I have always felt that Thanet has great potential if only we ourselves would support it. I have written a number of times about "supporting the little guy" and as part of this have been looking for ways to do this. One way was the Thanet Finder (search engine for Thanet) but I have been looking for other ways.

I have now found a way to add Thanet eBay listings to a site. On article pages below the comments there will now be a listing of products from Thanet based sellers (as well as strongly themed Thanet content).

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» Continue Reading: Thanet Star: supporting local sellers

I want to follow up on some surprise results that Tony and myself have briefly discussed in the comments section. In "To get ahead in business - ask a blogger" I shared how the blogging community seemed to be ahead of the game when it comes to third party ranks and metrics that measure the traction of your website. I'm still not convinced that I did not miss something but I want to explain why it matters.

The numbers tell a story, they indicate how well you are playing "the game" and the game is different depending on your aims but the numbers remain the same. Whatever reason you have a website for it has to meet one of the 5 Goals of a Business Website. The numbers tell us how well we are meeting those aims.

That is why they matter so much. When you goal is money the biggest indicator is how much but when the goal is attention they is rarely money as a good measure. So these other numbers start to mater. A lot.

Matt Bacak (another Matt B) explains more:

I was interested to see how Thanet and Kent's business websites stacked up so I took a few well known sites as control subjects and then added in local business websites that have all recently been recommended to me or known to me in some way. What I found was quite surprising.

To make things far I used as many metrics as possible to measure the success of the websites in terms of traction and penetration. the metrics I used were Alexa Rank, Google Page Rank, Google Back Links, Yahoo Back Links, Technorati (reactions, authority and rank) and Compete Rank. Each of these scores works differently for example with most of the rank based scores lower is better but a 0 is a total fail.

I chose Thanet Star (obviously) along with the TDC website, the Thanet Blog List and the website of a local photographer.  These would be my control entries against which we could measure the success of the websites in question.  What I did not expect was to have these sites dominate the results quite utterly.

I only wanted to use a smallish number of sites so I chose custwin.co.uk a business promotion business along with webdandy.co.uk and the first client they linked to afritrans.co.uk to compare with this I added webz4biz.biz who created the Thanet Business Network website. So I had two web designers and a client each. I added to this mix Boys and Maughan (local solicitors) and the Sure Start Millmead website (local non profit).

The resultant tables might surprise you.

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» Continue Reading: To get ahead in business - ask a blogger!