SEO, Website Content Optimization
& Software Development

A piece of internet history will be consigned to the Recycle Bin in the sky today as Yahoo delete the GeoCities web hosting network. Although long-since defunct, GeoCities was outrageously popular in the late 90s and was synonymous with amateur websites, playing a significant part in the democratisation of the internet.

Established in 1995, GeoCities allowed users to set up free websites within its online communities or “neighborhoods”. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a lot of talk at the moment about a new music service Google will be launching soon, but little is actually known at this stage about the finer details of what they have been developing.

The original belief that Google would be serving and retailing music themselves has been forgotten, and the general idea now is that they will be providing an enhanced music search incorporating streamed recordings into the search results.

Google have reportedly teamed up with Lala and iLike who will be providing the streaming, and will also be retailing the songs. Read the rest of this entry »

Google PageRank (or at least the visible Toolbar representation we see in our browsers) has long been on borrowed time. Although Toolbar PageRank (PR) is still with us, a report by Search Engine Roundtable late last week confirmed that PageRank values have indeed been removed from Webmaster Tools.

Google has been threatening to take away the already crippled link-based importance indicator (Toolbar PR scores are purposefully outdated and often unavailable) since at least 2007, arguing that they are a distraction for webmasters and fuel the link buying industry.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” explained Google’s Susan Moskwa, adding “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t already noticed for yourself, Google UK’s results have been pretty poor of late. Since June 2009, around the time of Vince update, the UK results have featured significant numbers of non-UK websites.

In amongst the regular co.uk and UK .com sites, those from other English-language websites like Australia, South Africa, Canada and (most frequently) the United States have been appearing. Even the odd Italian one has crept in.

Although websites from outside the UK can be relevant to local users, more often than not these sites are worse than useless. Not only are they usually completely irrelevant to UK users, their presence prevents the sites that are relevant from being found. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC today reported positive news as Chinese official export figures for the previous month (Sep 2009) are said to indicate that the economies in the rest of the world are recovering. This appears to be good news for global economies, but there is also another trend which in the longer term could well have benefits for those in the West who get in a position to take advantage.

One of our senior managers from our China office is in the UK at the moment. One of her immediate observations to us, on this first visit in three years, is that things now seem comparatively “cheap” in comparison to how she remembers last time. The comment was made after a shopping trip to Asda. It’s likely indicative of how prices in China have increased as well as current exchange rates working in her favour.

As a company with a long established Chinese office branch, we have experienced wage inflation, certainly amongst the white collar educated staff which our business tends to employ. Recent valuations of the pound has also made purchasing in China seem more expensive for UK companies, as the Renminbi (pegged to the U.S. dollar) has risen in value. It is nevertheless a surprise to hear such a comment, especially as we have considered China a cheap place to do business for so long. Read the rest of this entry »

China is the single largest new Internet market we’re likely to see emerge in our lifetime, so why are so many companies so slow to gain an early advantage?  The answer seems to be the perennial, “…we’re aware that there are questions we should be asking, but we don’t know what they are….”  So, let’s start on just a few of the basics….

“Will the Chinese user feel comfortable using my site?”

Not only do you need to make a great job of translation, but are you adapting your Chinese website to fit the culture too?

Ensure that a Chinese person finding your site shouldn’t have to think about credibility, usability, language, and most important of all, trust – it needs to speak their language in every way. Read the rest of this entry »

Trust is fundamental to all business, but if you’re not a big brand then establishing credibility online can be hard work.

Everyone knows who Amazon are and what they’re about. Interflora are an international brand known to millions, their reputation precedes them. What about the rest of us? How can we prove to potential customers that we’re trustworthy and safe to deal with?

Bricks & Mortar vs. Online

Despite their bigger overheads, one advantage bricks and mortar businesses have over online ventures (or even the websites of bricks and mortar companies) is the trust they are able to generate - an essential for any sale. Read the rest of this entry »

Many folks considering search engine optimisation quite happily believe that it is a one off purchase and once the product has been bought and hung up on the wall (metaphorically speaking) all that then needs to be done is to sit back and admire it.

In our experience however, a vital part of any campaign is the ongoing services that usually fall into two broad categories, on-site and off-site. The on-site work consisting of all the general tweaks and additions that can be made to a site to make it more SEO friendly, and the off-site work consisting of organic link building techniques to improve the sites overall popularity.

Once the site has been initially SEO’d, there are almost always on-site areas that have room for improvement and, after all, without it how would you:

• Keep on top of any search engine updates – Google generally perform minor algorithm tweaks once a week and major ones twice a year? 
• Prepare suitable and measured responses to competitors SEO efforts? 
• Weed out any further niggles within the existing on-site optimisation? 
• Correct any previously hidden deeper SEO issues that may only become apparent later in the campaign?

From our experience, the best way to keep on top of all this is to have regular monthly on-site reviews to ensure that the site is as strong as it can be and as relevant to the current climate as possible. After all, if your competitors are always updating their SEO, how can you afford not to be?

We came across an interesting article from respected conversion rate optimisation company Future Now. They have put together a list of “reasons shoppers listed causing them to abandon shopping carts”.

If you have an e-comm cart and are wanting to convert more, this makes for an interesting list. But on reading this, ask yourself the question, “Have I even got the basics right first?” The list itself, whilst very valid, assumes that some of the basic issues present on many e-commerce website are already solved.

Their list includes things like:

• High shipping charges
• Desire to comparison shop
• Couldn’t find customer support
• Couldn’t find their preferred payment option
• Item unavailable at checkout
• Worries about security
• Leaving to find a coupon code on a search engine Read the rest of this entry »
  

This week has seen thousands of peoples email addresses and passwords being posted online as three of the biggest free email services Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo’s Mail and Google’s Gmail were the victims of severe and crippling Phishing attacks.

What is Phishing?

Phishing (pronounced fishing) is quite simply the criminal process of stealing someone’s personal information online. This information tends to be credit card details, usernames and passwords.

So just how did three of the biggest names in technology fall foul of Cyber criminals? Read the rest of this entry »