I’ve touched on microsites before, but lets go a bit more into the concept. The idea is essentially this, build seperate, small websites that are good for several reasons:

• Being Separate from your mainsite has its advantages. You can be more specific, where you couldnt build a 5 page detailed look at one product easily on your oscommerce you can on a seperate site. Also by being seperate you can highly target your seo more blatently without worrying about jeperdising your main branding. Similarly you can express other thoughts on a topic, for keyword placement and to attract different end users only to lead them to your main site.
• A setup microsite can act as a bridge drawing people to your main site.
• A setup microsite can feed PR to your main site (hosted with a seperate company)
• Quick to set up
• Done correctly it can provide free advertising, free customers to your site, free PR boost for your site and even create a revenue.

Effectively you decide on your main site, 2 sites or small network of sites - your flagship big push project/s and then build a network of smaller, supportive ‘pusher’ microsites to aid the growth of your main site. They are designed to be left alone with little to none maintenance post development (which should only be a day or so) and self sufficient, paying their own way.

Here’s a few steps I would advise you read before proceeding with developing a good microsite network as a base to a main site.

Steps:

1. Get a different host - Hosting accounts are key to making use of microsites. It is probably not nescessary to have a different host for each site - maybe 2 microsites per hosting account in different niches. This is because each different hosting account will have different IP (shared hosting might have a load on one ip.) Different IP’s will help defuse your spread to the search engines. (it will help but I am sure google is not stupid to this!)
2. Get a good keyword relative domain - “candle-wax.com” would fit a candle wax subsite.
3. Go Niche - Choose an absolute niche - go niche and then niche of that niche. The better the niche the more chance your microsite has - if you sell a range of candles, make a microsite about candle wax types.
4. Build around a main site - using the previous example if you ran an online candle shop you could build microsites on: candle wax, bees wax, candle products, candle gallery, homemade candles, original candles, world candle records.
5. Time Manage microsite production - Limit your time on each project - I tend to allow a day every few weeks to building a microsite. Its not always constrained to a day, and doesnt always take a day - but don’t waste years making it stunning, stick to the basics - good original content, good link structure and clean code.
6. 1-15 pages - its only a microsite, start it as a microsite, plan how many pages you are going to have and fill them with good original content.
7. Links - Stealth links work - make it a ‘fake’ online shop that when the person clicks ‘add to cart’ it sends them to your main site, its also a great chance to get some real contextual links to your main site. Use words that are what the pages they are linking too.
8. Monetize - I will explain further down but done well will actually make money as well as helping your main site.

So if you manage the above you should be able to create 1 microsite in a day, 1 effective, targetted, long tail niche micro site in around 8 hours. Then what? Well then you push it - as you would any other site - but provided you have chosen your niche well and seo’d your pages this shouldnt be too hard. Strategic linking of your microsites together can help although you want google to think them as different as possible so use different sources for linkage, dont typically link them all together and try and differentiate them all from each other. Also do not use your main site to help them - this is not benificial. Use the microsites to boost your main site not the other way round!!

Monetizing your microsites should more than cover the costs associated with setting them up, therefor allowing you a free place to advertise, draw customers and further dominate your niche.

First things first stick some pay per click or similar on there - although typically you are trying to get people to your main site - so not over the top otherwise you might loose customers for only a few pennies. Using Matched.co.uk you should be able to make a minimum of £15 per month, unless your site is badly designed and poorly linked too (and you don’t have 5 good pages on it). You give them 5 urls that you will stick links on and they will approve/not approve you and give you a bit of code. Having this ad on your site will then get you £3 a month. Not much but 5 of them and you get £180 a year - that should more than cover hosting and registration fees . You are limited to 5 sites with each account on matched though (each with 5 pages = £75 a month)

Kindly use this link if you are going to use Matched so we can all benefit

Further monetization with amazon affiliates, Commision junction or ebay auctions is all good progress but as the site is so niche you are not likely to get huge returns on the effort. Personally I keep it reasonably simple but I have got a few micro sites running all of the aforementioned.

So try it out - microsites as a base for a larger web project! - If you require further consultation regarding seo powered by creative microsites then let me know

Too many people think seo is the end all of internet business. To what extent should we agree with this idea? should we put google before our customers to get more customers? never if you ask me, but its very easy to fall into the trap of doing things because you are used to them, even if they are not effective or even useful.

SEO is great to learn because essentially its the art of providing a good easy to understand site with good unique content that is of some worth. But its far to easy to get caught in the game. Yes using amazing seo skills can get you millions of viewers but no not hugely easily. The art of seo has exploded in line with online business and now is populated by a fair few million seo practitioners, but how far should we go?

It is possible to get huge amount of traffic, from lots of different places. You can gain better positioning in the serps, get dugg a few hundred times, become facebook fantastic - but the first is the only really stable producer.

Going niche is the obvious choice for those who can - but what if you require the top spot for an insanely competitive keyword/phrase - do you go niche for a few hundred similar phrases or work on that one mass keyword - its a sum up to be made by you.

Ultimately the more competitive the business probably the more time need be devoted to seo and sem techniques. If your in a fairly non competitive market you may only have to provide a good website to your seo dude or company and leave it with them for a few weeks to set up good seo practice, keyword alliteration and then your done. But if your after “cars” it will take a whole lot more to make it up there.

Day in day out you will probably need to provide 5-10+ brand new pages of keyword rich, new, original, appropriate content. Backed up by well designed pages, a long standing domain, customers that chatter endlessly about you elsewhere online and a monsoon of backlinks that could carry donkey.com to the top.

Personally I try to go for a balance - some weeks I will push things more than others, on low budget weeks I might do nothing but create good content or further work on making the current pages more appropriate. To compete with the “cars” serp big boys it probably would take a budget of 60k a year - mainly to pay 3 people to do the work!!!

But in the end does seo mean £££? It takes a lot more than just good seo to get the money in. Remember to make a good site with functional ways to convert clicks to customers and customers to £££. Sometimes its better if we don’t all just follow google around looking for our dish of customers and we just go and get them ourselves!!!!

Clicks are effective viewers, completely targeted and ready to be entertained. You pay google, yahoo or one of the other world dominating company’s to dice up their success and give you a billionth of a billionth of the result.

It almost annoys me that I use google adwords, although with competition as strong as it is you need to use all the tools available to you. Anyway I was not part of the now legendary 1p a click generation - I was online then I was probably just doing something less useful - like command and conquer or writing qbasic. But I am online now, trading and making money. So to get these bums in seats, get people there and looking, snag them into using my sites I use a range of tools - one being pay per click. Pay per click is not by any means my favourite type of advertising. Its effectively well over priced in comparison to the other alternatives, should you know where to look. But for new projects I usually allow a certain amount of play money and some of that gets thrown down the google hole.

But to get the most out of your pay per click, that is spend 6p on a good viewer as a pose to 30p is not actually that hard. First I would recommend diversifying. If your target audience is not essentially british (mine usually are but if yours are not) then you have a vast amount of choice in pay per click sellers.

I would recommend trying a variety of different ppc operators to see which works most effectively for your target audience and keywords. Definitely start with Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing (£60 free coupon if you click this link :D) and Looksmart.

For me Looksmart provides very cheap traffic, although I am not to sure at this point how relevant it is in comparison with more british targeting equivalents. Yahoo IMO is quite expensive but only relatively.

Google Adwords - if your not paying attention will be very expensive - prepare to pay 80p per click in a mass market for open keywords and still only hit 2nd place. However I suggest the following to get much cheaper adwords clicks (works with all ppc):

Long tail your keywords - that’s it - simple you say - well yes actually. By longtailing my keywords I am now paying 2p-8p for 2nd/3rd/4th position, more specific relevant clicks. This works in most markets, but requires some time and a regular adjustment. Essentially you want to create 3 or 4 word lines in adsense - e.g. instead of “used cars” you want to get “2nd hand cars in uk” - Depending on your localisation (or Hyper localisation) you can then intersect your locations to provide you with a huge list of 3/4/5 word keyphrases. These longer keyphrases will be used less often but as a result will be a lot cheaper. Spend the time to set yourself up with huge long tail lists of phrases relative to your target.

Here’s how I recommend going about getting cheaper adwords clicks:

• Get a database or list of your products/locations/keywords/descriptives. I say get a database because its a lot quicker if you do so.
• Create a php (or whatever language) script to write you keyword lists. Aim to have each line use at least 3 words. Phrases like “used cars west london” rather than “used cars”, other good examples would be “second hand cars west london”, “cars for sale west london” etc.
• If you have a good list of locations you may end up with a very long list of variated keywords. This is only good, just don’t create 20mb files - that’s too many.
• Stick them into google and run them in line with your current broader ads e.g. run “used cars *AREA*” as one campaign in google and another campaign with just the keywords “used cars”. The used cars one will likely get as many hits as you could want, but at a much higher cost. The more long winded list will achieve modest numbers but for a 2nd position it will cost you pennys.
• Do this with all your static keywords, ones that don’t change with time.
• Monitor them - Some will work well others will be no shows, but eventually almost every one will probably be typed in, depending on how long tail your going! Adjust the bid prices in as much detail as possible. If you have lists of thousands build this into the php script to output the bid value on the line *bid*.
• Sticking at double the minimum bid of 3p or 4p will usually get you top 3 position in my experience (with long tail adwords.)

There are numerous advantages to this, but depending on how much your spending it could be more cost effective to just use the broad term. Factor in your hourly wage in creating the files.

If you manage some low cost per clicks - Post them in the comments here - what’s the lowest cost per click you can get in google adwords?

I am not one for joining in phenomenons, I like objectively watching and trying to intervene occasionally for profit purposes. Mainly because the big net phenomenons usually mainly profit their originators and don’t do much apart from drain your time and slice your efficiency. Hence I have curbed my enthusiasm (good program) for facebook, counterstrike and msn. (I purposely never joined myspace!) but recently I fell into the Yahoo Answers Hole.

I say hole but it isn’t all bad. By answering questions well and being a good source of correct and helpful information you can help people and get a little credit (putting your url in source of 20 odd answers might provide 10-20 interested clicks and for search engines that ignore nofollow perhaps some serp climbing.) But it does help people which in cosmic karma isn’t bad, just not financially a great producer. While things are quiet though its a positive step.

It is providing yahoo with free content essentially which I don’t sponsor, but with the communication aspect it draws you in. Networking becomes notworking! There’s numerous equivalent sites out there, that really I would recommend you avoid if your of an addictive nature but want to progress in business, however objective attention towards them, as they are part of the modern business climate is essential.

Having said that if you want to add me as a friend heres my profile…lol god damn viral concepts.

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!

Submitting your site to search engines, potential link partners and directories is a good place to start when beginning a new web project. It won’t give you a million hits, but it’ll act as one of 20 or so things you can do to help (excluding creating good good content.)

So as soon as your site is legible (make sure its good enough to be viewed - because submissions will be checked or crawled!) Get on with submitting. You should also bare in mind that as good as it is you shouldn’t spend days on submissions. It will take a long time to get up the list like that. I would recommend the following because it shouldn’t take more than 2 hours.

1. Check site completely - perhaps obvious but you should thoroughly check your site for broken links and in various browsers. An ugly site may put people off and broken links are irritating and unhelpful to your seo efforts.

2. Decide on keywords, titles and description - You will need to decide what your keywords are (150 charectors worth) as well as a short description and a long description (250 char and 400+ char respectively) and a good keyword rich title. These will be used when submitting.

3. Get Roboform - Very important to get this before even starting, the time it will save you is immense (essentially you set some default answers to forms and then at the click of a ‘fill form’ button or even automatically it will fill the form and/or submit it.) It also works with a lot of the programs I am about to suggest because its integrated with browsers.

4. Get Web CEO - Excellent Excellent bit of software - well worth the download. I am not going to go into it too much, is very intuitive, but excellent tool for anyone running a website - seo based!

5. Get IBP & Arelis - Again similar kin to Web CEO but with very good features, would highly recommend - will go into more detail below.

 6. Create a special Email address - Under the domain you want to submit, or elsewhere - create a new email address to the one you usually use (for 2 reasons:) 1. it will keep your normal email from potential spammers, as the email you use for submitting might end up online. 2. it will keep the process concise - all the emails relating to submissions will go to this other inbox and therefore processing them will be easier.

7. Set up your programs - Once you have the above programs installed, and perhaps some other directory submitters and such (submit helper is also good) learn to use the programs a bit - you will need to set defaults in all of the programs: in roboform set up default login, email, username etc. information and test it works on a form, in webceo and ibp&arelis set up your websites with descriptions, keywords, titles and your email and contact details. Remember to use your newly created email to keep it separate!

8. AutoSubmit - Open Web CEO and under ‘promote your site’ click ’submit URLs’. Select the project you created for your new site, or make a new one for it. If you havent yet then enter your details, including the email address you set up (do this under the ‘general information’ and ‘page details’ tabs in setup tab.) Then skip to auto submission tab at the top. Select all the engines from the list (click ‘list of engines’  - 120 on my list) and then click ’submission’ tab and click ’submit’ - leave this too work - it will submit your site to as many as possible and give you an audible message when its done. Also do the similar process to this in IBP & Arelis  (Search engine submitter.)

9. Manual/Semi Auto Submit - Open up Web CEO / IBP & Arelis / Submit helper and go to the ‘manual’ or ’semi-automatic’ submit areas.  The basic process is to go through a list on the left, click the website address and it will take you to the submit page - select the ones which you remember - because these will probably be the bigger directory’s/engines. If not then go through the lists, although the list might be huge! This is where your roboform helps - once you open the submit page right click and you should see ‘fill form’ on the list - like with your other browsers - this will 90% automate your submission bar the clicking. Submit helper does a similar process. This will provide you with as many directory entries as the auto submitter does - if not more - but is time consuming.

10. Check your email - A lot of the submissions - especially about 15 of the search engines Web CEO submits too including anoox etc require you to click a link in their email to complete submission, so check the new email you made and go through them clicking the links. Some of the engines require you to re-enter your email address - this will sign you up to their mailing list but will get you on the engine.

Hopefully these 10 steps will help you get a little more web presence! - although probably not necessary for more established sites it can be a good place to start if your site is brand new. After that go and write some damn good content and build some good web relations!!!

(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….

*note this is a work in progress*

In my line of work its very easy to get swept away by it all, Essentially a never ending task, Search Engine Optimising and Search Engine Marketing & Promotion occupy such a huge arena that is the internet that it would not be difficult to spend every waking hour perfecting your web presence. The abundance of opportunity, through sheer quantities of human communication on such an easy low key level can be a mind blowing, viral, all encompassing thing.

Essentially still in its pre-pubescent stage the internet is still an unknown, people still see it as they did gold digging in the america’s only times 10, and then 10 and then 10,000 - in fact give every human, even children access to another single persons voice, ideas and business concepts, give them easy payments from their banks that they can easily access and that’s where we are at. Gold Digging times 50 million.

All viral concepts by nature, usually are flash in the pan, partly due to the fact that they are usually sponsored by people with short attention spans enough to ditch their last viral addiction in replacement for the new one. Its then a constant battle to retain their interest. Facebook is a prime example - people loved it, it spread and now I have no doubt they are realising a lull in attention, even with their introduction of ‘eye-catching’ yet thoroughly annoying applications. While we all have our opinions you cannot deny facebook made money, essentially it dug a good size net nugget.

Hence everyone is jumping on the viral bandwagon - we are a few years behind but everyone is chasing their ‘facebook-nugget’. SEO is the good spade to this process, a good basis to ignite the viral flame. I should note that as I discuss SEO I look at it more from a business owners standpoint than a SEO company’s. Primarily because this is my day to day role but also because Business is what makes me tick.

The overall point I am trying to make is that SEO is as much a foundation as any aspect of business, as important as headed paper and a major factor in any online service. There are deviations from this such as established brands moving online, but for all relatively young companies and especially internet start up companies, SEO can be your foot in the door.

Essentially SEO/SEM/SEP (Optimising, Marketing and Promotion) is marketing. Its the same as writing a good advert for the paper or script for your radio advert. It is a core constituent of any online start up, but more than that it has deeper more principle based positives. The things you, as a start up entrepreneur, a leader and a manager should be aware of are simply replicated in the modern format of SEO/M/P.

If you consider the principles of good SEO, 1. Optimise your website (good for users, good for search engines, good for business.), 2. Promote your business (get backlinks, create site relationships, gain a userbase), 3. Maintain (continue to seek backlinks but less, create relevant interesting content, optimise content, promote content, gain more users, repeat.)

Although very broken down these 3 points are easy to understand, they apply without contest as SEO/M/P skills. But further than that they are the key points of marketing in general. Search engine optimising, marketing and promoting is amazingly easy to get caught up in, and in my opinion rightly so - it is the new age of marketing, the modern way to get in peoples faces. But the concepts scale back to every type of business almost without fault (I was going to say not coal mining but even that!) If you look at the actual things you are doing in your SEO/M/P campaigns - I almost guarantee they will translate to real world actions, and depending on your company this can be a great tool.

Explaining how you want your new marketing manager to work can be a pain, but look at it in terms of your SEO campaign.

Replicate the scenario of your online actions, replacing users with customers, website with shop/premises/service/business as a whole. Good business needs good foundations:

• Optimise your business - cut the crap out, bad employee attitudes, difficult to understand literature, badly situated premises - all similar evils to browser compatibility problems, broken links and complicated navigational menu’s.
• Promote your business - once optimised you can proceed with a sure footing, give good customer service, chase sales leads, meet and greet suppliers, chat to customers, get out on the street and promote - exactly the same concepts as getting backlinks online (same as referring customers), creating relationships with other business’s (B2B) and targeted paid advertising.
• Maintain your business - Get in good routines (but be ahead enough to deviate when opportunity arises) - Plan ahead, set up good process’s with good employee’s, with good attitudes - this will free you up to plan for the bigger picture (seperate management and Leadership!!). Real world examples include HR, boundaries and responsibilities. Good people doing what they are good at, in such a way that builds positively upon your base of positives. Comparatively you can continue to build positive experiences for your customers, effectively empowering them into being walking talking backlinks, Keep things fresh - never show a tired or sad face, create a positive interesting experience that remains in a similar style but has a viral interesting element that is effectively the same as your ‘original new content’ online. Advertise, Promote and Market effectively - as this is the maintenance part, monitor what does work and what doesn’t for your company -try new ways without too much risk - keep the ones that work and mercilessly cut things that don’t - the same as your paid ad’s, eshot’s, webinars and what have you - except often more difficult to monitor.

The things we talk about in SEO can become detailed and complex, but the fundamentals remain an offshoot of a positive business psychology that does track back incredibly well from computer to board room. Next time you see a new SEO concept, or come up with a campaign - sit back for a minute and realise - it all applies to the real world optimise, promote and maintain - Search engines by definition are essentially a guide to human approval - get high up the rankings and get paid. Get to the top of the chart’s ten years ago and get paid. Search engine optimising is an offshoot of Real World Optimising and both are essential business skills!

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. 

Mod Re-Write on Apache is a great feature, great for SEO work and great to keep things tidy.

When planning a new website you should think about how search engines will crawl your site and just as importantly how people will.

Never overlook content for some google context.

11 Points to make Mod Re-Write work for your users and google

1. Use directories to guide people - if the book ‘7 Habits of Highly effective people’ is one of your products make this obvious. “ www.bookshop.com/products/self-help-and-personal-growth/books/7-habits/ ” - maybe a bit long winded depending on the size of your operation - but is still better than ” www.bookshop.com/products/books/129/ “.
2. Use it to trick RSS readers - One problem that people don’t realise (not enough testing) is that yes RSS feeds are great and your users will love them, but readers can point blank reject any that do not end in .xml . Keep them happy - add the .xml to the end even if your showing a php file that generates the feed ” www.bookshop.com/rss/new-products.xml “
3. Be careful for loops - Theoritically its possible to create a 1 page php script/.htaccess file that could create an almost infinite loop that google would follow for months before realising it - this problem can occur with bad linking and the use of regular expressions in your .htaccess. If your .htaccess is programmed to send anything after your domain to a php file, nothing will ever be shown as not available - great you might think - but not if bots or people get stuck in the loop!
4. Learn it completly - Mod re-write is hugely under-used in my opinion - there are some great parts of it that can save you a lot of time with file creation and the way everything is processed. Learn it completely and utilise your knowledge to support a good php/asp/html/jadajada site
5. Use real pages too - don’t make your site too perfect - use some real file extensions too e.g. ” www.bookshop.com/about-us.php “. Hiding all pages behind Mod re-writes could waste time that you could spend doing other more important web work - with the one off pages (about us, contact us etc.) don’t bother. ” www.bookshop.com/about-us/ ” looks neater but has no real gain other than its neatness.
6. Combine it with a permalink script for maximum effect - With the right scripting your whole site can automatically create its urls on the fly, once set up you can have flashy keyword packed urls implemented by the adding of information. e.g. adding a new product ‘8th Habit book’ can be done, the url generated from the title so the link to the product is automatically set as ” www.bookshop.com/books/awesome/8th-habit-book/ ” - looks flash - helps pump googlage with keywords. (Note bookmark my homepage if you want a script that incorporates this and a lot more into an SEO CMS like system as I am currently sticking all these little bits I have developed over the years together!)
7. Pay attention to CSS and links - Adding directories that are not there is great in theory - but kills a page if it uses CSS sheets stored elsewhere. CSS gets its position from the url and PHP from the root: for example a file in your domains root directory called ‘example.php‘ could be called to show “ www.bookshop.com/examples/one/ ” but if this page outputted html that linked to a css file in the same directory it would load without a style sheet - because it would be looking for a style sheet in the directory ” examples/one/ ” - note links also wont work because of this principle. I have developed an easy get round for this that allows you to go as many directories deep as you want while maintaining all your links and CSS in the original directory. I will be releasing this within the next fortnight or so as part of a collection of SEO tools. (Bookmark www.criTix.co.uk - it’ll be worth it I promise!)
8. Stroppy Mod re-write - I have occasionally managed to piss mod re-write off, primarily it will just return 500 internal errors if you use short phrases or things like ‘directory’ in mod re-write. Just test the thing - good thing is if it doesn’t work - no pages will probably work - so it’ll be obvious!
9. Don’t overcomplicate your Mod re-write - Even though alot of the above points may indicate complicated or long winded .htaccess files - its best to keep it as efficient as possible (as with most things.) Huge htaccess files can be a burden and difficult to maintain - try to plan and maintain a good mixture of htaccess and inscript dynamics in the most code efficient way - no one likes a slow loader!
10. Actively use Modrewrite - The uses are endless - I have used it to show ‘maintainance’ pages while I work on parts of the site (you can temporarily divert all traffic to a folder to a certain file while you fix errors or such!), redirect badly spelt guesses at urls and consistently use it to hide the types of files I am using. Just remember modrewrite whenever you are planning site development - it will save you time!
11. HTACCESS is your friend - Like all good config files the best bit is you could have 10 files that do different things - that can be switched in an instance. Try one version of your htaccess out for a few months, keep a ‘maintenance’ version on the server and then just switch it when you are performing maintenance ( a quick hint: if you have 2+ .htaccess files on the server name them: .htaccess (the active one), a.htaccess, aa.htaccess etc.) this way they will always appear next to the active htaccess so you can simply rename the files to switch them around! )

This is part of a series of posts I am writing to develop further a concept of site development. I will detail all parts of website development, progression with times - seo age etc. I will also be releasing a bolt on SEO toolkit which will have a load of php,mysql,htaccess etc examples and a little SEO Content Management system that I use on every website I maintain!