SEO is a recession beater

With the current financial climate causing many companies to cut back on their expenses, one area that doesn’t seem effected is in Internet marketing, or search engine optimisation to be specific.

Staffing costs can be expensive, offline advertising is costly and business trips can break the bank, but the low cost of SEO compared with the very high returns means that SEO is flourishing in an otherwise floundering economy.

According to Aaron Kahlow, the chief executive at this year’s Online Marketing Summit conference, because of the recession companies are looking for (more…)

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Microsoft to stop forcing Internet Explorer down users’ throats

As someone who had to buy a new laptop recently, one of the worst aspects of a new computer is having to re-install all of your own software. You need to find all of your own discs, the serial numbers and download all of the programs that you need before you can start working. It can take the best part of a day to do all of that.

Then of course you’ve got the problem of Microsoft insisting that you use Internet Explorer as your default browser, unless you tell it otherwise. This has been a bone of contention for years as Microsoft has included IE in its various bug ridden guises over the years, refusing to bundle other, better, browsers with the Windows OS such as Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox and now Google Chrome.

Things are about to change though as the powers that be at Microsoft have finally relented and will allow other browsers to be included with the new Windows 7, which goes on sale later this year.

During the install of the new Windows 7 users will be offered a choice of which browser they want to install, rather than being forced to use the dreaded IE.

Microsoft did intend to sell Windows 7 in Europe without any browsers, including Internet Explorer, but that idea was criticised by (more…)

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Bill Gates quits Facebook amid scores of Friend Requests

Everyone who joins Facebook for the first time goes through the same initiation ceremony of being inundated with request to ‘find the name of your next love’ or ‘battle it out with ninjas v pirates’. Depending on whether you’re an absolute chav from MySpace or not depends on whether you accept and add every single one of these applications to your Facebook profile, making it the undecipherable behemoth that it becomes.

You’ll also be inundated with ‘friend requests’ from people you may know, people you work with and people who you’ve never met. Again, if you’re an avid MySpace user you’ll add all of them thinking that the more friends you add, the more popular you are in real life.

You’re not alone in this though, as Microsoft supremo and possibly the most famous nerd in the world, Bill Gates, also gets inundated with spam on Facebook, so much so that he’s (more…)

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Facebook comments get teacher suspended

Facebook has a long and illustrious history of getting people into trouble for posting comments on their profile. It’s got people the sack, split up relationships and even caused divorce in its short time in existence. This time though it’s not the curse of Facebook profile and its public nature (that everyone seems to forget) that has claimed yet another victim, it’s the private discussion section of the website; something that should remain private.

Sonya McNally is a teacher and she was discussing her class with another teacher over Facebook, making the comment:

By the way, (class) 8G1 are just as bad as 8G2.

This seemingly innocuous comment caused offense to Kirsten Allenby-Moore, who reported her to the council. She wrote in a complaint letter:

I found the comments personally insulting as the (more…)

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It’s the on-page SEO, stupid!

SEO is just like American politics, or at least for the purposes of this article we’ll assume that it is. “It’s the economy, stupid” is a famous slogan from the Clinton campaign in 1992 where Bill Clinton defeated George Bush (the older one, not the stupid one) just one year after 90% of Americans said they were pleased with Bush as a president.

The slogan was meant solely for internal use for Clinton’s followers, and referred to George Bush’s failure at realising the importance of the US economy, which had just entered recession (how times change eh?).

Bush’s foreign policy was excellent. He’d ended the Cold War and had staged a successful invasion of Iraq, but his boasts of ‘no more taxes’ proved false.

Just like Bush, many SEOs believe that their foreign policy is what will earn their clients the rankings they’re after. Using links and social networking websites to try to boost their client’s rankings is what occupies much of their time, rather than what they should be doing, concentrating on (more…)

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How to write SEO copy for regional optimisation

Writing copy for regional optimisation is one of the things that many SEO companies and SEO professionals often do badly. The problem stems from the fact that the client invariably wants to rank for a search based on his services, and for his locale, so for example:

Carpet cleaning Wirral

If you live in the Wirral and you’re looking for someone to clean your carpets, then you’ll probably search for something like that. The problem is that to rank for a phrase like that many SEOs believe that you need to enter that exact phrase several times on the homepage of the website.

Not only is this not true, it’s also very poor English and harms the readability of the website. The stop words ‘in’ and ‘the’ should be used at the very least, as Google (more…)

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Would you let an Estate Agent SEO your website?

Getting a new website built is much the same as having a new home built. Both go through a similar design stage; they need to be planned out, constructed and decorated so that they look pleasing to the eye, yet stable enough to last you a lifetime (in theory at least).

However, when many people have a new website built they don’t seem to understand the different roles that web industry specialists play in the process, and often go to one person or company for everything. This results in a website that is wholly inadequate for the intended purpose, and hence it fails to deliver.

Let me now explain the difference between a web designer, a web developer and an SEO, and how you need all three to construct the perfect website, rather than (more…)