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LexiConn – September 2005 Newsletter
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In this month’s issue:
* Search Engine Tips Part 2
* Urchin Statistics Package Offering
* MySQL updated to version 4.0.26
* phpMyAdmin updated to the latest version

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Search Engine Tips Part 2…

Last month’s issue provided you with numerous links to information regarding search engine rankings. The focus of this month is to provide you with specific things that you can do to help your website attain higher rankings in search engines such as google, yahoo, msn, etc.

Perhaps the single most important part of your webpage as far as search engines are concerned is your title tag. This tag is not only for people visiting your site, but it is what tells search engines how to categorize your site. Be sure to include keywords in your title tag that people would search on to find your website, not just your company name. Avoid generic statements such as ‘welcome to our site’; instead, integrate your welcome message and company name into a meaningful sentence. For example, if you sell specialty fruits, a good title tag might be ‘Specialty fruits and hard to find kiwis, mangos, guava, and more – ABC Fruit Company offers a large variety of one of a kind fruits’.

Another very important section of your webpage with respect to search engines is your first paragraph. Specifically, search engines look at the first few lines of text on a webpage. It is here that you will want to establish a balance between the message you want to get across to your site’s visitors, and the keywords that people will use to find you. It is very important to integrate keywords and phrases here, and to avoid generic welcome statements. The focus of this paragraph should be on content that will help people find your website.

As far as meta tags are concerned, they do serve to help enhance your ranking but, contrary to widespread belief, are not the main factor in site indexing. As the saying goes, ‘content is king’. In your meta keywords & descriptions sections, you will want to list the most specific words and phrases that people will use to find your site. Do not list generic terms and avoid using the same keyword/phrase over and over. Also, be sure to avoid listing hundreds of them, as this may be seen as artificial inflation. Using the same words over and over, and listing too many of them could have an adverse affect on your site’s ranking.

If you are interested in knowing how many people search on certain keywords, you will want to reference:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ (free)

http://www.wordtracker.com/ (paid solution, for more in-depth reports)

Another important factor in determining ranking is how many other websites link to your site, as well as links from your site to other sites that are related to your industry. Getting your website linked on other pages and also varying the text of that link can dramatically increase your rankings. Your website will be seen as more useful based on both the volume of links, as well as the link text.

In order to see how many hits you are getting from search engines, and to see if any changes you have made have led to improvements, you will want to track your results via the free statistics package wusage (linked to in your account manager under the site statistics tab), or the paid program urchin, which is detailed below.

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Urchin Statistics Package Offering…

LexiConn offers a detailed statistics package called Urchin for $5 per month. Urchin is an industry leading web analytics software solution that analyzes web traffic for your website and provides accurate and easy to understand reports on your visitors – where they come from, how they use your site, how many visitors browse your site, and more. You can review past data, generate reports for certain date ranges, and export the data to applications such as Microsoft Excel or Word.

An example of the stats it tracks can be found at:
http://demo.urchin.com/report.cgi?profile=golf101.com%20with%20UTM%20tracking&user=english

If you are interested in adding this to your account, the online request form is located at:
https://lexiconn.com/lexiconn/secure/add_urchin.html

If you are a ShopSite Pro customer, LexiConn has an Urchin Ecommerce Module that does everything the standard Urchin does plus detailed information on revenue data. This module is great for helping you analyze your sales and figure out how your customers are finding you. Full details regarding this offering can be found at:
http://www.lexiconn.com/ecommerce/shopsite/urchin.html

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MySQL updated to version 4.0.26…

MySQL has been updated to the latest version, 4.0.26. This release is primarily a bug fix addressing the following issues:

- Query cache is switched off if a thread (connection) has tables locked. This prevents invalid results where the locking thread inserts values between a second thread connecting and selecting from the table. (Bug #12385)

- Attempting to repair a table having a fulltext index on a column containing words whose length exceeded 21 characters and where myisam_repair_threads was greater than 1 would crash the server. (Bug #11684)

- When two threads compete for the same table, a deadlock could occur if one thread has also a lock on another table through LOCK TABLES and the thread is attempting to remove the table in some manner and the other thread want locks on both tables. (Bug #10600)

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phpMyAdmin updated to the latest version…

phpMyAdmin, the web based software tool for managing a MySQL database, has been upgraded to the latest version, 2.6.4-pl1.

Improvements include:
- Foreign-key dropdowns can be more customized
- Export: configurable filename templates
- Display column comments while editing data
- Transformations: new hexadecimal mode
- HTTP auth: support FastCGI
- Themes: can now have different theme per server
- OLD_PASSWORD in the list of functions
- Better messages when checking numerical input
- Allow adding DROP TABLE when copying databases
- Better support of information_schema
- Various interface CSS improvements
- Tree subgroups in left panel database selector
- Documentation: links and anchors to every FAQ item
- Table comments move to page header
- Export: configurable default charset
- Removed warning about PmaAbsoluteUri not set

Fixes include:
- Database search in MySQL 5.0.x on fields without a charset
- Invalid “normal” cursor style
- Browsing state when deleting multiple rows
- Support bigger queries in print view, insert row, export results
- Unsaved changes to relations were lost when changing display field
- Exporting under IE 6 (Windows XP SP2)
- Better catching of parse errors in config file
- XSS on the cookie-based login panel
- Show all while browsing foreign values
- Escaping of special characters in ENUM or SET
- XSS on table creation page
- Using mysqli extension with MySQL 4.0.x
- “empty result set” message was sometimes not returned
- Incorrect message “You should define a primary key”
- Abide cfg settings even if using MySQL > 4.1.x
- XSS on username (cookie-based login)
- (pl1) Exporting in https under Internet Explorer
- (pl1) Missing Save button in Relation View