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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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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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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Your website is your ambassador on the net. It’s what Internet users see when they’re looking for your product or service, if that visitor doesn’t like what he or she sees, they’ll go away.

So why do you simply put your site up and forget it? Why are so many websites under-valued, abandoned and left to rot while your competitors’ sites are happily sweeping up all your potential customers. There are millions of people using the Internet every day, and a lot of them are looking for your products - you need to be attracting them to your site.

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As a dedicated Twitterer (join me here - http://twitter.com/andycal), I have been following with interest the ways that people use the medium to interact and market their services, websites and products.

Sticking with SEO for now, one subject that came to light was how to build links to your own site. If you have read the free DIY SEO book, you’ll already know a little bit about link building and how it can affect your site positively. Essentially, any site that has a link to your site will generate a little bit of ‘rank’ for your page. Some SEO people call this ‘link juice’ and you’re looking to get as much ‘link juice’ as possible.

But how do you get these links?

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In our last newsletter I explained how using our DIY SEO book principles I’d managed to get a completely new website on to the first page of Google within a couple of weeks. Well, it seems that if you type ‘Birmingham Laundry’ into Google, the website I created is actually at number one!

Want to do this for your site?

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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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