NikkaBokka

Web Traffic Generation

2007-06-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

Working on my recent project I came across the need to experiment with generating traffic to my site. The rationale behind the experiment was to determine whether traffic was a factor considered by various search engines when assigning rank. There are many articles on the web which purport to the fact that traffic to a site is the most important factor, but the ideas presented are often flawed as search engines (the mainstream) often publicise relevancy being the determining factor. Of course we would also have to take into account links mainly incoming but that’s a topic of a later article. Let’s focus on traffic generation by way of a simple analysis.

In all experiments the simple case is always considered from the onset, i.e. we isolate each variables and examine the output or result when a stimulus is applied. In this case we isolate traffic. The objective of the experiment is to measure traffic and also to look at methods of generating traffic.

Step 1. Build your website.

I’m assuming if anyone is reading this article they would already have a site which is live. However if you don’t, help is at hand. You can either design your web site from ‘scratch’ or you can take advantage of templates which are available from the web. I would recommend, www.DigiMisi.com where you can download 2 Gigabytes of templates in various formats: Flash, HTML and Photoshop.

Besides the presentation the content should be concise and focussed on keywords which I again I assume you would have researched.

Make sure your site is compliant to web standards. Visit The W3C Markup Validation Service for more information and validation of your code.

I think I’ll leave search engine optimisation for another article as it may detract from the topic of this article, but do not neglect the importance of a site which has been optimised for your chosen products or keywords.

Step 2. Traffic Generation.

So where do we start with this one? Well, the good old fashioned method would be to advertise in the classifieds of your local newspaper or walk around handing out flyers to the general public. Both methods have been tried and tested for years and produce results depending on when and what you are marketing. Both can be used highly effectively to create hype of an upcoming event, for example how many times have you had the urge to go out to watch a movie which has been either raved about on TV or a magazine later to find out it was the worst movie you had seen? I bet you’re also starting to wonder why I have given the above as examples since the topic is specifically devoted to web traffic generation. The answer is simple; the above is a perfect analogy to make in terms of web marketing for traffic generation. There’s no difference between paper marketing and web marketing, both can be employed to create traffic to your site. The only difference in the methods we use depends on the type and volume of traffic you want to create. Taking the case of presenting flyers to the general public, when presenting a flyer, if worded correctly can instantly leave an impression. In most occasions the flyers I get handed promote clubs and the cost of their drinks which is all fine and well around the clubbing hour but pointless 9am in the morning. Hopefully you’re starting to get the picture. More on traffic generation in the next article.

CSS Hack links

2007-03-04T04:30:00.000-08:00

Web browser compatibility testing is a must. Make sure the page displays as intended on the most popular browsers. However if you discover there are some oddities that manifest themselves when switching from one to another, check these links for further information specific to your concern:

Box Model Hack and feeding different IEs different css
Position is Everything: Explorer Exposed (
Floats, Margins and IE
CSS Bugs and Workarounds
Richinstyle's Bugs
Toward A More Standards Compliant Internet Explorer
CSS-Discuss Group's CSS Hacks
Eric Meyers On CSS - Tricking Browsers and Hiding Styles
QuirksMode- Browser Quirks
No, Internet Explorer did not handle it properly
Internet Explorer 5 Mac: oddities

www.NikkaBokka.com

Translating complex CSS selectors

2007-02-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

Standards are updated on a regular basis but it's difficult to keep track as progress waits for no man, but help is at hand: recently discovered a free online tool which helps with the translation of complex CSS selectors at
http://gallery.theopalgroup.com/selectoracle/

Nice tool to refer to when developing or understanding complex CSS structures.

www.nikkabokka.com

Continuing on the theme of Web Colours/Colors

2007-01-19T06:54:00.000-08:00

Found an excellent site which discusses color schemes and has a list of useful tools for all web designer - worth a visit:

http://www.alvit.de/web-dev/color-tools-mixers-palettes.html

I personally would experiment with colors as much as possible before committing to a design. The presentation is equally important to rank as will be discussed later.

www.nikkabokka.com

Color Scheme Generators Part 1

2007-01-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

Hi,

Today's research is on colour tools for web site design.

The importance of having colours that compliment each other can make a significant difference to the look and feel of your site. There are many tools and hopefully over the next couple of weeks I plan to list the tools I find most useful.

Here's one to get you started:

http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

Excellent application allows the user to experiment with numerous colours which compliment each other.

Stay tuned for further links.

http://www.nikkabokka.com/

Is your site being penalized for low link popularity?

2007-01-11T04:54:00.000-08:00

Link Popularity (the number of web pages that link to a site) has become a critically important factor in driving traffic to a web site. Unfortunately, new sites and sites with low link popularity are at an severe disadvantage and often find it very hard to attract new visitors. Here's why...
Although rarely stated in plain english, search engines do not like and do not trust unpopular web sites!
This sounds extreme, but starts to make sense if you think about it from the search engine's perspective. Search engines evaluate millions of web pages and display them in order of relevancy. In the past, search engines have played a continual cat and mouse game with thousands of webmasters who try to 'trick the engines' or 'beat the system'. Given the rewards of a good ranking, some webmasters would create thousands of computer generated pages hoping to trick the search engines into assigning them a good ranking. These pages would look bad to a human, but would occasionally rank well. This happened more and more, and engines started to fill up with 'junk' listings.
Around this time, search engines started to discover that link popularity was a very effective way to weed out 'junk' pages and a good way to judge a site. Link popularity is very difficult to abuse (a webmaster would have to control tens or hundreds of sites located on different servers). Also, search engines found that judging a site by who links to it is one of the best indications of site quality. After all, not many webmasters make a habit out of linking to bad or less than useful web sites.
Although search engines don't come right out and say they don't like unpopular sites, it's easy to read between the lines...
1. Search engines now discourage manually submitting your site saying that they will find your site by following links on the web.
Google says (in their FAQ) that submitting is not necessary and that "The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly."
Yahoo says (in their FAQ) that "The Yahoo! Search index, which contains several billion web pages, is more than 99% populated through the free crawl process. Yahoo! Search crawls the web every 2-4 weeks and automatically finds new content for indexing."
MSN advises (in their Site Owner Help) to "Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link.".
2. Sites can be delisted from a search engine if enough pages do not link to it.
In their FAQ, Google explains that one of the possible reasons your web pages used to be listed and are now aren't is that.... 'The contents of your page or the links pointing to your page changed significantly and you no longer have a sufficiently high PageRank, or your page had low PageRank to begin with and a small change caused you to be dropped from the Google index.'
3. Once included in a search engine index, sites with higher link popularity are heavily favored
Google says (in their Technology Overview) that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. "
Yahoo suggests (in their FAQ),that you should "Correspond with webmasters and other content providers and build rich linkages between related pages." to improve the ranking of your web site in their search results.
MSN says (in their Site Owner Help section), "The MSN Search ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as page content, the number and quality of sites that link to your pages, and the relevance of your site’s content to keywords."
How many links is enough?
Once site owners realize the importance of link popularity, the first question they ask is usually 'how many links do I need?'. The frustrating answer is.... it depends!
All sites need a basic amount of links as a starting point. These links prevent the search engines from treating a site as an "orphan site" (one which is not linked to) and improve the chances of the search engine finding the site's pages to add to its index.
Some sites only need ten or twenty good incoming links to rank well. Others in highly competitive industries need hundreds or even thousands. The best way to tell is to run a Link Popularity report on your site and on your competitors' sites. If your competition is outranking you and has many more incoming links, you should probably start thinking about increasing your link popularity.
Increasing your link popularity
Luckily, there are several highly effective ways of increasing your link popularity. Proper use of link popularity reports can give you the information you need to evaluate your situation and act accordingly. Better yet, running the right link popularity reports can show you exactly where your competitors are receiving traffic from and provide you with hundreds of handpicked sites interested in linking to your site.

I hope that is of helps.

http://www.nikkabokka.com/

Vertical positioning hack in css

2007-01-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

Hi,

For those who have experienced a vertical postioning issue when using netscape or firefox:

The webpage may look perfect in IE but as you are all aware when it comes to CSS, IE lags behind Firefox and Netscape with regards to compatibility or support. More recently when developing or modifying an existing website which worked perfectly in IE but showed a vertical shift in other browsers, I discovered a simple hack to resolve the concern, insert the following,

within HTML:

,

where the class for "spacer" being defined as,

div.spacer { clear:both; line-height: 0; height: 0; border: none; margin-left: 0; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0;}

The above should eliminate the spaces, but if it doesn't, simply increase or decrease "margin-top" value to suit.

Hopefully that should be help.

www.nikkabokka.com

Saturday

2007-01-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

Another day in sunny glasgow!

Given the web development a break for the weekend.

www.nikkabokka.com

Tools for web developing

2007-01-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

Hey Guys,

Another day indoors. The weather is as usual cold and gloomy.

Decided to design a web site on the theme of Arabic calligraphy and art. The first stop in the design process is likely to be the fonts and the images. Spent hours searching for fonts and images and I've shortlisted a few. If you guys come across a "font" block I would recommend myfonts.com - perfect for browsing.

It's getting dark out there, better get back to work.....

www.nikkabokka.com

An Introduction

2007-01-02T09:04:00.000-08:00

Hi Guys,

My first blog and hopefully not my last!

Another day in rainy Glasgow trying to promote my website www.nikkabokka.com. I've decided to create a blog in order to post my opinions on all web related matters. I guess it's to keep a diary on my thoughts on web development and optimisation.

So i'm inviting everyone to comment and express their thoughts.

www.NikkaBokka.com