At a recent seminar we held in Birmingham, we laid down the gauntlet to people who wanted to increase their site rankings. We started a bit of a competition to get people actually doing this stuff because we had an idea that most people still don’t put into action what they learn.

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We all love animals (aside: I don’t) and we all think that using them in advertising to win the ‘cute’ vote is a good idea (aside:I don’t think that either) but sometimes you can take it too far as a Russian company did this week when they thought a parasailing donkey would win them friends. (more…)

There seemed to be a frenzy on a few weeks ago for the new iPhone …

This has caused some queuing outside the O2 shops across the UK. Apple seem to be quite clever in the way they use scarcity to build their brand and there’s some kind of assumption that it must be amazing because it’s hard to get hold of one.

Doesn’t really work on me, I just carried on walking past the queue. (more…)

Back in 2007 Prince upset a lot of traditional media outlets by giving away his album “Planet Earth” for free on the front of the Mail on Sunday. At the time there were predictions that this could seriously backfire and lead to his albums being pulled from stores as people simply stopped buying them. You could see their point – traditional music outlets were and still are being ravaged by the popularity of music downloads, but did it hit Prince in the pocket?

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Just bought an iPhone? Found out it doesn’t work when you hold it in your left hand? Yeah, so have thousands of others. (more…)

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. (more…)

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

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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