Don’t you just hate it when Google replaces your carefully crafted Description tag with the rubbish written by the editors of the Open Directory Project?

Well, Google has now fixed that problem. That means you can control what displays as the description when you’re listed in the Google search engine results (SERPs) page.

Google supports the meta tag called NOODP – which I’m assuming means “No Open Directory Project”

Add this line of code to your HTML




and you can suppress whatever the ODP editors wrote about your site. Just your own perfect description will appear in the Google search engine results.

Apparently, it takes just a few days to work.

I was asked which tools I use to manage this website. I’ve pulled together a list of the software that keeps my website ticking.

My choices won’t suit everybody, and in hindsight I might have chosen differently. But these services are all working and sometimes it is just too difficult to change horses.

This website was designed as a demonstrator of how to easy it is to keep your content fresh and up to date. I use Senior Internet’s content management system for the Events, Library and Client sections of the site.

I didn’t realise how much money I’ve invested in Adobe products: Dreamweaver and Contribute are used to create and update standard web pages. Images on the site are edited with Photoshop Elements, and PDFs are created using Flashpaper.

The blog section is kept up to date with Blogger, and readers’ subscriptions to my blog news is automated with Feedblitz.

I monitor activity on the site using WebTrends website statistics software. Incoming links to the site with monitored with SEO Elite, and overall performance in the search engines is tracked with WebPosition and WebCEO.

Customer data is managed in the office using Goldmine, and I use Goldmine to send out small email marketing campaigns. Larger email marketing campaigns go out using Vertical Response or Intellicontact or Mailchimp.

Any thoughts on my choices?

I talk a lot about search engine spiders, and how they index the text on your website.

But what about us humans?

How easy is it to read the text on your website? How easy is it to understand?

A “readability test” is an automated analysis of the copy on your website. The test looks at relative difficulty of reading your text:

• the number of words in each sentence
• the number of syllables in each word
• the complexity of sentence structure & grammar

The test provides you with the reading age or years of schooling. If you want to reach a broad audience, then you need to be writing at a level equivalent to 8 years of schooling.

Use these readability tests to determine your Fog Index, your Reading Ease Index, or how many years of schooling a reader needs to understand your copy.

Juicy Studio: Readability Test will test your online web pages

Document Readability Test lets you cut and paste your text for testing, and makes recommendations for improvements.

What about this page? You need 10 years of schooling to read it easily, and it fails the recommended Reading Ease test.

Let me know if you understood it, and whether you found it easy to read!

Is it possible to damage your search engine rankings by having lots of spammy sites linking to your site?

More specifically, could my competitors get me “bowled out” of the search engine rankings by submitting my site (without my permission) to link farms and other bad quality sites?

This myth is called “Googlebowling” – and by the way, this has more to do with loud shirts and beer, rather than Freddie Flintoff.

Nope, its not possible to get “bowled out” of Google by poor quality inbound links.

Google make it absolutely clear that “links from these sites won’t harm your site, they won’t help your indexing or ranking. Only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site.“

What will cause problems is when your website links out to these bad sites.

So don’t lose sleep over getting Googlebowled, but then again, don’t bet tempted to give links to unscrupulous sites only to get rubbish links back.