I have just released the first version (after testing) of my new page tools. Named Pagex, these 2 php include files will provide a quick and easy bolt on solution for page related tasks. It allows you to do the following all from 1 single administration file. Best of all its free under GNU and is absolutely easy to install!

• Control SEO - Control all meta tags, titles and monitor page rank for all your pages from one place!
• Monitor pages - load times, page rank, turn them on and off for maintenace
• Basic in built CMS - Pagex has the in built ability to feed simple repetitive data across many pages (menus, headers etc.)
• Referrers, Referrer Logging - Don’t bother with log files - watch your referrers in real time, with PR rank, search query highlighting + more.
• Free under GNU license
• Runs on Mysql/PHP

Click here to download Pagex / Click here to view more details on Pagex

The following is an excerpt from my Pagex Page: 

Pagex - is a simple, bolt on tool that you can use to monitor your pages, feed them data, turn pages off for maintenance, analyse your referrers, page load times and customise all meta data for each page from one simple menu. All this built into 2 php files and made mind bogglingly easy for everyone from the SEO expert to the beginner web developer!

(well pounds as I am writing from the uk, but you get the idea.) If you had the right data you could log into the CIA network. If you had the right data you could bring down ebay. If you had the right data you could email everyone in the world? But where’s the line - what data constitutes a waste of hard disk space - a pointless entry?

You could quite easily watch every aspect of a users session on your website, in fact I am fairly sure using AJAX you could record every mouse movement when on the site, but to draw the line isn’t easy. I personally stick with google analytics, hit tail and my personal coding. Knowing the percentage of users that have javascript installed is a good example of good data, knowing how many of them are using internet explorer over firefox - also good data, but thier ip irrelevant of use - not so useful.

The conversation about what constitutes worthwhile data is an extremely relevant point, as technically it can make money or loose money. Popular blogs with good content updated often (new, steady datastream) are usually the more successful.

However at this point I look at data specific to the creation of Microsites.

Perhaps a bit early in the runnings I would like to explain a project I instigated last week. The concept of microsites is not a new one, the idea being that you create a site irrelevant to your base site, aimed at a niche or long tail phrase that either acts to increase your linking in the sector or work or to work as a secondary to your web presence.

Anyway If you have the right data you can feed thousands of pages with unique content and hopefully establish a microsite that both provides a modest income in the form of adsense ( or similar ) revenue and provide good linkage too.

So heres the process:

1. Register a hosting account elsewhere to your normal provider - (different class ip is the start of your google hiding tricks)
2. Register a good domain with your keywords in it - e.g. cheap-wheel-nuts.com if you are a wheel nut seller. Obviously they might have all been taken but just try and get your key words in there - use typo’s if very popular topic.
3. Find data - There are lots of ways to get data - depending on your market it might be a bit difficult, but as I have found out alot of industries have industry bodies and other third parties that have legal requirement to provide database data for public use. Another way is potentially to use data protection act to aquire data. - The key is the data hasnt been mass published before. - The more entries the better. The two examples I found with relative ease had 3150 entries and 43000 entries respectively, on each entry there was 5 - 25 fields, plenty to feed pages.
4. Build a site using dreamweaver or something simple. Keep it all simple. Basically make a 1 page template that provides a slot for adsense and linkage to your main site - then maybe 1 header image and a main space for content.
5. Build your content into the pages dynamically, combining clever php and .htaccess mod re-write.
6. Install pagex (a module i am developing - is in alpha), hit tail and google analytics (if you want), google adsense for ad revenue.
7. By using a max of 10 dynamic pages you should have a small battle ready site. - Next use a crawler to make a google sitemap, and using a new google account tell google about the sitemap.
8. Make sure the pages are optimised, use completly long tail titles that are absolutly unique between pages.

I am keeping a bit hush hush about this because I am still testing it. Whether or not the data is suffiently different enough to everything else that google wont disallow it, or what we will see. The data which I have used for my example has 43000 entries, is uk based and is distributed as a legal requirement of the industry. Each line of the 43000 has 20+ fields of data which effectively act as unique information.

Grand total of pages when put together 70000+ pages. Spam you thinking? I don’t agree with Spam in any form, but with this example it isn’t. The information is actually really useful and although its a long way of doing it, it does act as a service. Although a simple search could have been done using only 2 pages, this way does the same but gives me 69998 more unique pages.

In total thats 4 unique pages, 3.5 hours work, roughly £45 in registration/hosting fees but potentially 70000 niche pages, lets just hope google doesnt black list it as spam!

Too be continued….

The idea behind Content Management systems is a sound one. You take all of the skill out of adding and maintaining content. You take the html, database and coding work out of the equation. Essentially you give the writing people the tools to write.

It’s a toss up of efficiency. In my experience 80% of the time its more efficient to plan and install a content management solution, whether its a page that is updated 4 times an hour or 4 times a month - if you can let someone else take care of it because you placed good coding behind it then its saved you time.

There is obviously two facets to this - the web design company and in house design - often if you hire in web design or development people that are not part of the company it wont be as efficient as possible. In all cases you are going to spend more than 3 months developing or £8k+ then employ a self motivating web developer for a half year.

The idea is to take all the coding and spend a little more to get it done right at the beginning - universal good quality coding that lays a basis for good site expansion.

Ideally every single aspect of your site will controllable by at least 2 people in your company. Leave it too one web developer and he will be swamped when he needs to be free, and should he ever get ill or leave problems will arise. So spend the time getting either your web team/web guy to make a good content management system and then TRAIN at least one other too use it, including a username/password system depending on the circumstance.

You can opt for out of the box content management - there are good examples available. Joomla is a popular one - or Wordpress could be used for simple sites. But likelihood is you will need to modify these to better intergrate with whatever it is you are doing, and if only one person understands the modifications the aforementioned problems apply.

So let your coder code and teach your maintainer’s to maintain. Further pushing the boat out, why not let your seo people do SEO? - Oh its complicated - because chances are they will want the control of a coder.

This is basically the reason I began writing ‘Pagex’ - Pagex is a seriously bare bones seo content management system. I have written so many CMS’s from the ground up that I know what I want for any basic site. With universal simplicity intended Pagex consists of 2 files. One php include and one php cms management file. My intentions for it are simple: Let people gain real control of their websites, really easy.

Pagex will work around you, not fouling up your code or taking huge loads on the server. It is a quite hardworking simple content management system.

I will write more about pagex over the next few weeks, it is essentially finished and just needs me to annotate code a bit clearer as well as creating a readme.

Aimed to be a content management system for SEO’s and webmasters alike. Because they are essentially a merging breed.

Centralised control of the following aspects - from one file:

• Page Titles
• Page Meta Description
• Page Meta Keywords
• Site Wide Headers
• Site Wide Footers
• Default titles if not set, Title Prefixs etc.
• Universal Directory’s - will adjust for creating endless imaginary directory’s with mod re-write
• Referrers
• Page Rank of Referrers and Internal Pages
• Load Time monitoring
• Single click disalble any page to the public - with custom maintainace messages, titles and html
• Dynamic Sitemaps
• Input Cleaning - Automatically remove SQL injection etc
• CSS file management, automatic linking
• Basic Visitor statistics - counters etc.
  
• Easy installation site wide of Google Analytics, Hit Tail etc.
• Automatic Keyword Generatio
• 4 CMS Slots - Stick any code anywhere using custom Code ’slots’

I will further delve into my new ‘Bolt on Content/SEO Management’ solution PAGEX within the next few weeks. It will help web developers and SEO operatives alike.

PAGEX - The SEO / Web Development Bolt On CMS. 

Statistics are great, and no format of business is as easy to get detailed relevant statistics as web business. Statistics can help you finesse your site, improve your Return on investment (ROI), plan the site’s future, impress bank managers, friends and investors.

Overuse of statistics however can become addictive - you can find yourself checking ” how many hits today ” every half an hour and waste time that could have been spent bringing more people in. So as a cautionary don’t check them too often!!!

The main online statistic tools I use (to view internal statistics - not external keyword statistics or similar) are Google Analytics and Hit Tail.

Google Analytics - Visually pretty, fairly useful and free - Register through google and then to install simply stick a bit of Javascript on every page (urchin) and let it do its magic. Using a central file for footers allows easy insertion of said code.

• Geopositioning doesnt work particularly well in rural situations in my opinion, seeming to plant the position of the nearest big city rather than more local towns. But is interesting.
• Is useful in combinations with adwords campaigns as it intergrates keywords and campaigns with the statistics to allow you to better finesse your googlemarketing.
• Graphs are pretty and 50% are useful, learn and perfect the conversion goals to fully utilise GA.
• Reports are a nice function, you can set them to run weekly, daily or however often - unfortunately they will only email telling you its been collated with a link - not email reports directly (keeping you coming back.)
• Site overlay is also great if you have enough visitors - it will overlay a bar to show you how often each link on your homepage has been clicked (imposed over your actual homepage.)

But does all this really come for free? Well not really - I am sure there is more to it than offering nice free service for google. I haven’t had a chance to read the terms and conditions fully but I assume they use the data to further thier control of the internet - I personally accept this cost at the price of good easy statistics (the fact they have effectively javascript control over millions of websites is pretty mental.)

Hit-Tail - This functions in a similar way to google, you register and install a little bit of javascript calling code in the very bottom of your pages, but it offers a more simple approach to literally output where people came from. Its a great tool that in real time will provide you with the search phrases people use to get too you.

I would highly recommend hit tail to anyone who does any seo on their site - as well as allowing you to dynamically watch people find your site it also provides suggestions on keywords to target - which as far as I can work out are calculated by spotting the search’s that have brought people to your site but have very little competition on google.

Once you have got a few hundred + people hitting your site a day it will automatically spot the easiest targets for keyword focussing. Typo’s are quite a common as well as random things people type in like phone numbers!I would advise you set this up, once a week checking your suggestions list and picking the best keywords, focus a little seo on them and this will push you up for Used Search Phrases - likely upping your ROI.

Personally I also use a few scripts I have written that log refferer’s into a database that allows me to mess aroun with the data myself later - but these are slightly double bubble if you intend to use the above!