The SEO Benefits of Video on your site

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

I recently participated on a discussion (on LinkedIn http://bit.ly/cgHG8R) about the advantages/disadvantages of having a video on your home page. The discussion was an interesting one, bringing up various aspects including accessibility, brain-mapping, and general layout pros and cons, but one thing struck me forcefully – the ‘received wisdom’ that video has no seo benefits […]

Getting your pages indexed in google’s local search – a google.co.uk case study

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

There has always been plenty of debate about the importance of choosing an appropriate tld (top level domain, like .com, .ie, .co.uk etc), and choosing a hosting service based in your main target market. Until recently the common wisdom was that, if you wanted to rank well in a specific local search engine index, like […]

Fixing that ‘Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.’ problem with wordpress plugins

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

The huge range of useful plug-ins for WordPress are a contributing factor to its huge popularity both as a blogging platform and as a content management system. The great thing about the plugin system is that – in theory at least – it’s dead simple to setup. You upload the plugin to your plugins directory, […]

Shortening the_excerpt in wordpress with substr

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Things have been very busy here for the last couple of months, so sorry for the lack of posts. We hope to resume normal posting shortly. In the meantime, here’s a quick and simple wordpress tip that’s come in handy for us so we thought it would be good to share. One common problem you […]

Google puts Premiership and Serie-A football fixtures at top of serps

Friday, August 21st, 2009

It seems that Googlehas suddenly  subscribed to that famous old adage of Bill Shankly’s – football is not a matter of life or death, it’s more important than that – given that they’ve started pushing Premiership, and Serie-A fixtures to the top of their serps (search engine results pages) for searches using city names that […]

Alice Hoffman blasts reviewer on Twitter

Monday, June 29th, 2009

There’s an interesting story brewing on Twitter at the moment, as best-selling author Alice Hoffman has taken to task reviewer Roberta Silman for her review of The Story Sisters, Hoffman’s new novel. There are countless blogs and twitter profiles talking about Hoffman’s reaction – she tweeted up to 27 times about the review, going so […]

Want more followers on twitter? One simple tip

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

If you’re using Twitter to promote yourself / your band / your novel / your conference etc it’s obvious that you would like to have a large amount of followers. There’s one single thing, more than any other, that puts us off following people on our various twitter accounts, and it’s a simple thing that […]

Google makes advances in image recognition

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Google has just published an interesting research paper which suggests that they have made big advances in the image-recognition software field. At a computer vision and pattern recognition conference in Miami recently, Jay Yagnik, google’s head of vision research claimed that their new system has had an 80% accuracy in identifying untagged images of up […]

Twitter trashes skewed Daily Mail poll

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Right-leaning British newspaper The Daily Mail found itself with egg on its face on Friday as one of its infamously non-neutral polls was targeted by psychologists on twitter. The poll which had the decidedly non-neutral question ‘should the nhs let gipsies to jump the queue?’, raised the ire of a number of psychologists who as […]

Self-Publishing? What should you pay for your website.

Friday, June 19th, 2009

We’ve already pointed out one horrendous experience had by a self-publishing author (who paid his publisher over ten-times the going rate to register his preferred domain name, and then found that they had actually registered it to themselves). Browsing about we’ve come across another mistake that authors/novelists using self-publishing companies can make. They presume that, […]