The title of this post probably seems really counter intuitive to many people and it’s not something that every web site owner wants to hear.

But it refers to the idea that you own web site may not be the best place to get your message across. Other people may well have much larger and much more relevant audiences that you. The key thing is that when you publish information, it should always refer back to you and your web site.

For example, let’s say you decide to interview your company director about a new product and you make a video of the interview. It makes sense to publish the video on a popular video portal like YouTube where it is most likely to be exposed to the largest audience. Then, you can embed the video in your own web site. Other people can also embed the video in their web sites as well.

Even if a web site has less visitors than your own, it may still be very productive to concentrate of getting coverage of your story on that web site rather than your own, especially if you are looking to reach new audiences and customers.

Consider another example. Imagine you run an membership association. A small part of your organisation’s remit may be to promote an annual professional development course to people in your industry. Rather than just announce the course on your web site, seek out blogs and web sites that deal specifically with professional development. They may well have much a smaller audience than your own web site but their readership is very focussed on the topic of professional development and you will likely get much more interest from their web site.

So don’t worry about having to publish everything on your own web site, just make sure that when another web site publishes information about one of your projects that the readers have all the information they need to complete the task you are interested in whether that’s a conference registration, a newsletter sign up or a product sale.

Good luck.

Google Analytics is a great way to get insights into what’s happening on your web site and it’s free. It’s one of the most popular analytics packages around. But for some people all of the data can be overwhelming.

You don’t need to give everyone the same level of access to all of the data. Casual users in your organisation may only want to see the general trends in visitors numbers or the number of recent visits to a particular page.

If you have people in your organisation that want access to the analytics information, but just need an overview, I’d advise using Polaris from Desktop Reporting.

A screenshot from the polaris desktop reporting application

It’s a simple AIR application that anyone can install on their Windows, Mac or Linux machine and allows access to nearly all of the useful information in Google Analytics without overwhelming the user.

You can download it at Desktop Reporting

Before you invest any time or effort into Search Engine Optimisation for your web site, first make sure that your domain name is set up correctly.

Make sure that your website is available whether or not the visitor types the “www.” in front of your web sites address.

Different web browsers handle misconfigured domains differently.

• Internet Explorer will launch a search based on the domain name using your default search engine.
• Firefox will try both versions of the domain and eventually arrive at the available version
• Chrome and Opera report the misconfigured domain as an error.

So which ever browser your visitors are using, at best they will experience a delay and at worst they will interpret the error page presented to them as your site being unavailable.

In some cases your web hosting company may even have a holding page configured advertising their services on the badly configured version of the domain.

So what is an easy way to check if your domain?

Simply open your web browser (other that FireFox) and type the address of your web site into the address bar with the www. in front of it and then with out the www. in front. In both instances you should arrive at the home page of your web site.

For a more scientific approach you can do what is called pinging.

In Windows go to Start > Run > Cmd and then type ping www.YOURDOMAIN.com

You should see 4 lines of data appear similar to the ones in the picture below which start with the word reply.

Pinging a domain to check it is available

Then do the same for YOURDOMAIN.com (it’s not case sensitive).

If the domain is misconfigured then you will the a message telling you that the domain cannot be found.

And if you discover that your domain is incorrectly configured, contact your web designer or your hosting company to let them know about the error.