Well, as you can see the new site is launched - this was completely unintentional. I was supposed to upgrade Wordpress to 2.3 so that we could enable tags for the new site and have the tag cloud at the top of the page, which you will see manifest itself. Unfortunately, the new version of Wordpress made the old site look all over the place and it seemed like it was going to take me a month of Sundays to fix the mess. So, with so much outstanding to do on this site, and with all the real web boys busy on proper projects, I opted to put the site up as is and try and get it going as soon as I can. So for those of you looking at the site right now, that is the story, the blog posts are still there and as you can see I have been active there this week. The normal selection of articles will be back soon and the rest of the functionality resolved in the next few days also. Maybe we can have a glass of bubbles then; bit premature now!

I think that people completely underestimate the importance of the title tag in their website development and subsequently in search engine optimisation. In some ways the title tag can make or break the success of a site.

Firstly, the title tag is given very high weighting in search engine algorithms (Google included).

Secondly, like the title of a book the title tag tells the user what the page is about - it draws the user in. Looking at two options: “Fletcher Living at Jacks Point, Queenstown” versus “Your next home at Jacks Point, Queenstown”. Which one would you be more likely to pick up and read? Clearly, the second one not only appeals to an emotion (or in other cases has a call to action, e.g. book your hostel online here) it also explains quite clearly what the page is about - finding your next home in Jacks Point.

Getting your book picked up or in the case of the web and search engine results, your web page selected for visiting, is an important point that I think most website publishers/owners overlook. Focus tends to be so driven toward the search results without then taking that extra step and focussing on actually turning those search engine rankings into real customers. The title tag plays an essential role here. In the search results it is the title tag that appears at the top of the result. It is here that a user say staring at a page of results for a search, say, Auckland hostel, has to make a decision on which they are going to click on to get the information they want. If your title reads “cheap Auckland hostel”, “book your Auckland hostel here”, “the best rates on Auckland hostels” “Auckland hostels rated and booked” and so it is going to do one heck of a better job at attracting the user to your site than the page that says “Bobs Backpackers, Auckland, New Zealand”. Notice, I switched in that latter title example to “backpackers” - I did this on purpose; it is essential that you know what search terms users are using to get to your site, or not as the case may be, and match your title tag accordingly. (For more information on selecting keywords read this article).

As a rule of thumb, in most cases stay away from using your company name in your title tag. The example above for Fletcher Living being casein point. Instead try and use your main keywords; and whatever you do don’t stuff your title tag with keywords - what a waste of time and space.

Thirdly, analyse and fine tune your title tags. If the goal of search engine optimisation, internet marketing or even simply having a website is to attract more customers then you should be continually trying to etch a few more visitors from your search results. Rather than becoming obsessed with search results and how can I get a site from position 4 to position 3 in Google for a search term I prefer to focus on how can I increase the number of visitors clicking through to a site relative to the number of searches being made. I believe that this results driven strategy leads to faster results and better overall long term sustainable search engine rankings. Who knows, perhaps Google even puts a weighting on click through rates from search results - they have the quality score on keywords for cost per click campaigns!

One of the most important tools I use in measuring the effectiveness of title tags is Google webmaster tools and the top search queries, under the statistics menu. On this page you see a table of all the top search queries that you site featured in on the left hand side and the top search queries that generated clicks through to your site. I firstly look to see what terms the site is generating alot of search volume for and if there any terms that appear high in that list, but are not generating matching actual visitor numbers. Ongoing, I will rework title tags ever so slightly monitoring both the search volume and the click through rate continually trying to etch out a higher number of visitors to the site. This process should be never ending.

A final note here, and probably the subject of a second related post. Along with the title tag, the meta description is the text that appears beneath your title tag in search results. Once again select this content carefully to attract your customers to your site against the 6 or 7 other sites that appear above the fold around your site in the search results page.

As promised last week this post is an introduction to some of the thinking behind our pre-Christmas launch of the new Adventure Tours beta website. I say it is a beta version as we have really only launched the framework to which so much is going to be introduced including the much awaited travel planner.

The whole idea behind the Adventure Tours website was to simplify the user experience, make it easier for them to find the information they wanted and to understand how tours could be combined to create packages - or purchase prepackaged combos. We also wanted to bring a lot more inspirational photography into the site as it was thought that experience of the trip was poorly conveyed on the last site.

In redesigning the home page probably the most important concept here was to simplify everything. We use a technique called spearfish shopping to highlight the tours that are most popular at a particular time of the year. Adventure Tours runs some quite sophisticated analytics and analysis so they pretty much know what tours should be selling at what time of the year etc and therefore focus these featured information on those products. The “ads” down the right hand side are direct promotions for internal pages and can be used to highlight tours or products that there is a special on at the time or that is selling below par etc.

The flash map that works as a secondary navigation was developed by our friend Davis Hammon at Rising Tiger Media in the US and like everything on the site is in first release. There are plans to continue to develop this map with most, but still simple, information.

The individual product pages are really the key to the success of this first release. The tour highlights at the top of each tour are designed to speed up the decision-making process for the user. It is felt that visitors to the site sort of have a list of things they really want to do on our tour in Australia and that by showing them quickly which tours contain these things we are making it easier for them to make decisions without wading through the itineraries.

The flash draggable map at the bottom of the itinerary is the first launch of the dynamic map which will be the backbone of the Oz Experience website. There is a huge amount of information that is going to be built into this map in the coming weeks, particularly with destination information and hopefully some imagery.

Finally, each individual page is completed with popular packages and add-ons, which are designed to make it easy for customers to understand how they can combined tours or use pre-made packages.

Has the site been successful so far? Well, that’s the best bit - in the first 30 days sales are over 20% above all previous records!! Likewise, the feedback from International travel agents has been very encouraging, for example; “On behalf of the Copenhagen office at MyPlanet, I am writing you because I want to praise you for the new website, I think it is very nice looking and friendly to the eye.”

Launching a new version of your website can be a stressful exercise, particularly when so much of your business comes from direct Internet enquiries. The biggest risk is that you lose those hard earned search rankings and virtually have to start again. I am writing this post as one site I know very well has just recently launched a new version and experienced just that a large fall in their search engine rankings.

The reason I am sure is that they have overlooked one of the most important steps in launching a new site - the art of 301 redirects. 301 redirects are page redirects that tell search engines that URL’s have permanently changed their name and therefore to take the previous information held about this page, including all it’s incoming link value and most important search engine position and permanently transfer this information to the new page names.

301 redirects are a server side redirection, meaning that once a search engine (or user for that matter) comes into the page looking for a previous URL they are redirected to the new URL and simultaneously told to remember that redirect because the change is permanent.

Most websites are hosted on apache web servers and therefore the easiest way to handle a redirect is with regular expressions in the .htaccess file. The

To Move a single page add: Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.domain.com/newurl.html

To Change domain names:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*oldwebsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.net/$1 [R=301,L]

For some reason on our sites we don’t actually use the first command instead preferring to add: RewriteRule ^oldurl\.htm$ /newurl [R=301,L] for individual page redirects as well.

The $ sign means that this is the end of the URL, note the forward slash before the dot in the redirected URL also. In the brackets at the end of the rule the 301 states that this is a permanent redirect, while the L says this is the end of the rule. Note also for a single page redirect that capitals are important. If the URL is in capitals on your previous site then it must be in capitals as well and also note that you clearly need to state whether the old URL is htm or html suffix.

If you are dealing with a huge number of URLs that are to be redirected and they have similar names it is possible to not include the $ sign and simply produce a regular expression that is encompassing of a group of URLs, such as RewriteRule ^/folder/ /newurl [R=301,L]

I hope this helps, as I say, a popular campervan company I know of recently launched their new site only to experience significant falls in their search engine rankings, which can only be attributed to the 301 redirects not being done properly.

Whenever generating an SEO report for any client or a site appraisal I always look at the sites Alexa ranking, both at the time and over time. Over time I use it as a measure of performance.

But, really is there any value in this ranking? After all Alexa rankings are determined by traffic measures for Internet users that have installed the Alexa toolbar in their browser (either Internet Explorer, Mozilla, or Firefox), so isn’t the data completely skewed.

Mat Weir, Xebidy lead developer, believes the data to be completely useless; his argument being that installing the toolbar is more likely in some users than others. For example, he says that You Tube users are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed, whereas Digg.com users are not, giving Digg a much lower traffic volume than it really has.

I had a brief look at some of our mates sites. Comparing Wayward Bus (ranking of 2,322,699), Adventure Tours (834,129) and Oz Experience (974,589) they all have rankings comparative to each other of about where I thought they would be based on our web analytics. Perhaps there is a value in comparing apples with apples. When I compared Base Backpackers (14 hostels across Australia and New Zealand) with The Park (a hostel in National Park, New Zealand - where you say, exactly!) I find that their rankings are 3,292,826 and 2,522,225 respectively - this is very contrary to my web analytics.

Is there any value in the Alexa ranking as a site comparison indicator. I think there is if comparing two sites in exactly the same market with similar Internet users. I think Mat is right though that comparing sites across markets is pointless.

Is there any value in the Alexa rankings as a site performance indicator? For the time being I am going to say yes, but I am going to investigate further. As a trend indicator it provides another measurement, but, at the end of the day, theoretically the ranking is derived as a measure against all Internet traffic (well, a sample of it anyway) and if, say, The Parks ranking goes worse, but our web stats show our traffic has increased and revenue has increased then surely we are happy; or are we, perhaps it is a fair argument to say that we are under performing relative to the Internet.

It has been 5 weeks since my last post due pretty obviously to the festive (read drunken) season. We are also waiting on a new design for the Xebidy website to come out of the US and while we had hoped to have it live by the 15th January it has been held up - so rather than hold off anymore best I just get straight back into the swing of things as I have so much to say.

It has taken me nearly an hour this morning and go through and moderate all the spam comments that appeared on the site over the break - nearly 300. That does my head in and I think one of Google’s highest priorities this year should be to stop sending it’s ad-sense network to sites that are nothing more than thinly disguised spammers. It does my head in the continual bombardment and when you visit the site you find nothing more than a bunch of Google cost per click ads.

So, we actually finished 2007 on a bit of a mad rush and in all the haste I did not really get time to talk about everything we had going on. For starters we launched a new website for Fletcher Living at Jacks Point. This was not so much a new site for them as we simply took their old site that was developed in flash and developed it purely in HTML on our Bootstrap content management server; which is much better for both search engines and users. Obviously, we will be looking for a dramatic improvement in traffic this year from this site and we have undertaken a year long project to improve this traffic, sales and content on the site.

We also developed the site for Waiata Lodge, a new luxury lodge being developed on Queenstown hill, onto our Bootstrap content management platform. This site was designed by our mates at Fluid and we simply put together the code for them. Hopefully, we will continue to work with them this year on this.

Finally, in the heat of the December rush we launched the beta version of the new Adventure Tours website. This is going to be a great site, but it still in very early days. I will explain some of the features that we have already designed into the site later this week as Bruce Thurlow is as we speak winging his way from Sydney to Queenstown to work with us on this and the new Adventure Tours website.

So, what does 2008 bring for Xebidy. Well, we recently launched a cost per click search marketing campaign for our mates at The Park Travellers Lodge in National Park and we will be working with them all year to develop their site for both traffic and content. Likewise, as I said Fletcher Living at Jacks Point.

The Australian Adventure Tours Group, consisting of Wayward Bus, Adventure Tours and Oz Experience still remain core projects for us with a heap of the promised Web 2.0 functionality to got into Wayward Bus and Adventure Tours in the next month and the new Oz Experience website which I think will be awesome to go live early March.

For our mates Base Backpackers we continue to redevelop their site and have been introducing a new look and feel to some pages slowly. I won’t make too much noise about this yet as we have a long way to go and are working on some pretty exciting stuff which should come to fruition int he coming weeks. Needless to say , congratulations to the team at Base for their three new hostels (2 acquisitions in Brisbane and 1 brand new one in Taupo ) which they sneaked in before Christmas.

Finally early 2008 has Xebidy undertaking a few new projects also, in particular the launch of the Swuzzlebucket Advertising Network which we will make a big song and dance about in the next week or so, Travel Generation in about 6 weeks and the very exciting Breathe project, which we have been quietly (if we can do anything quietly) working on for some time and should see a sprint to the finish in March. There are a few other cool projects and I am looking at a few interesting strategy projects also with some high profile companies - so without letting any more out of the bag. Let the year begin in earnest!!