… According to Fifa, it didn’t…

This was the joke banded around yesterday after the terrible decision of disallowing England’s second goal even though it was a foot over the line. There was uproar for about 20 minutes, until German scored their third and fourth goal to finish England off.

After 90 minutes, when all was said and done, it was the poor performance people we’re talking about. Not the fact that the goal line technology should be upgraded and they should allow the referee to watch replays. Read the rest of this entry »

Just bought an iPhone? Found out it doesn’t work when you hold it in your left hand? Yeah, so have thousands of others. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s sometimes difficult to find an analogy between the normal day-to-day work that us SEO types get up to and what goes on in the news and then other times something happens that just drops a peachy blog item in your lap. Such a thing happened this morning as the analysis of the England performance unfolded on BBC news and various pundits were ask for their opinion.

I suddenly realised that our love of the England team is pretty much related to our love of SEO. Bear with me, it’s not as odd as it sounds…

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I’ve just subscribed to .Net magazine. For us web designers, it’s a great source of inspiration.

I had put off subscribing for a few months because I thought to myself “HOLD ON, all this information is available on the internet”.

However, each time I go into the newsagents, I pick it up and read it. There is still something really relaxing and inspiring about the printed word. Maybe it’s the tactile nature, maybe it’s because you can just take the magazine anywhere… I don’t know, I just know that people love to read magazines. Read the rest of this entry »

We have a rule when selling our products – the customer should really need it. For example, if you want some search engine optimisation for your website which doesn’t have any prospect of making you money, then we’d probably say “really, no, what’s the point?”.

However, I’ll be honest, if we can see that you can make money from it then we are happy to explain how and why you should invest in said work. Marketing is great for those who want to sell stuff, it really is, but some companies have taken marketing to a whole new level and some new advertising campaigns are admirable and offensive in equal measure.

Dettol is one such company that has drawn a line in the ground, some metres away from the current line, and then jumped over it. Leaped, even.

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Just when you thought your search results were fast enough and fifty billion pages of information would see you through to the end of the week, Google goes and makes a change that means every-thing’s faster and there’s more of it. Damn, how will I fit it all on my iPad???

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Being a hectic business owner, I run out of time to do the simple things like just getting my hair cut. So this morning I grabbed the opportunity when I drove past and noticed they’d opened up early.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I have my haircut the conversation can go one of three ways. What’s going on in the world, where am I going on holiday or what do I do for a living.

People are already fed up of talking about the England goalkeeping fumble against the USA, so he skipped that and the holiday chat and opted to ask me what I do.

Now I usually just say we create websites. Most people know what a website is so you can pass the time while he chops my hair into shape. But I thought i’d be daring and tell him ‘we help companies get found on Google and get more business’.

Most people obvioulsy use Google, but I never really know whether people really understand about Google and how it works.

The hairdresser looked at me with a mix of puzzlement and sadness and then said “it’s hard for us on Google because our company name starts with a V so we’ll be down the bottom of the list”.

Now, i’m not critisising the guy. He has more important things to be thinking about than page rank.

But it struck me that some people still assume that Google works like a giant Yellow Pages. Well, it doesn’t.

I just wanted to put that straight.

Google is, however, pretty complicated in the way that it does rank sites, and here’s some blog posts from the past to help you work out what you should be doing if you want to get your site higher up Google:

Getting Started with SEO

Reciprocal linking and its role in SEO

Getting on page one of Google

An easy way to get some good Google link juice

Don’t guess with your marketing – measure and test

Splash pages are utterly pointless. There, I’ve set out my stall and I’m quite proud of my stance.

Now, if everyone believed what I said religiously then I’d firstly not have much to write about here and secondly I’d be a millionaire many times over. I’m not rolling in cash and in the most part people ignore me, so I’d better start explaining my position.

A splash page is a single page that greets the unwary Internet surfer when they visit a web page and it usually (in the least offensive cases) has a nice picture and a ‘click here to enter’ button. What it attempts to do is to impress you with their ability to draw a picture or have a nice animation of a bird or something, I’m not sure exactly why, they just do.

Anyway, in some cases they reach new levels of turpitude by making us listen to some music whilst we scramble across our keyboard for the ‘mute’ button. This usually ends up with my CD being ejected by mistake due to the habit of many laptop manufacturers of making their buttons invisible until touched. Clever, that.

That’s beside the point, what I’m trying to explain is that splash pages are absolutely and without exception an annoying part of the web that I really thought had gone away for good. But they’re still around and appear to be growing in popularity.

But why? What is it with companies who feel they have to inflict their own brand of multi-media hell on those that simply want to have a good look around a site? Why are you doing this to us? WHY?

Even worse are those that insist on using Flash. I like Flash a lot, but only when used sparingly. Flash is superb at getting information across to people in interesting ways and it’s pretty much the best method of viewing multimedia content, but when overused it just gets in the way.

When I view a website I just want to view the information I came to see and then do something with that information. If I have to wait for a flock of seagulls to whizz across the page until a phone number is revealed or even worse – before the page with all the text on can appear then I’m just going to go somewhere else.

And herein lays the rub. People want to get to information quickly and without hindrance and if you put barriers in their way then they will simply go back to the pool of 50-billion or so other websites to find one that does service their needs.

If you have a splash page then do yourself a favour and be done with it. Cast it out into the great trashcan on the web and let your website free so people can enjoy it in all its splendour. Web design doesn’t need splash pages and neither do you!

Unless you’re a Martian then I’m pretty sure you’ve heard about Twitter. Surely, if you’re turned the telly on in the last few months, there would have been some mention of this social networking phenomenon that has taken the world by storm. Even David Cameron uses it, it’s that cool (or not).

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Web design isn’t just about how pretty a site looks. In fact, it’s only a bit about how pretty it is and more to do with functionality and certainly, a gorgeous looking site won’t help you in the search rankings. However, even though people spend a fortune on great looking designs, they go and ruin their search engine chances by mucking up on the simplest of things.

One such thing is canonical URLs.

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