*META NAME=”title” CONTENT=”Sins Resources”*

Keywords:

The keywords tag is the most important META tag you’ll use when promoting your Web site with search engines. The content in this tag will tell search engines what keywords are relevant to your page. You should select words that people are most likely to use when searching for information that your site contains.

Description:

The Description tag contain a brief description of your site for search engines and indexes. Some engines allow descriptions to contain a mere 25 words whilst others will allow longer descriptions of 65 plus. My personal preference is to use shorter descriptions, though there doesn’t seem to be any harm or benefit whatever length you select to use.

Revisit-after:

If you update your site regularly, adding more pages you can instruct some search engines to revisit your site and index these new additions. Don’t set the revisit value too low as it will be ignored by robots completely.

Title:

Title tags do pretty much the same job as a normal document title. The Title Tag is still used by some search engines. I always include it for completeness, even though its not entirely necessary. There is a description tag that contain a summary of the page or what its about. This information will be used by search engines that ignore meta tags.

Following these simple guidelines will increase your sites chances of being found by your target audience.

Out of Gurantee Expiry Chip

I’ve often thought that there was some sort of chip installed inside electrical equipment that would cause them to start failing once the guarantee has expired. True to form my PC has just expired and the graphics card fan bearings are seriously screwed up. To come to this conclusion I did first try to blow out the system with compressed air purchased from PC World today. My Dad thinks it is really funny that a can of air is a tenner a shot. I suppose it is really. I’ve seen air for sale from mountain tops on e-bay, though I don’t think polluted city air with a faint smell of chips wafting over from the take away down the road is not going to be so much of an attractive option.

I have my PC on the desk with its side panel off as the air circulation is enough to cool the system so that the graphics card fan does not to spin and therefore make so much noise. The noise of the thing is incredible, almost as noisy as my old Linux box whose called “wardrobe” for no reason other than its the item of furniture immediately seen to my left. Wardrobe is an old girl dating way back and still going strong. Virtually every piece of wardrobe other than the motherboard has been replaced mind you so I guess technically most of her is not really that old after all. Hmmm..

Its most likely that eventually I will have to buy another graphics card for Dell, but I’m not in any rush for that as I’m not a game player that needs a really flash card. I’m not buying yet mainly because I know there’s a dodgy batch of nvidia cards out there and I don’t want one of them. I don’t want to buy an ATI one because this often means many flavours of Linux will not work properly incase in the future I decide I want to put Ubuntu or similar on Dell. I like to buy cards with future upgradability in mind rather than buying something that will just work for windows based operating systems alone – That will be crap forward planning I think!

Automatic Blog Pinging

Its been a while since I set up a new blog and being a lazy person I don’t like visiting every single site to register my site each server. In this situation its often nice to use a pinging service. When you ping a server, you are saying hello and I’ve got some new content for you to index. This is pretty much the same deal as registering with a search engine, except with directories you only have to tell them about your site the once. Where as with pinging the idea is to provide a means of telling servers about your site or blog every time you have added some new content.

I myself sometimes individually ping services to make sure they have worked properly and other times I am just lazy like everyone else! Using an automated service does have its negatives as you never can be completely if the ping was received without problems. There’s nothing like doing this yourself, rather than relying on a third party application.

Even so, I don’t have time to visit all the pinging sites every time I change something on one of my blogs. So I tend to make use of the services below:

• Pingomatic
• Blogflux Pinger
• King Ping