It’s Christmas, so I know nobody is watchin (looks around), but if you are then you might be interested in this little experiment in swift Google indexing.

The idea is to get Google to index a page really quickly and understand the content of that page. The page is an ecommerce site about tyre changers and with a bit of luck, it will be indexed quickly.

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The Internet is a terrifying place, it really is, but we do rely on certain bits of software to keep us safe like virus killers, spam filters, pop up-blockers etc. However the one bit of software we have to trust is our web browser as it’s the most used application, heck, it’s essential.

Now, we’ve all known for some time that Internet Explorer can be a bit buggy and many in the ‘geek’ world will spend a lot of time convincing us that we shouldn’t use it due to security holes, but Microsoft are a big company and you expect that they’ll do their best to keep us safe.

Ooops.

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With all this talk about search engine optimisation, marketing and seminars, it’s easy to forget one of the core aspects of our business - creating great websites.

We’re the first to admit that our portfolio pages are sorely lacking in the latest sites we’ve been working on, heck, we haven’t even got some of last years’ sites on there. That needs to change, but in the meantime here are a couple of sites that will be going live very soon.

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There’s only one thing worse than doing no search engine optimisation and that’s doing too much. When setting up a website or wanting to promote an existing one, many people go absolutely overboard and begin slamming in the keywords and building up the back links.

Trouble is, if you suddently appear on the scene with a website that’s quite obviously trying too hard, Google may penalise you more than if you’d done nothing at all.

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It used to be that you could surf the net and all you’d suffer was a couple of sore fingers and perhaps some bleary eyes. The Internet was a safe place and you could pretty much go in there without any kind of protection like virus killers, pop-up blockers or anti-virus constantly running.

I remember, back in my system admin days, sitting at my desk, cranking up the modem and surfing around the Nasa website clicking on images and links with abandon without a care in the world. I guess I remember that with the same nostalgia as we all remember the long hot summers where we could walk the streets in safety.

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One of the most infuriating things a web designer has to deal with is the constant questions about how much money a website will make and how long it will take for it to be number one on Google. It’s become so bad now that every question like this just phases me out and all I hear is a slight buzzing noise at the back of my head.

Seriously, please shut up.

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I love the Internet to bits. Just when you think you’ve pretty much got every avenue covered, someone drops in a little gem of information that makes you sit up and think “D’oh, why didn’t I think about that?!”

Gregor Spowart has just blogged about something that you should be aware of that had completely slipped my mind, simply because I hadn’t realised it still went on. Namely, the “we’ll submit your website to hundreds of search engines” nonsense being spouted by lots of web firms.

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Google are at it again!

They’re not content with just offering up search results that they think you’ll be interested in, they are now giving you the choice of altering the results, saving them and remembering your favourites so they can serve you better in the future.

For example, if you searched for ‘Sandwich Shop’ and you weren’t happy with the results, you could promote the results you preferred above the ones you didn’t. Sounds odd, here’s it in action:

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So, Mr Darling has dropped VAT to 15% in an attempt to give the economy a kick. Whatever you think of his policies, he’s certainly creating work for someone and given that there’s only been a week to sort it out, we envisage this weekend will be tech-heaven with IT departments working late to ensure all systems are up to date and ready to charge less come Monday morning.

But we’ve heard some worrying comments from some businesses about shortcuts they intend to take to ensure they are ready. Unfortunately, they could end up losing thousands.

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Since we started providing search engine optimisation services for companies, we’ve seen a worrying trend in the industry. It appears to have been going on for years, but as we approach SEO from a marketing angle and not a purely search engine angle, we seem to have been immune to to most of it.

Thing is, when we tested a lot of search engine companies, even the big ones, the first thing they ask is “what keywords do you want to be optmised for?” The problem for many companies is they just don’t know and even if they think they know, they’re not the expert so what if they’re wrong?

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