• Make sure you include your telephone number, address and postcode, many of your visitors will be using sat nav to find you and a postcode makes that very easy and saves you having to guide them in.
• Use a simple email address; you would not believe how many users create a typo on words like accommodation@yourdomain.com or reservations@yourdomains.com, and if that happens you don’t get the enquiry. Keep it short like stay@yourdomain.com, eat@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com
• Test your email addresses and website contact form regularly to make sure it’s working.
• Get professional photos of your accommodation/business, high quality images will drive more enquiries…it is a guarantee.
• Make a gallery available on your website in small but high quality formats (try and keep image sizes below 300kb)…a great example is at http://www.theperen.com
• Make use of high quality (sometimes free) content providers…most of them just want content so if you write an article about an experience some of your customers had they would be likely to take it and run it on their websites. Even if you look at it as a free link, which is crucial for search engine ranking on your given terms.
• When your listing your business with 3rd party sites make sure you give a good account of what it is you’re offering and upload images…it is likely more people will be looking at their website than yours if it’s on a tourist information website.
• If you’re paying for advertising make sure you are getting a return on your investment; You can measure this by using tools like Google Analytics (your web designer/developer will be able to advise you on this). It’s a free product from Google and just involves installing some tracking code on each page of your website. You’ll then be able to see exactly how many visitors are arriving on your website and what sources are driving the most traffic to your website. At our website using Google analytics we can even tell you how many phone calls we have delivered to your business.

If you want me to audit your online prescence get in touch

Use Analytics’ detailed traffic analysis to gain insight into and improve your AdSense performance. they’ll break down performance in some new ways, showing earnings and ad impressions based on user visits, the top sites referring users to AdSense, and the geographical areas where your visitors are located.

Search options will allow users to break out their results in several ways, including:

• Show only pages with a certain type of content. Limit search results to see only videos, forums or reviews for a given search. For searches about films or novels, you’ll now be able easily to search for reviews; or you can view only pages that contain videos in them.
• View related searches. With this tool you can view a list of related searches or have them graphically represented using the Wonder Wheel feature.
• Organize by date. Find the most recent results, by limiting your results to pages from the past 24 hours, past week or past year.

Search options might be particularly helpful for searches that are hard to express with keywords (such as “Show me discussions about ‘the Oscars’ in forums”) or when you want to explore topics more broadly or refine them (for example, “Show me queries that typically branch out from ‘Renewable Energy’”).

Be sure to try out the Wonder Wheel great for finding related keywords!

Search options is a further way to give users the power to customize the way the use Google,” said Juergen Galler, Director of Product Management at Google. “We’re always thinking about what we can do to improve the search experience, and we think this launch is a good step to help users get quickly and easily to precisely the kind of information they seek.”

1. If you have a trademark; search for it and quote the URL from the intellectual property office
2. Note the date that they registered the domain name from the whois on the Nominet.org.uk  website
3. Check the way back machine and understand what the domain was used for in the time that the current registrant owned it. Often you can see that on a accidentally dropped domain name, the new registrant immediatly puts the domain on an domain auction website. In a recent case the registrant put the domain on a domain auction site within 12hours of acquiring it which coincidentally was picked up by the way back machine therefore adding ammunition that the registrant had no intention of doing anything with the domain.
4. Take screen shots of the domain in its current state, if the domain has paid adverts from your competitors or clients this is great ammunition for your case as the regisitrant is trying to palm off their domain as your own.
5. If the domain name is for sale with a domain sales site like Sedo you can find visitor number from their domain listing page. Another useful statistic to include as squatters will often not realise this metric is publically available and would otherwise be impossible to get.
6. If the brand is registered in a personal name or UK registered business they are very unlikely to want their details broadcast if the case gets referred to an “Expert” because the case becomes publicly available. Some high profile squatters not naming any names have a truly tarnished online reputation due to the DRS process going to an experts decision on many occasions, you might want to highlight this to them in the initial correspondence.

The goal at this stage is to cover every angle and not give the registrant anywhere to move, if they are new to the DRS this is usually enough to bring on the sweats.

The Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) offers an efficient and transparent method of resolving disputes in the .uk Top Level Domain. Through the DRS they seek to settle .uk domain name disputes through mediation, and where this is not possible, through an independent expert decision.

All expert decisions are published on their web site. Nominet have now launched a decisions search function. The search function allows users to search through the full wording of decisions for key phrases or words. Specific searches can also be made using the domain name, date, result, expert, complainant or respondent.

Nominet are also in the process of tagging all decisions in a number of categories. A case will be tagged based on which part of the dispute policy it relates to, for example, typosquatting, passing off or trademark infringement. We will also tag cases based on the field of activity or industry to which the domain name relates. The tag search function is an ongoing project and it will take us some time to complete the tagging process for all historic decisions.

DRS decisions will still be published using our RSS feed. You can subscribe to the DRS RSS feed to ensure that you are alerted to new decisions as soon as they are published.

What this means for Trademark and brand owners…

Having consulted on dozens of Dispute Resolution  cases in the past few years knowing what to write and how to approach the situation is the key. Now via the Nominet DRS search function knowing what to write can be extensively researched from previous case history. They even talk about giving search functions by the type of abusive registration whether its Typo’s or squatting. The big power brands such as Expedia and GoCompare have put a lot of effort into their domain reacquisition process so why not make use of their internal experts writings for your own personal issues. I’ve always thought that the .co.uk process for taking back a domain for being an abusive registration was the easiest of any tld…now with an extensive library of case history to go on it got even easier and less daunting for anybody to take action and be confident in their arguments.

What this means for domainers

Not all domainers abusively register domains. However if you have domains that are closely aligned with any trademark or brand you might find an email from Nominet arriving in your mailbox in the not too distant future.

If you have a case which you want looked at email me at contact@leewoodman.co.uk. Having looked through several of the DRS case profiles there are some which I’d feel confident of winning should it go to appeal.

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/events?id=yoursiteID

To all those wondering if historical data is being recorded by Google even though its not yet visible in your accounts…yes it is. I installed event tracking on a website without it yet being available in the analytics profile and it’s recorded back at least 4 months since we first included it in the HTML.

<!– Start of Google Analytics Code –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.”
: “http://www.”); document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost +
“google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-26676-4″); pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();</script>
<!– End of Google Analytics Code –>

This is an example of the tracking code that runs on each and every page of the website to enable Google to track user’s movements. Note: The user must have Javascript enabled to run this code.

This shows an overview of the traffic on Swansea.info for the period 1st September 2008 until 1st October 2008. The traffic does fluctuate quite a lot day by day but there is a reasonably consistent trend over the time period.
It also reports on Visits (9319), Page Views (24,239), Page views per user visit (2.60), Bounce Rate (58.42% and is how many times a visitors lands on a page and leave straight away without looking at another page on the website.

A recent article by (Dainow, 2008) says “Google Analytics should not count a bounce as a visit”. But that is how a lot of people use web sites: they enter a specific search in to Google and hit each item of the search results in turn. Just because people do not go beyond the entry page does not mean it is not a useful visit. Maybe the author is focused on conversion-funded rather than ad-funded sites. Omniture’s HBX analytics counts bounces as visits and it is fair for Google Analytics to do the same. That said, he is right about Google Analytics artificially deflated visit-time stats. Google counts a bounce as a visit of zero-seconds duration and includes it when calculating average visit duration. Omniture HBX simply ignores bounces in the visit duration calculation. This means HBXs average visit time is always higher (and more sensible) than Google’s – especially where the bounce percentage is high.

It also reports on the average amount of time a user spends looking at the content (1minute 37 seconds) and also what percentage of the traffic are new visitors in this case 78.91% will not have seen the site previously in the reported period.

This shows the statistics from the site search report in Google Analytics.

The CSE will index 100% of the sites content if provided via an XML feed (Google has 2 indexes, 1 for regular search and one for its Custom Search Engines). This was the easiest way to gather user search data and didn’t involve developing a search function. The benefit of using the CSE is the results are algorithmically generated not just a simple SQL query based search, this results in far better targeted results.

Site Search is of great value to copywriters and web masters. Being able to understand the user when engineering information architecture is a crucial step in the future success of a website and one of those steps is analysing Site Search.

The data is usually quite difficult to come by as the information contains sensitive business information. If you have a similar website in the same market, this insight gave an understanding of what the user expected to see from the Mumbles.co.uk brand. Based on those results determined the information architecture for the new Citys.info internet franchise and what order to put on channels i.e. Hotels, Restaurants, Bars, and Beaches. Instead of offering content which the user might not have wanted to read by understanding the site search results it gave a voice to the user. By further analysing site search data, it will give good content suggestions which otherwise might not have been thought of. This is effectively a vertical search marketing and content suggestion tool in the hands of every webmaster.