Over nine years later and despite two major updates it lives on. Internet Explorer Six was never a very well built bit of software. It’s security is poor at best (some say the least secure software on the planet), it lacks support for modern web standards and increases development time. Nothing works on IE6. Well, it does – but only after hours of re-writing perfectly good, standards compliant code in just the right way to work on this lumbering dinosaur of a system.

Well, this will go on no more.

Google are officially dropping support for IE6 from the 1st March.

YouTube are officially dropping support for IE6 from 13th March.

And we are dropping support for IE6 now.

What this means

• Websites will work fine in IE6, but some advanced functionality will not.
• Some elements will not display correctly in IE6.
• Users visiting a website in IE6 will be notified that they are using an out of date browser, that some site functionality will be unavailable. They will be advised to upgrade.

Why everyone is dropping support for IE6

Websites have become more and more functional. There are so many visitor friendly things a site can do – auto-suggest words for your search term, show information relevant to your location, provide one-click shopping baskets, show video, audio, and allow users to do countless things. As technology becomes more advanced, making it work on obsolete browsers becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming. Spending every increasing parts of a budget getting a site to work on a dated system does not make good business sense – it increases development time with little benefit to our clients or the end user.

In any case, support for IE 5.5 ended many years ago – the only reason IE6 has lasted so long is that it’s the default browser for Windows XP – and we’re now two iterations further down the road (Vista and now Windows 7), it’s time to follow suit.

What if I still want support for IE6?

If you still want it, you can have it. All we are doing is removing support as a standard procedure. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why you would want a site to work in IE6, and these include:

• Sites where the demographic still largely uses IE6
• Intranet sites
• Sites targeting third world countries

If you feel you need it, make sure your developers continue to support it. As the major players phase out support, other companies will follow suit. If you need it, make sure you make it clear.

Why does hosting matter?

Search engines look at a number of factors when they rank websites, and these are aimed at making sure:

• the right information is delivered
• it’s reliable
• it’s relevant to the user
• it’s delivered quickly

Hosting directly impacts the last three points. Also, in order to setup your website in the best possible way for SEO you need to be able to access some key features that are not available on all hosting platforms.

Reliability and Speed

The first thing to ensure is that your web host is able to deliver pages quickly and reliably. If pages are slow to load up you will be penalised – Google wants to make sure its users get to content quickly. 

Geographic Location

Where your site is hosted has an impact on how well you will rank for certain terms and geographical searches. For example, if your server is in Germany and you are optimising for the keyphrase "pizza delivery nottingham", you are less likely to be relevant to the search engine spiders as a company that hosts their website in the UK.

Where your site is hosted within the country is less important, just make sure that if you are offering a service specific to one location, you are better off hosting in the country where you provide that service.

Server Options

Finally, make sure your host allows for the following:

• 301 and 302 redirects
• Custom .htaccess files
• Custom 404 error pages
• mod_rewrite and mod_alias directives
• Access to raw logs

The key thing when choosing a hosting platform is to test all of the above during your trial period or within the first fourteen days. If you find it doesn’t meet your needs, swapping early will save you costs down the road.

Ben

Here’s an except:

 The complimentary way of getting Adwords and SEO to work together:

1. Plan to start your Google Adwords campaign a month before your SEO campaign.

2. The data you get during this month will inform how you focus your SEO campaign:

1. Your highest converting keywords become the keywords you focus on for SEO.

2. Your best headlines become page titles and headings.

3. Your best body text becomes your META description tag (a bit of code that describes your page to search engine robots and other websites). Whilst META descriptions no longer have much bearing on Google, they are often used when other sites link to you. By using text you know works in your META description tag, you ensure a better quality of traffic from these links.

3. Geographic results will give you a good idea of how popular your website is in specific regions. Use this data to focus local SEO on the regions where you are selling well.   

 

For the full article, get your copy of TV Bay Magazine at http://www.tv-bay.com/subscribe

It’s actually a problem with the way bullets are encoded with Word, compounded by the way the Symbol font set works on mac. But, there’s a fix.

All you need to do is substitute the Symbol font set with OpenSymbol. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Go to preferences
2. OpenOffice.org > Fonts
3. Check "Apply replacement table"
4. In the left box, select Symbol, in the right box select OpenSymbol.
5. Press the green tick, and select "Always"
6. Save and you are done.

You can now open and save word document with bullets with ease. 

We are big fans of Open Source software. Google Docs is great for collaboration and reading most types of document – but absolutely rubbish for creating documents to be printed. Open Office is great too, but niggles like this worry us. Still, at least this time around there’s a fix.

Ben

What is the Google Adwords Qualified Individual certification?

To become eligable for certification, Individuals must:

• Manage an account (theirs, or a client’s) for 90 days
• Attain a spend of no less than $1,000 during this period
• Pass the Google Adwords official exam.

The exam is hard. It requires 85% correct answers, and the software the exam uses prevents access to other websites so you can’t lookup answers during the test. As well as this less than 80% of the questions are technical, meaning you can have expert knowledge of how Adwords works and still fail. As at least 20% of the questions are focused on real-world application of Google Adwords within a marketing campaign, it does mean those that pass have an understand of not just how the tools work, but how to use them to get results.

As Google says:

Because achieving Qualified status is no easy feat, we reward these professionals with an official programme logo and Professional Status page which tout the title.

A Qualified Company differs from an individual, in that it employs at least two Qualified Individuals, and has a higher spending threshold within the 90 day period.

How does it benefit me?

Google Adwords Professionals have a clear understanding of how to build a marketing campaign that works. Adwords is a tool, and one that is easy to understand but difficult to use profitably. As Qualified Individuals have demonstrated a good knowledge of how to build campaigns properly, you can expect the following:

• A complete analysis of your marketing goals, website and industry.
• A budget that’s suitable for your business, geographical location a
• A list of the most profitable keywords.
• Ad copy writing
• Help improving landing pages.
• Ongoing campaign monitoring.

And this matters, as it means an Advertising Professional can:

• Save costs and improve profitability.
• Allow you to concentrate on your business, not the search engine campaigns.
• Get excellent results without you needing to take on another employee.
• Assure you that your campaign is working to its best.

How can I tell if an individual or company is qualified?

Companies are required to provide a link to their status page on Google. Our is here. This page shows the companies information, and verified that their qualification is up-to-date. Qualification lasts 18 months before it needs to be renewed – and to gain renewal all the above requirements must be met.

To find a Google Adwords Professional near you, Google suggest using http://local.google.com/ and searching for "google advertising professional" near you.

There is also a registry, though this is not a Google run resource, whoisagap.com. 

Ben Kelly is Alpha Wave Media Ltd’s Google Adwords Qualified Individual. Our company profile on Google is here.

So why do I have one there?

Putting a photo on your site establishes rapport and trust. When you meet someone face to face, have a chat, and hand over your brochure you’ve had a chance to build up the start of a relationship. Online, you are simply handing over the brochure. Without presenting some personal information along with a photograph, they have no reason to trust you.

Make it personal, win trust.

Ben

In this issue, I conclude our three part series on developing a web strategy. In previous issues we looked at how to plan a campaign, and how to go about building your website. In this article, I show you how to analyse if your website is working correctly. Starting with SEO, I show you how to judge if your campaign is working effectively. I then give an overview on how to use Google’s free traffic monitoring tool, Google Analytics, to track visits to your site. 

To get the latest issue, visit the TV Bay Website and subscribe: http://www.tv-bay.com/subscribe

To view previous articles, you can use the TV Bay’s interactive 3D viewer on the above link too.

We are always happy to hear feedback from readers, please leave your comments below.

Ben