When you get to the payment screen in Godaddy, open a new window, go to Google and enter “Godaddy promo codes <this month> <this year>”.

For example, it’s currently January 2009 so I entered “Godaddy promo codes January 2009″ .

Browse through the search results, find a discount that suits you (there a different discounts for different expenditures, such as save 10% of a single domain purchase; or save 20% from purchases over $50 etc), and enter the promo code at the bottom of the payment screen in Godaddy.

Hit the “Apply Code” button, wait for the page to refresh, and taa-daa, you’ve just saved a few pennies!

Discount applied on the Godaddy Payment screen

I use this for Godaddy every time I make a purchase without fail. The principle also applies to any website who offers promo/discount codes.

Try searching Google using a similar search method next time you see a promo code box on a website’s payment screen – odds are that somewhere in the world, someone has posted a discount code on the web that may just save you a few quid!

For the record, here’s a few promo codes for Godaddy.com for the month of January 2009 (please be aware that these codes do expire at any time without notice, so you may need to try more than one code before you have success….otherwise just choose the Promo Code that offers you the best savings!):

Buy .com domains from GoDaddy for just $7.49 (Register,Renew,Transfer)
Promo code: cjc749t2

Use this code now at www.GoDaddy.com

Save $1 on your GoDaddy order
Promo code: cjconeoff

Use this code now at www.GoDaddy.com

Save 10% off ANY order with GoDaddy
Promo code: cjcsave10

Use this code now at www.GoDaddy.com

Save 12% off any order with GoDaddy
Promo code: gdp1230a

Use this code now at www.GoDaddy.com

Save $5 off ANY order at GoDaddy of $30 or more
Promo code: cjcsave

Use this code now at www.GoDaddy.com

Save $10 off your ANY GoDaddy order of $50 or more
Promo code: cjctenoff

Use this code now at www.GoDaddy.com

Save 15% off your GoDaddy order of $75 or more
Promo code: cjcdeal

Use this code now at www.GoDaddy.com

Save $15 off your GoDaddy order of $75 or more
Promo code: gdp1250b

Use this code now at www.GoDaddy.com

Save 25% off your GoDaddy order of $75 or more
Promo code: gdp1134a

Use this code now at www.GoDaddy.com

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If you are partial to belting out a few tunes with your mates, accompanied with a microphone in hand and the song words bouncing across the screen, you will fall in love with this innovative website.

Online Karaoke will have you Dancing on the Ceiling

Currently the Lucky Voice library has over 6,300 tunes in it, enough to keep you going well into the early hours of Saturday morning.

Registration will get you access to 1,000 tunes for free, with access the remainder of the tracks incurring a small subscription fee.

I can see this idea being applied to viral campaigning quite easily.  If your company has purchased rights to a particularly catchy tune or jingle, why not create a downloadable ‘karaoke’ version for your target audience to download and sing along to at home?

Better yet, you could create an entire karaoke album distributed via email and downloadable online or streamed straight off the web . You can even take advantage of the ‘music video clip’ media style to promote your brand without looking too tacky, by placing your logo in the top right corner of the screen, just like the MTV branding consumers are already used to.

A night’s worth of fun for home-stricken punters looking for a cheap and fun Friday night. And a light-hearted and potentially extremely viral way of getting your brand right into the lounge rooms across the world!

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Well one of the first things you need to get right are your meta-tags. Meta-tags are pieces of text that are hidden in the HTML behind each page on your website.  Meta-tags are used describe the information that is on each webpage.

Meta-tags are important for several reasons.

1. Some search engines rank your web pages based on the information in your meta-tags. The more accurate and refine the meta-tags are, the more chance you have of ranking high in Google
2. The text stored within the meta-tag is used by many search engines in your search results.  Think of it as the textual “preview” of your website’s content that appears on the search results page of Google.
3. Meta-tags allow you to target certain keywords

The most common issue I see with website meta-tags, is that the meta-tags are not individually set for each individual page on the website.  I’ve seen websites and blogs with thousands of pages, each page using exactly the same meta-tags. It’s not rocket science to work out that by tweaking the meta-tags to suit the content of each of these individual webpages, your ‘reach’ in Google could be far greater.

So how do you check how Google is currently indexing your meta-tags? It’s easy, simply type go to Google.com (or your local version of Google) and type:

site:www.yoursite.com

For example, for my test blog sneakydevil.com I typed site:www.sneakydevil.com .  Here’s an example of the results that appeared for Sneaky Devil.

Sneaky Devil meta tag listing in Google

You will notice several aspects (some good, some bad) in the screenshot above that will contribute to SEO.

Firstly, the meta-tag description text  (the black ‘description’ text under each page heading)  is the same for most of the individual pages, which is not ideal at all for SEO.

Secondly, the URLs are not considered Search Engine Friendly.  If you look at the URL underneath the black description text, you will notice that the URL is not something that you could not remember easily, nor would it make sense to you if it was written on a blank piece of paper with no accompanying information. URLs must be a short, concise representation of what is contained within each page. This helps not only the search engines interpret what is contained on a webpage, but just as importantly, humans!

Thirdly, the page titles. Again a failing of many websites our there is to have the same Page Title hard-coded for every single page within the website.  The page title is represented in the above screenshot, by the large blue Title text. In this specific case, the page titles for Sneaky Devil are considered optimised, however the home page title could do with a little bit of work due to the unconventional method of writing one long string of words separated only by full stops.  Think of search engines being like your grade 4 english teach -   strict and conventional.  Google is programmed to interpret ‘natural’ language, so anything which deviates too much from your standard words and sentences may be misinterpreted by Google.

Go try out the site:www.yoursite.com command in Google now. You’ll be surprised what you find as you trawl through the results.  Stay tuned, soon I will show you how to update and fine-tune your meta-tags so that your website is one step closer to SEO bliss.

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Wikipedia has been on my horizon for investigation for quite a while. Quite a few of my digital clients have requested inclusion into Wikipedia, which I concur is a great idea for two reasons:

i) It’s ideal for search engine optimisation, due to its Pagerank and status as a reputable website from a search engine point of view

ii) Wikipedia is increasingly becoming THE reference point for accurate and unbiased information (rather than relying on the opinions of yet another $2 blog)

If you’ve still no idea what a Wiki actually is, the definition on Wikipedia (which I suppose always subject to change according to the rules of a wik)i is:

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.^[1][2] Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.

So you can see why the definition is subject to change, as updating the definitions and information used to describe with a particular word or phrase is the very essence of a wiki.  It is an ever-changing online information portal kept up to date by a community.

I’m currently investigating opensource software solutions to create my own online wiki.  For ease of installation through my web hosting provider, I was going to cut a few corners and select whatever Fantastico had to offer.  The problem is, two options were presented, TikiWiki and phpWiki.  And whenever options are present, trouble looms. Time for what I love most….some research on Google!

My Google search for ‘comparison of wiki software’ actually yielded an ironic result. One of the best comparison matrices I could find on the topic of wiki software comparisons, was on…oh, you just won’t believe it….Wikipedia!   So if you’re interested, this is the Wikipedia comparison of wiki software applications I am referring to.

It’s a matrix, with distastefully bad colour coding, and numbers like ‘v2.4′. I am warning you, it’s nerdy, so don’t take the plunge if you’re eyes aren’t of the square variety.

I’ll continue my investigation into Wiki software and report back with my findings soon. If you have had any experience in with Wiki applications, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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You’ve since caught 40 winks, had breakfast, a shower, and now you’re itching to see the fresh stats Google Analytics has churned up for you.

You login to Google Analytics and…. <drumroll please>….

Your web-stats amount to the amazing figure of:

0 visitors!

What? What has happened?  This cannot be true. Can it? Is my website really that bad?

Hold on a second, and don’t despair just yet.

Google Analytics takes up to 24 hours to start producing data. You can read more about it here at the Google Analytics help center.  So wait until dinner time before you log in again. And then, if you still have problems, read this article which outlines potential issues which may be impact the integration Google Analytics on your site.

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You can’t go past the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.  I’ve installed it on a few of my sites (tshirtalert.com, and this very blog that you are reading, breadmilkdigital.com) and can vouch that plugin is one of my most important WordPress tools, as well as being quite addictive and entertaining, as I watch my stats climb and fall according to how much coffee I have consumed (and consequently, the quality of my blog posts!)

If you need a little bit of help with the whole installation process and setting up a Google Analytics account, this article might also assist.

Happy wordpress-google-analytic-ing!

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Google Analytics is my number 1 recommendation as a web analytics package. It’s the right price (i.e. free!), it has a strong and active user base who continue to contribute to its evolution, and thus new features are being added quite frequently.

Not only that, but Google Analytics is really a cinch to set up.  I’ve just added it to an ancient Joomla installation powering one of my testbed websites, shackn.com, and it literally took less than 30 seconds to install.

Adding Google Analytics to a Joomla installation is a piece of cake. This article from GoodWebPractices.com will get you there in 30 seconds flat too.  If you’re running a website on Joomla with analytics or tracking, you owe it yourself right now to take miniscule few moments of your time to install Google Analytics.  You’ll thank yourself later!

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Well fear not, My Cool Button is an online web 2.0-style button generator. Just choose your colours, text, size and shape of the button, click “Generate” and you instantly have a web 2.0 button which you can download immediately for use.

Here’s an example of MyCoolButton.com’s capabilities, used on one of my own websites:

The search Australian surfbreaks button from www.shackn.com, created by MyCoolButton.com

If this trend continues, local software on PCs will be a thing of the past.  Already Google has it’s suite of online office application, with various other software providers also following the trend.   Maybe the continual investments in increasing hard-drive capacity will one day be futile, as it seems that we are trending towards an online world that will soon negate the need for us to store software locally!

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