There has always been plenty of debate about the importance of choosing an appropriate tld (top level domain, like .com, .ie, .co.uk etc), and choosing a hosting service based in your main target market.

Until recently the common wisdom was that, if you wanted to rank well in a specific local search engine index, like for example google.co.uk, your best bet would be to have a server based in the u.k, and a .co.uk tld.

It runs against the logic of the web though, as many companies wish to have a .com tld as it is still the most popular and open of tld’s (many tld’s cost a lot, and require a large amount of bureaucracy to prove your entitlement to use them), and many companies operate in a number of different markets. Also choosing a host in your market country might not be economically advisable (for example, a number of years ago many web-site owners in places like Australia chose to host their sites in the States because of the considerable savings available due to competition).

Google has a great track record for focussing on useful results for visitors, so it’s no surprise that they’ve been making efforts to clean up the geo-targetting issue. Matt Cutts discussed it at some length on his site, explaining why increasingly .com results are being returned in local indexes like google.co.uk.

So, one of the big questions of the moment is ‘how do i get my site included in the local index?’ – or to put it another way, using google.co.uk as the example index, ‘how do I get my site included in the results from a search where the user has clicked ‘pages from the uk?’

I helped out a site owner last week on this very issue, so can happily report that it isn’t as difficult as you might think. In a forum this particular site owner described his situation – he has a .com site that is performing well in the main search from google.co.uk, but when searching in ‘pages from the uk’ index he was nowhere to be found (and we did a check, searching for some unique text on his site, so it wasn’t – as often is the case – that his site was indexed but not performing well, which is a separate issue).  The solutions posed in the forum included
1) Change to a google.co.uk domain – something which is best to avoid, particularly if your site is already doing well under a .com tld. If you change you’re looking at correctly implementing 301 redirects to avoid losing links and page rank.
2) Change to a host in the UK – switching hosts is one of the most traumatic things a webmaster can go through, and should be avoided if you’ve already found a good value/service host.
3) Change the site from flash, because it’s not seo friendly – this was a bit of a red herring, given that only a small part of the site was built in flash. In any case, while the search engines have always advised using flash only where necessary due to indexing issues, this would be a big change, when the real solution was much simpler.

So? What did we do?
We did what all webmasters should try first, and that’s follow google’s advice. We set the site up in google webmaster tools and, in the site configuration / settings section, we set the geographic target to the uk. A couple of days later the site was appearing in local searches.

Some caveats:
1) Your site should realistically be appropriate to that geographic market – if you’re a Russian spam site and you set your target market as google.co.uk in webmaster tools don’t expect it to work
2) Consider whether you actually want your site to focus specifically on one market. Depending upon what your business is, it may maker more sense to leave things open. The site in this case was a hairdressing salon, so obviously they want to do well in local searches – but if you sell goods online, and your physical location is largely irrelevant, then why bother focussing on local search.

The huge range of useful plug-ins for Wordpress are a contributing factor to its huge popularity both as a blogging platform and as a content management system. The great thing about the plugin system is that – in theory at least – it’s dead simple to setup. You upload the plugin to your plugins directory, then go into the wordpress admin area and activate it. Any special instructions will then appear from the plugin itself.

Of course life isn’t always that simple. A client called early this morning saying that he was having problems installing a new plugin (the mailchimp wordpress plugin- that he was getting a ‘Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.’ message. Working through his problem is hopefully instructive for others, so here’s what we did.

Check the Wordpress error message

Error messages appear for a very good reason. They’ll give you the clue as to what the problem is. So try to activate the plugin, and at the top of your plugins page, when a problem occurs, you’ll get an error message.

In many cases the problem exists because of a limit placed by the server setup on memory allocated to php. In this case you’ll get a ‘Allowed memory size of xxx bytes exhausted while upgrading Wordpress‘. There’s a good discussion on how to fix this very common problem here

That, though wasn’t the problem for this client. Instead he was getting the following error:

‘Warning: main(/public_html/testsite/wp-content/plugins/mailchimp/MCAPI.class.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in/public_html/testsite/wp-content/plugins/mailchimp/mailchimp.php on line 28

This straight away gives us something concrete to work on. In the activation of the plugin the file MCAPI.class.php is called, and if not present will produce the above error.

“But it is there”, an increasingly frustrated client remarked – “after all, I uploaded the latest version of the plugin directly, and even went into the file-manager to check if the file was there!”.

A quick check on the server confirmed my  hunch. The file was there, but was in lowercase – rather than the specified MCAPI.class.php.  In grammatical terms I’m as guilty as the next for my often random capitalisation of terms. This often produces mild irritation from people reading things I’ve written, but rarely causes downright confusion – Web Servers, though, are a different case.

A file in lowercase is not necessarily the same as a file in uppercase – for example, on a unix system you can have both existing in the same folder.  So, the simple solution? A quick rename of the offending file to its correct uppercase format – and bob’s your uncle the mailchimp plugin was fine

The offender? Take a look at your ftp client

This solved the immediate problem, but how had it occured in the first place? After all, Client A. had done everything according to the book – he’d downloaded the latest version of the plugin. He’d checked that it was compatible with the version of wordpress he was running (this is another useful check to do whenever having problems with a plugin), and uploaded it.

A quick look at his ftp program settings revealed the problem. Using the wonderful Total Commander program, he’d missed one tell-tale setting which was causing all the problems:

That little box checked, ‘convert file names to lowercase’ was the problem. So, from now on, it’s unchecked, and all systems are go.

Have you had any other problems installing plugins, for which there was a simple solution? Let us know and we’ll link to them.

Things have been very busy here for the last couple of months, so sorry for the lack of posts. We hope to resume normal posting shortly.

In the meantime, here’s a quick and simple wordpress tip that’s come in handy for us so we thought it would be good to share.

One common problem you can run into, when customising wordpress themes, is the default length of  text returned by the handy template tag the_excerpt . The default, which is set at 55 words (not characters!) is often to big a chunk to fit its required purpose – that of providing a teaser for posts.

What to do? Well, you can add code into the functions.php file to change the default size of the_excerpt site-wide – as detailed here

What, though, if you just want to reduce the excerpt on a specific page – for example on your home page (by default index.php)?

Using the simple php command  substr you can reduce the_excerpt directly in the loop.  You’re going to have to use the get_the_excerpt hook first though, as you can’t run substr directly on the_excerpt template tag.

Let’s take the example of the front page:

The loop starts here: <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> returning template tags like the_title(), the_author(), and the_excerpt() for use within the template.

We’re going to create a variable called $excerpt and assign the contents of get_the_excerpt() to it. So <?php while (have_posts()):the_post();$excerpt=get_the_excerpt();?>

Then, wherever in your template you want to reduce the size of the_excerpt simply replace it with <?php echo substr($excerpt,0,x);?> where x is the number of characters (not words!) that you want to display.  So, to display an excerpt of 50 characters you would have <?php echo substr($excerpt,0,50);?>

Adding a ‘Read More’ link

You should, of course, provide a link to the full post when using the_excerpt or any variation on it. To do that, simply add <a href=”<?php echo the_permalink();?>”>[ read more...]</a> immediately after your excerpt code.

It seems that Googlehas suddenly  subscribed to that famous old adage of Bill Shankly’s – football is not a matter of life or death, it’s more important than that – given that they’ve started pushing Premiership, and Serie-A fixtures to the top of their serps (search engine results pages) for searches using city names that coincide with clubs.

Search for Bologna, and google seems to assume that you're a footie fan

Example, do a search in google.com for Bologna, and you’ll get at the top of the page – with a football icon – the next two fixtures for Serie-A club Bologna FC, provided by UEFA.

Try the same for Blackburn and you’ll get the next two Premiership fixtures for Blackburn Rovers, provided by premierleague.co.uk.

This is an interesting development, and one that may cause a bit of a flurry for those developing and running travel-related sites, where ranking for a particular city name is important, and made just that little bit more difficult by these seemingly parachuted-in results.

Maybe it’s because searches for these two cities statistically tend towards football, but I doubt it – particularly in the case of Bologna which is struggling to remain in Serie A, and can hardly half-fill its stadium for most matches.

It’s hard to argue, I would suggest, that  the #2 and #3 results for ‘Bologna’, wikipedia pages on the city and the sausage respectively,  are less important than upcoming fixtures for Bologna fc – indeed Bologna fc’s actual site ranks a lowly #15 on the serps for the same term.

Interestingly if you do a search for Milan, where the wikipedia page for Berlusconi’s club A.C. Milan is #2 in the overall results, you get no fixtures. Is this because football is less important in Milan? Or because there are two clubs in the city? Or simply because there’s something else triggering the fixtures at the top of the page?

Probably because there’s something else triggering the results, given that a search for Liverpool – a city which has two clubs – gives upcoming fixtures at Liverpool fc only. Will this lead Everton fc fans move over en-masse to Bing as a protest?

And why is it that these results are only coming through – as far as my brief research shows – for Serie A and the Premiership. What about Spoain’s La Liga, and the German  Bundesliga?

All of which is to say that, though we’re  football fans at Boduweb (and support Bologna FC as it happens), maybe it’s best to tweak this new system so that fixtures get returned for searches for the club not the city.

There’s an interesting story brewing on Twitter at the moment, as best-selling author Alice Hoffman has taken to task reviewer Roberta Silman for her review of The Story Sisters, Hoffman’s new novel.

There are countless blogs and twitter profiles talking about Hoffman’s reaction – she tweeted up to 27 times about the review, going so far as to reprint Silman’s email address and phone number, for her readers to join in.

There are plenty who are labelling this as a great example of ‘how not to use twitter’, while Hoffman herself seems delighted to have this direct channel to discuss ’snarky reviewers’ with her readers.

Our view here at boduweb? It’s a great illustration of the power of twitter, and the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It’s also an important lesson on how writers can get involved – for better or worse – in their own promotion.

Ony time and sales figures will tell whether Hoffman has the last laugh in this.

One thing that is essential, though, for any writer promoting themselves on twitter, is to understand the ramifications of using the system. If you post up there – even if you only have a handful of followers – your words may well be taken at face value on thousands of sites.  Remember, the system is disproportionately used by journalists and bloggers ever hungry for new stories to publish. It’s a double-edged sword.

If you’re using Twitter to promote yourself / your band / your novel / your conference etc it’s obvious that you would like to have a large amount of followers. There’s one single thing, more than any other, that puts us off following people on our various twitter accounts, and it’s a simple thing that can be fixed.

First of all, try to think how many people will come across your twitter profile. Theire are a couple of very common ways, and they all work on the same principle – a list.

1) You’ve started following me. Twitter is a great place for information sharing and conversations, so it makes sense in most cases for you to check out the profiles of those following you. If you like what you see, you’ll follow back.

2) I’m following, for example, @three_monkeys who writes about a very particular topic close to my heart. I think therefore that the people @three_monkeys is following are probably worth following, so I click on his ‘following list’

3) My profile is based on a specific area, one well represented by a profile like @bbcbreaking, so I browse to their ‘followers’ list looking for like-minded souls

In all three of these cases, I will browse a list which presents profile pictures and names together. Crucially, when I hover over a profile name I ‘ll get the bio info of that profile. And here’s the tip, then: Make sure you have a bio field filled out for your profile. If you don’t, you’re making it more difficult for people to quickly see what you’re about – and if it ain’t quick and easy, why should they bother with you??

twitter tip - add bio field

Google has just published an interesting research paper which suggests that they have made big advances in the image-recognition software field. At a computer vision and pattern recognition conference in Miami recently, Jay Yagnik, google’s head of vision research claimed that their new system has had an 80% accuracy in identifying untagged images of up to 50,000 famous landmarks.

This is exciting news that will, if and when the system is integrated into google’s search engine (to be clear, the research remains, at the moment, just that – research).

Exciting and challenging, because at the same time that google is increasingly adding both image and video results to their main search pages, the current s.e.o practices for images are almost exclusively text and code based. At the moment if you want your images to appear in the google index you need to focus on giving them appropriate file-names, filling in the alt tags with appropriate keywords, and generally optimising the context and page on which the image appears.

Sophisticated image recognition could potentially change all of that. Imagine a site that has lot’s of images on its pages but none that are actually labelled or set up in terms of the above s.e.o. The images are all simply called image1.jpg, image2.jpg etc and the alt tags are left blank. These images are not completely useless to google and other search engines currently – they can analyse the page context and hazard a guess that the images are of something in particular. The chances, though, of the images ranking well are poor though, and are almost completely in the hands of one’s competitors – if they’ve optimised well, they’ll outrank these images easily. It’s also highly unlikely that google will give prominence to these images on the main results page – as the possibility of them being spam is just too high.

If some computer vision system were able, however, to correctly identify these unlabelled images, then coupled with more general s.e.o. on the page you could start to see them crop up on that all important first page of results – spelling a lot of traffic for some, and perhaps a corresponding drop in traffic for others.

For the moment, though, this is all in the future – and related specifically to landmarks and readily definable visual content. The tip for the top is to make sure you have all your images presented on the page in a search engine friendly way (and in keeping with accessibility). So:

1. Give image files descriptive filenames
2. Make sure that images on your page have their alt tags properly filled in
3. Put images in context – to perform well, make sure they’re not left hanging on their own on your site, but are placed in a proper textual context

Right-leaning British newspaper The Daily Mail found itself with egg on its face on Friday as one of its infamously non-neutral polls was targeted by psychologists on twitter.

The poll which had the decidedly non-neutral question ’should the nhs let gipsies to jump the queue?’, raised the ire of a number of psychologists who as part of their research staunchly defend questionnaire neutrality.

An email and tweet campaign got under way encouraging people to vote yes on the poll, and so it was that right-wing rag saw 96% of the polled answering yes (with traffic that apparently almost crashed the newspaper’s server).

An interesting story in itself, but one with lessons for bands/writers/ businesses trying to promote themselves online. Hold on now! We’re not suggesting you start posting xenophobic poll questions in a tacky bid to increase your hits! No, but this combination of normal polling with email and twitter can be a great and powerful way to boost traffic.

An example: you’re a writer, so you put a poll on your site asking ‘who is the most important novelist of the last 5 years?’. You send out details of the poll to your email list – if you have one. You send it out to your facebook friends, and you post a link on twitter (making sure that the title of the tweet is short and snappy enough to encourage plenty of re-tweets).

We’ve already pointed out one horrendous experience had by a self-publishing author (who paid his publisher over ten-times the going rate to register his preferred domain name, and then found that they had actually registered it to themselves). Browsing about we’ve come across another mistake that authors/novelists using self-publishing companies can make.

They presume that, because their book is published to a high standard, their self-publishing company is the best place to go to when setting up a website for their book.

Any decent self-publishing company has various extra services available for their authors, ranging from business cards through to marketing, and inevitably web design. But are they taking advantage of their client’s inexperience to offer them an over-priced deal?

Let’s take a look at one of the bigger self-publishing site’s web design offer for their authors. They offer 3pages, graphic design, 2 rounds of revision, and html javascript for a whopping $600 . If you want .php or .asp you need to pay an extra $100.

That’s $600 or $700 dollars for a small static website, and one in which the design will probably feature your novel’s dust-jacket heavily, which is something you’ve already paid for elsewhere.

If you want to market your book using a website, you’re going to need a number of things that aren’t included above:

The ability to add content. Sites that regularly add/update material are – for obvious reasons – more attractive to both search engines and visitors. Having three pages online might work o.k if you’re already world famous, but if you’re a struggling author you’ll need to use your website as a tool to gain an audience, and three static pages is not going to do you any favours. You’ll get as much attention that way as you would leaving a single copy of your novel on the upper deck of the bus home – i.e not much.

The ability to integrate with social networks: The above package doesn’t stop you from setting up social networking accounts, but it doesn’t include them or integrate them with your eventual site. Trying to market your book online without using facebook, twitter, myspace etc is like entering the ring with your hands-tied.

Search Engine Optimisation: The description of the services on offer focusses heavily on the visual, but there’s no mention of working with you to ensure that your site is optimised for search engines. The deal offers you a pretty web-site, that will most likely end up hidden under a bushel as no-one will find it. Search Engine Optimisation should be an equally important part of any web design

And that’s all just for starters.

The Bodu Writers standard package offers the following:

• Customised installation of wordpress
  We’ll set up the super-easy-to-use free software WordPress, but customise it to your needs to make it more of a content management system rather than the simple blogging tool it’s usually used for. You’ll be able to add pages and blog posts whenever you like, and as your website grows so will the possibility of reaching out to a new audience for your book.
• Graphic Design
  As a self-published author you’ve already got the main design element paid for – the book cover. We’ll design a site template that shows off your cover to its full advantage. We do a number of sample site designs, getting feedback from the client on each one in order to work out what their tastes are. Based on that feedback we do the final design.
• Search Engine Optimisation
  We know that a happy client is one who can see his/her website performing well in the search engines, and one which is getting visited. With that in mind, we’ll ensure that the design follows the best practice guidelines issued by the major search engines. We’ll also explain to you what you need to do to improve your site’s visibility – remember, the code and structure of any site is important in s.e.o but a huge part of it is also the content created by the website owner (you).
• Social Networking Sites
  We’ll set you up on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, with profiles customised to compliment your main site. We’ll also give you our own tips and guidelines on how to use these social networks to good effect. [We can also set you up on other social networks of your choosing, though this is subject to additional cost to be negotiated.]
• Tech Support for a year
  We design your site for you to be able to manage it on your own, but we won’t leave you stranded. We realise it can take a bit of time, particularly if you’re not technically minded, to get up and running and feel comfortable with your site. We offer free tech support for one year as part of the package.

And the cost? Our websites for authors costs just €200

That’s a whole lot more for a whole lot less!

What about hosting/domain name etc?
These aren’t included in the price, for the simple reason that they are annual recurring costs. We can advise you on where to go, how to register a domain, or set up a hosting account – but the annual cost remains for you to pay. It’s worth pointing out that the self-publishing example provided above has the same conditions regarding hosting and domain registration – so the difference in price between our package and theirs remains the same.

How long does it take to get set up?
Typically we can get you up and running within a week – that includes time to do different draft designs, to consult with you to choose the design which suits you best, and to ensure the site is set up correctly. We’ll then help you over a week or two to get used to the site structure and ensure that you’re comfortable updating it.

Interested? Get in touch with us for a no-obligation discussion about how we can meet your website needs as an author

So the big news in recent weeks has been the presentation of Google Wave, due to be fully launched later in the year. You can check out the presentation here.

As with virtually any new search/social media release, there’s immediate talk of it being a *killer – with twitter being the * in this particular case. It’s also been suggested that this is Google’s shot at robbing some of facebook’s thunder.

Time will tell, but what’s particularly interesting to me is the fact that it’s going to be open source, and the possibilities for integrtation with your website or blog, allowing you to directly apply some principles of social networking to your own website.

Boduweb are already working on an idea for one of our clients – we’ll keep you posted here on the blog about developments. Exciting times ahead!