At the beginning of October we were seeing a lot of people download our ebook and it was getting some great reviews. However I’m never satisfied with that; I want facts and when someone invites me to read an ebook I view it with skepticism. Very often those peddling information are just looking for methods of making money because the techniques they’ve written about don’t work. If they did, why write a book?!

OK, ours was free, but it does come loaded with ideas and promises that many will assume are wrong or just plain inaccurate. I don’t blame you. On the face of it, it was a piece of marketing that has resulted in us receiving a lot of calls and so we are now helping even more people with their websites, it worked.

But I wasn’t happy. I’m guessing that many of you having read the ebook and laughed out loud at the amazing humour, simply closed it down and didn’t do any of the things it suggested. I reckon you thought ‘Hmmm, interesting’, maybe sent it on to your IT friend who said “it’s rubbish” and the consigned it to the recycle bin.

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We get some odd phone calls y’know, usually from people with some very strange ideas about what Google does and how it indexes your website. It’s not their fault, obviously, us techie types have spent the best part of our lives trying to make anything computer related as impenetrable as possible to the layman.

We’ve done such a good job that anyone who does understand what we’re talking about is usually labeled a ‘geek’ or a ‘nerd’. Well, at the risk of embarrassing a few people who read this blog, I’m going to tell you about some of the bizarre things we’ve been told about SEO and then I’ll explain how it should be done.

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We’ve had a fantastic response to the free DIY SEO book and also a whole bunch of questions have been asked, which on reflection is not surprising as the book leaves quite a bit of detail out. So, I’ll try to add to the general knowledge of things through this blog and hopefully de-mystify some of the more complex areas of the whole SEO world.

Tags – what exactly are they?

This question comes up a lot and it is easy to see why. Us web types throw geek-speak around like it’s normal English and we expect everyone to pick up on it and just understand. Well, people don’t and so it’s our task to educate and inform. Here we go…

‘Tags’ can be many things, but when we talk about them in the context of SEO, we generally mention things like ‘Meta Tags’ or ‘Title Tags’ or even ‘Header Tags’. It stems from the basics of how web documents are created. You see, you just view a page and see a bunch of text on it, however in order to format or display that text in a particular way, you need to tell the browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc) to do something to it.

If I wanted to display some of this text in bold, I would add ‘<b>’ before the text and ‘</b>’ after the text. I have therefore ‘tagged’ that text and the browser will know to display it in a nice bold font.

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Last year, around about October, we suffered from a drop in sales. It seems that business was pretty bad all around the place and everyone was holding off on their new websites and SEO. Nobody wanted to risk any money on anything as ‘cutting edge’ as a new website – no sir.

Then the new year came and it kinda picked up a bit. It hasn’t been a great year, but it’s better been than last and things are looking pretty healthy. Then this credit crunch hit the news. I say ‘then’ it hit the news because up until recently when the banks all went fubar and the FTSE dive-bombed, nobody seemed to have noticed that the British economy was taking a turn for the worse.

We’ve been in a downturn for ages though. I mean it, absolutely ages and nobody has noticed. Even the FTSE has been declining, look:

FTSE from October last year

That’s a graph of the FTSE 100 from October last year. Pretty steady decline, i.e. something’s up. Share prices go up, on average and so a downward slide is a ‘bad thing’. This is where business suffers as it’s due to a bunch of crappy profit figures and trade announcements that tends to send the prices down.

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