MarsJupiter Daily News

On a brief humorous note for Saturday, we see our Alexa web site ranking has changed again.

It now shows the site recording an 800% increase in rank over the last 3 months, equivalent to a doubling of traffic each month.

If this trend continues, due to the fantastic power of doubling we will be bigger than Microsoft by this time next year and take over the entire web shortly after!

Of course in reality these figures will being to level off, but they do go to show, what paying a little attention to the way you run your web site can do.

For the last month and it is in the last month that the figures have started to climb, we have started paying attention to Search Engine Optimisation and have made a great number of changes for the better on our web site.

The next month will be even more fascinating for us, as we see what effects occur as the changes start to get indexed by Search Engine Spiders.

Just when we thought we would launch into our new project for which the spidertheweb.com domain has been registered, we get notified that the final patch for Mambo portal has been released and that it is a recommended update for all sites!

So instead of the new project we have spent another day updating the web site, and for good measure we have compiled a comprehensive article on Search Engine Optimisation for Mambo portals.

We think this is very useful reading for Mambo Webmasters.

So it looks like we will start the spidertheweb.com project from Monday, which is frequently not a bad thing with software projects.

Another busy day at the web site face and another major transformation for the web site.

We have implemented SEF advance for Mambo Portal Which may sound a bit of a mouthful, but has the extraordinary effect of making all the links on a mambo driven web site come out in plain english.

This makes our site much better to navigate and rumour has it, does wonders for search engine ratings.

It has however left our periodic regression test of all the Search Engines used in our Foboz Meta Search Engine running a little behind schedule.

When we do this test there are always a few engines that have gone a little awry due to format changes etc. This time round is no different, but to put things in proportion it looks like only about 2-3% of the engines may need attention, which is not exactly critical, especially as even with those engines with issues, Foboz may still manage to get the top results.

Daily report for Wednesday 25th February.

Just a couple of days ago we mentioned in passing that a webmasters work was never done, but we seemed to have got to a landmark point in our web site development. This was of course asking for trouble and we almost immediately found out a few more pointers on how to make the site more attractive to search engines. One method is documented here and as we progress the other, we will post more on the method involved.

We also registered a new domain today "www.spidertheweb.com" as the name would suggest it is a placeholder for a new product we plan to develop that will spider web sites with the aim of reporting on them. The product will report broken links plus over time a whole lot more.

Now we know there are similar products out there already, but several things make a product of our own appealing.

• Some of the products we have used are clumsy


• Some are broken in some fundermental ways


• We want to establish more of a presence on the web site front


• With both the Foboz - Meta Search Engine and the Callisto - Newsreader/Bulletin Board browser, we already have a sound basis for this sort of program.

Tuesday February 24th - Daily Blat

The Foboz - Meta Search Engine now has 350 search engines.

Today's increase being down to us filling out the software search category to contain 10 popular shareware site search engines. This makes Foboz the best way to search for software that we have seen.

It has to be said though, that is has taken us rather longer to make the leap from 300, to 350 search engines, than it did from 200 to 300! Part of this is simply a matter of priorities, we think that Foboz already has the best selection of search engines and adding more is not quite as important as when we started out. But it is also getting increasingly hard to find engines that meet the search engine selection criteria.

We don't believe for a moment that the sites we want are not out there, but that the backwaters of the web are not easy to navigate. Ultimately we think that Foboz will be a good weapon in the fight against this growing trend that we see on the web that leaves many sites invisible, but meanwhile we are also trapped by the tendency of the major search engines to miss out good resources in favour of a flood of the banal.

Consider the statsistic that 85% of web traffic is driven by search engines and people using search engines do not look beyond a page or two of results. Now consider a web search on current events! In the case of a major search engine, how many different sites would be returned?

In the Foboz Meta Search Engine we have 56 news and current events search engines. This means our results from Foboz would be infinitely richer in variety.

A webmasters work is never done. web sites must continue to evolve or they will wither and die.

However there are points at which you can at least say you have reached a marker point, and in our case the new look of MarsJupiter which began exactly one month ago has reached such a point.

We think we look a lot better, and equally importand we think we have gone a long way down the road of making sure the site is visible to search engines.

On the subject of search engines and search engine optimisation SEO, we have added another article:

Just how important are search engines anyway?

To our increasingly important resources section.

The main news of the day though is for shareware authors. We have radically upgraded our free list of shareware submission sites The list is now ordered by the ranking the site receives from Alexa.

The importance of this cannot be overstated, it means you can prioritise your submissions against an unbiased reference as to just how significant a shareware site is. Other ways of estimating the importance of sites, such as how well they work, how many listings they have, or how good they look. Have all in our experince proved pretty meaningless.

We continue our series of articles on Search
Engine Optimisation. If you are a webmaster or shareware author, we think
the articles are well worth a look.

We are combining our own insights, with research into all we can find out on
the subject.

Our own product the Foboz -
Meta Search Engine started us out on this learning curve, combined with
the realisation that we had been suffering from our own lack of attention to
this important issue on our own web site.

On the subject of Foboz we have added more search engines to
the "science" search category, giving a total of 24 search engines dedicated to
finding science related information.  This is a classic case of where
categorised searching makes sense. To paraphrase one of our users:

"try typing 'dolly' into a general web search. It won't be 'dolly
the cloned sheep' that comes to the fore!"

 

In todays Blat we range from cooking dinner to cooking up web sites.

For cooking dinner or indeed any meal at all we refer you to the recipe search category of the Foboz Meta Search Engine where we have 17 of the best recipe sites available for you to search for that perfect meal. These range from the very indulgent EatDangerously to the Atkins diet site, which some to think of it at least in some peoples opinion may be much the same thing!

For cooking up web sites, the beginner could do a lot worse than start off by
looking in our resource section at web
portals. These days it is more important to know about Content Management
Systems than it is to know about html.

We had a blast from the past today, with an ex - Alex employee getting in contact with the urge to "bat and rat". Even
today this programming language had an adherance amongst the few who know of it,
and indeed for numerous little projects it is a language that is still hard to
beat, as well as being a language that can be picked up in minutes by anyone
with some programming experience.

We are planning a product that will be source code based, so that users can
fully configure its operation, and we will be writing it in Alex.  It is
the language that is best for the job, and one of the few that can work cross
platform on windows and unix systems.