|
Web Tip #15: Use Different Usernames and Passwords Do you have a million usernames and passwords for all your various online and offline accounts? If so, then you're like me. I use variations of username and password themes, but never the same ones across accounts. If you only use one username and password and some unscrupulous netizen figures them out, they could conceivably get into all your accounts, including bank and credit card accounts. So it is not wise to use the same usernames and passwords for all your online accounts. Instead, try using a variation on a theme like I do. That way, every online account has a different username and password, making your online experience a little safer, but you also have a chance of remembering them if the theme always stays the same. Another trick is to use one theme for your online accounts and a completely different one for all of your offline accounts, such as your cell phone, ATM pin number and so forth. That way, you never type in your offline "theme" anywhere on the Net. In the May 2005 issue of The Net Gazette I made another Web security suggestion in Web Tip #7: Try to use the same credit card every time you purchase anything online. And be sure to keep the limit low, so if the number is ever stolen online, the criminals can't spend a lot. Password Protect Your Laptop Have you heard of any of the multitude of recent security breaches because of lost or stolen company laptops? How about this one?:
Or how about these?:
So what can you do? For a start, you should definitely password protect your whole laptop. Here's how you do it: (for PC's only)
Keep in mind that every system may be a little different so the methods for password protecting your system may differ from the above directions. Also, different Microsoft operating systems, such as Windows 98, 2000 or XP, may have different methods too. So if the directions I provided above don't work, take the time to review your operating system Help files to figure this out. Believe me, it's worth it.
Along with blogs, another Web technology that is new and full of promise is RSS. In the last issue of The Net Gazette, we explored the world of business blogs. Refresh your memory on blogs. Also in that issue (Web Tip #13) I recommended that you add new and original content to your site as often as possible, ideally once a day. RSS can help you with the task of adding fresh content. Regularly adding fresh and original content:
All of the above factors translate into revenue. We all know how hard adding original and fresh content is. I often don't have the time to add new content. You have to be original, creative, organized, thoughtful and motivated, and above all, able to write. On any given day, I may have only two or three of those qualities if I'm lucky! So what's a website owner or business owner supposed to do? RSS may be the answer. What Is RSS? Here's the Wikipedia
definition of RSS: RSS feeds are operated by many news web sites, weblogs, schools, and podcasters. "RSS" can stand for any of the following phrases: Really Simple
Syndication (RSS 2.0) Want to see an example of RSS in action? Go to the Oak Web Works, LLC homepage and look at the bottom of the right-hand column under the title 'Latest Tech News'. This is actually two RSS feeds from other websites. Think about this. Our company homepage was very static. It didn't change very much since the services we offer stay basically the same. Why should any visitors come back if every time they browse to the site, the content is exactly the same? They don't have much of a reason. Interestingly, that's the way search engine spiders were programmed to "think" as well. Spiders are programs written for search engines to regularly surf the Web and record what's there. That recording goes into the search engine's databases ready to be accessed by the next searcher. This process is called indexing. For example, Google will send out a spider to your site and index a lot of it, but not always all of it. It determines how often to revisit and index your site by how often you update it. If you update it every day, then it will visit much more often than if you never updated it. Engines also consider the homepage to be the most important page, so it's good to update it even more often than the rest of your site. But if you struggle with adding fresh content, then RSS may be the answer. We didn't write the headlines under 'Latest Tech News' on our homepage, the RSS feed grabbed it from another site who had somebody else write them. Once we set the feed up, we don't have to do anything more, and our homepage has regularly updated content. Ever time those headlines change it updates its feed, which is then updated on any websites displaying that feed. RSS feeds can be more than news headlines. They can be lists of any kind. They can be article or blog subject lines, product releases, or almost any other grouping of changing or growing data. How Do I Set An RSS Feed Up? There are a number of ways in which you can display an RSS feed on your website. You can use Javascript or various other scripting languages. Unfortunately, RSS that uses Javascript is not seen at all by search engines when they come and index your site, so don't use Javascript. Instead, use a script that can be handled by your Web server. Ask your hosting company or IT people what platform your Web server uses and what software or modules are loaded onto the machine. This will determine what scripting language you can use for your RSS. Check if your Web server has PHP capabilities. If so, then there are hundreds of scripts written in PHP that you can use for free that properly displays RSS feeds and recognized by search engines. Even if your Web server is Microsoft-based, the server can still have PHP capability, so you could probably still use a PHP script. There are RSS scripts written in ASP.NET, Perl and more, so you have a wide variety to choose from. For the Oak Web Works, LLC homepage we used an ASP script called RSStoHTML. You can download it and other RSS scripts here. Here is a another Web page that offers many other RSS scripts. Which one would you choose? I don't know. Try a few and see if they run on your server. If one runs on your server properly, and you check this by simply seeing if it displays RSS feeds, then use that one. When you download
the script, look at the code and find where to add an RSS feed URL.
There should be a dummy one in there already, so just replace that
one with the RSS feed you want to use. Here's what a typical RSS
feed URL looks like: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/userland/Technology.xml After we inserted the RSS feed URL into the script, we wanted to display the feed in HTML on our homepage. To do this we added the following bit of code into the spot on our homepage html code where we wanted it to display: <!--#include virtual="RSS2HTML-tech-news-home.asp"--> Where can I find feeds that are relevant to my website's content? First you can try these: You can also do a search for your topic and RSS feeds. For example, search for "RSS feeds and pets', or 'football and RSS feeds', or 'small business news feeds'. Finally, you can go to specific websites that are related to your industry and look for one of the orange RSS symbols like the ones below. Click on that and you'll get a feed URL to enter into your RSS feed script.
Remember, always be sure to include feeds that are relevant to your website's content. Once you get the hang of the concept, RSS can be a lot of fun, and definitely keeps your website fresh and updated, just what search engines like, and more importantly, what people like.
Don't let the title lull you into boredom and make you think this is not for you. Believe me, your website's user statistics and information are as important to the success of your Web presence as numbers and statistics are to the success of a Major League baseball team. Businesses should be continuously looking for ways to become more efficient, save money, and increase revenue. The ones that don't wither away and die. Hello capitalism. By simply checking how your site visitors found your website, and what they did while on your site, you'll discover lots of things to do to improve your visitors' experience and increase your revenue. Think of Web stats as a way for site visitors to communicate with you honestly. The tracks they leave tell you what they were thinking. Finding your particular Web site statistics is relatively easy, but beyond the scope of this article. I have written extensively on this subject before and I recommend that you read the following articles to learn all about how to get your Web stats. See Web
Analytics - Murder by Numbers - Part 1 In this article I am going to explain to you how to glean the useful information from your Web stats and how to use this information to improve your Web presence and revenue. Your Web server produces log files that include all the activity information on your site. These log files, when run through log file reading software such as WebTrends or Google Analytics, turn the information into readable Web statistics that you can learn from. Again, the articles above will explain this to you in great detail. A common feature of website log file reading software is the ability to display how each and every user got to your website at any given time.
The graph above shows a typical Web stats display showing what domains referred this site's visitors over a specified period of time. It's taken from an old Web stats report for the Oak Web Works, LLC website. You'll notice that Google is by far the largest referrer, followed by MSN and then finally Yahoo. Since these are search engines, theses referrals come from human searches. Therefore, the first thing that we can learn by looking at these specific stats is that Google is very important.This means that it may be best to concentrate on what Google wants in your Web pages so you can rank higher in Google. Or it may mean that you need to concentrate on improving your pages for MSN and Yahoo too so that you're not mostly dependent on Google for referrals.
This graph shows what search words were used to find the website. People typed those words into a search engine, saw our website in the search results and clicked. That's how it works. Now we can really start to learn a lot just by looking at this graph. First, we now know that the term 'web design and development' is used by a lot of people to find websites. Second, we now know that the Oak Web Works, LLC website ranks well for that term. We see that people use adjectives in their searches, such as #5 and the use of the word 'inexpensive'. We also see that people use plural versions of words like in #6. But here is an extremely important strategy while reading Web stats: Go to a search engine and type in the exact phrases others have used to find your site. This brings Web stats analysis to another level. This is important because you want to put yourself in the shoes of your site visitors, and this is a great way of doing just that. For example, go to Google now and type in one of the phrases found in the chart above, such as 'inexpensive web design'. (The chart is old so the rankings may have changed a litlle.) As of this writing, that phrase yields 24 million results, and our website ranks eighth. After I conduct the search and find our website, I click on the link since that was exactly how a few people found the site according to the Web stats. I then try to view the page from the point of view of the users who found us using the keyword phrase 'inexpensive web design'. I'll ask myself questions such as "Where are my eyes first drawn?" and "Are there appropriate calls to action?" In this case, the user is probably looking for Web design services that are inexpensive (not a lot of brains needed for that one), so I look for a call to action link that would most likely explain the service, since that's what a user who typed this phrase in would do. There have been eye-tracking studies that have showed that most often users' eyes begin at the top left of a Web page and travel from there to the bottom right, just like reading a book. That's why so many organization's logos are found at the top left of their Web pages. The visitor who typed in 'inexpensive web design' will probably be looking for a link to click on. Is the link for Web Design something that a typical new visitor will find easily while on the Oak Web Works, LLC website? It's towards the top left, so the answer is "yes". If on the other hand, the link was buried, or worse still there was no Web Design link at all, I had better add one in a prominent spot immediately according to the Web stats. I recommend the book The Big Red Fez: How To Make Any Web Site Better by Seth Godin. In it, Godin describes how utterly important it is to offer your site visitors very obvious calls to action. Don't confuse them, make it as simple as possible for them to achieve their goals. If not, they'll click away in seconds. When looking at your Web stats you can learn what the visitors' goals are by what they type in the search engine. Be sure to readjust your website pages to facilitate your users' goals. To take another example, consider the #4 keyword phrase 'java mysql'. What page on the Oak Web Works, LLC website shows up in the search results for this phrase? Whatever page it, it better offer an easy and obvious way for the user to learn about our Java and MySQL services. Otherwise, we're leaving money on the table. The strategy of following in the footsteps of site visitors can and should be used by all site owners and webmasters. See what your user sees. Learn where to concentrate your efforts. If the Web stats tell me that www.aWebSite.com sends a large amount of traffic to my site, then I may consider trying to get links on similar sites to increase referrals. If the Web stats show that people are leaving the site right before the checkout page, then the checkout process, information and look & feel better be analyzed and improved upon so that less people click away and more people buy. As you begin to review your Web stats regularly, you really start to get a feel for your website. You learn how people in your industry such as customers find you and their thought-processes when browsing the Web. If you put yourself in the place of visitors long enough, the elements your Web pages need become painfully obvious. Go ahead and give it a try for a week. I bet you'll find lots of things that need to be changed and refined.
In the next issue of The Net Gazette we're going to look more into blogs, maybe some more into RSS feeds and at some point in the next six months I want to get to Web 2.0. It's very interesting and could seriously help your business. Till next time, Happy Webbing - Jason
To learn more about these subjects or if you have a need for e-marketing, design or programming services, please visit www.oakwebworks.com.
P. S. - If you liked this newsletter, please Forward it to your friends or colleagues To ensure you receive your OakWebWorks.com e-mails, please add jason@oakwebworks.com to your address book. If you have trouble reading this e-mail, you can view it here: http://www.oakwebworks.com/newsletters/feb-issue-06.htm
|
||||||
