Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

Recently I was posed with a question using one of my favourite CMS’s, namely CMSMS. As will all apps that require email addresses, making sure it’s a valid email address is not as easy you would think. Coupled with the possibility of underscores, dashes, plus signs, etc, it can be a nightmare.

The FrontEndUser Module is a great addition, where it allows you to have a login for your site, and display certain parts of templates whether a user is logged in or not. Sadly their email validation is slightly flawed, as it didn’t like email addresses with dashes in the username part.

I came across a great post titled “Comparing E-mail Address Validating Regular Expressions” , which show various examples of what regular expressions will match and check for valid email addresses.

FrontEndUser Fix

To fix the FrontEndUser module to allow dashes (some of you call them hyphens) you can take the following steps

• go to /modules/FrontEndUsers/FrontEndUsers.api.php
• find the function IsValidEmailAddress around line 965
• comment out :

if( !eregi("^[_a-z0-9-\.-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-\.-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,4})$", $email ) )

• and replace it with

$reg ='/^([\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+\.)*[\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+@((((([a-z0-9]{1}[a-z0-9\-]{0,62}[a-z0-9]{1})|[a-z])\.)+[a-z]{2,6})|(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}(\:\d{1,5})?)$/i';
if( preg_match($reg, $email ) )

Note : this is just more a little mind wander, rather than an actual Google product, but it’s one that I can really could foresee them producing.

The next thing from Google

I’m thinking out loud here, while looking at my credit card bill earlier today I am really quite surprised that Google hasn’t launched their own version of a credit card. They already have a payment gateway, google checkout, which can provide data on consumer spending processes. But it is limited to online transactions. I’m sure that offline transactions, and the data set of

• what people buy with the cards
• where they are when they purchase
• what time of the day they purchase
• what their average purchase amount is
• frequency of purchasing at a location
• etc.

could nicely be tied in with the data on into

• how they search (google search)
• use a phone (google voice)
• use broadband
• use email (Gmail)
• use health care (health.google.com)
• etc.

to allow them to create a comprehensive profile of a person, and ultimately target ads to people with products that  now that they like to buy.

Again this would align with their strategy to organise the worlds data. hen I see Google touching into these markets with their recent  credit card comparison tool for the UK, I really start to think that it could be a possibility.

We’ve seen how they will soon destroy the GPS industry with their Google Maps Navigation (which I wish would be launched in Europe, so please hurry up) to provide free turn by turn directions to users instead of having to buy rather expensive GPS devices. Google entered the market under the radar so to say, by licencing the content until they were in a position to use their own. Maybe with the comparison tool google will be able to see what offers interest consumers most, is it a low APR , balance transfer or rewards ?

Ways to make the Google Credit Card attractive

I’m sure they will want to avoid another backlash like they got from the launch of Buzz earlier this year, so it will have to be something people are willing to trade their data for. Most cards in the United States don’t have an annual fee, unlike European cards, so I don’t think that a no-fee card would be a such an attractive proposition. And offers of points, air miles and cash back are also quite standard. To catch the attention of the public it would probably need to be something significantl that people wouldn’t mind their purchasing data being analysed. My thoughts that it would be something with an extended credit limit, lower balance, and then tied in with another google product like say a free phone for example. Again these are just some random thoughts on what they could do.

One other possible entry into the market would be to purchase one of the smaller credit card companies, like say Discover.

After Google Credit Card

And what will Google do after that. Could Google start to be an cheap energy provider or even a  bank ? Sure why not ! At the end of the day it’s all data.

Here is a quick tip on how to save paying PayPal fees. I was sending a large amount of euros today, and this would have resulted in about €50 of fees. So I did a bit of poking around and came across this tip, with this method it brought it down the fees to €30.

The stipulation for this to work is that you need to have either a Premier or a Business account. There is a feature called MassPay on Paypal where if you wanted to send multiple payments, you can simply upload a CSV file with the email address, the cash  amount and the currency. The fees here are much less, and there is just a flat fee charge of 2%. Here is what you need to do :

1. open up notepad
2. enter in person@email.com <tab> cashvalue <tab> currency code (USD / EUR/ etc)
3. for multiple payments you can enter the same as 2 , on the next line
4. save as ASCII .TXT file.
5. login to paypal and find the mass pay link at the bottom of the page
6. click make Mass Payment on the left hand side of the info page
7. fill out the form, and identify people with email address when asked.
8. click review, do a review and see the fees.
9. Click send and save some fees !

Paypal Fee Savings

For example if you wanted to send someone exactly €1000, it would typically cost you 3.4% plus €0.35 for the transaction charge so you would need to send an extra €35.56 . With Mass pay this would be the flat 2% or €20. Also what is nice with this method, you don’t need to calculate what you should pay someone via paypal so they get €1000, rather you would have the CSV file person@email.com  1000 EUR

So not only does it save you a few quid, the payee doesn’t see the unusual €1035.36 transaction, and a fee charge,  rather just get an entry for the whole €1000.

It obviously works for smaller amounts, so it depends on whether you want to spend the extra few steps to save cash. I always think, better in your pocket than someone else’s !

A quick post to say thanks to my few clients who trusted me to get their website back in the index or to tweak their pages to get a few more visitors to their pages. Thanks to those who have collaborated on projects, have shared their code, and even offered their business advice. It was more than a pleasure emailing, talking on the phone, skype or on IM with you. The first year in business was a bit of an eye opener, a challenge at times and a steep learning curve. Thanks for helping me get there.

Merry Christmas !

From time to time you hear of Google tweaking their UI (User Interface). As they have such a large population of users it’s not often you actually get to be in one of these test groups. Below is a video of a recent test they performed, and my main google a/c was in the test. In this particular test Google remove all the surrounding links :

And once you focus your mouse on the input box to put in your search query, the other links are then shown. For this test it wasn’t every visit to google.de resulted in such a behaviour, it was more randomised.

Google UI Testing Video

Use full screen to see more details.

Google can generate valuable information from these testing sessions in the areas of usability / accessibility / user experience / conversion optimisation. What do you think of all these Google UI tests ?

Things have been extremely busy here at blackdog.ie but there are a few updates I would like to bring to the few people who read here.

1. The 3rd Bar Camp Cork is on next weekend, November 14th 2009. If you can make it I would really advise popping along and listening in on some of the talks (or even giving a talk yourself). Last year it was the first event of it’s kind I went to, and it was worth travelling back from Munich to attend.  I met some great people and actually learned alot from it. If you want to meet some  motivated online entrepreneurs and IT geniuses then this is the place to be. Sadly I can’t make it this year, but hopefully I will be there again next year.
   
2. The SEO world tends to get a bad reputation for dubious offerings, being over priced or just plain out lying. Often these companies contact clients of mine offering the sun, moon and stars. They tend to talk about  special affiliations to google, and promise that they can achieve organic SEO #1 positions for competitive keywords.  A while ago, fancy dress mogul Ronan O’Brien called foul over a SEO company Storm Media , and managed to grab their attention via his blog. Check out the blog post about Storm Media. This company has also been covered by other Irish bloggers like Sian Phillips

Hopefully the next update won’t be as long coming.:D