Google Wave – exciting possibilities

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

So the big news in recent weeks has been the presentation of Google Wave, due to be fully launched later in the year. You can check out the presentation here. As with virtually any new search/social media release, there’s immediate talk of it being a *killer – with twitter being the * in this particular […]

The problem with AJAX and Flash – in terms of google indexing

Monday, June 1st, 2009

There’s a great article by Vanessa Fox over at SearchEngineLand.com which, taking its lead from triumphant announcements at the Google I/O conference, discusses the still very real problems some sites have in being effectively indexed and ranked in google and other search engines because of their use of AJAX and Flash – two very useful […]

5 Reasons Writers Need Their Own Websites

Friday, May 29th, 2009

The trouble with being dedicated to your job is that you’re like a horse with blinders on – you don’t seem to enjoy the benefits that peripheral vision can bring. Yes, you are focused on your work and enjoy it so much that you have time for little else when you’re busy, but there is […]

How do you spell s.e.o?

Monday, May 25th, 2009

I was a little dissapointed listening today to the otherwise excellent SEO Rockstars podcast site-review program, with guest s.e.o. expert Chris Boggs, when Boggs pointed out amongst the failings of one site the fact that they had ‘spelt optimization wrong’  [Chris has been in touch to point out he was actually being ‘tongue in cheek’ – […]

Moving domains – an expert experiments

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Back in April Google guru Matt Cutts decided to move his blog from his www.mattcutts.com domain to another that he owns, www.dullest.com, changing host and ip address at the same time. All things that can have an impact on how your website performs both for visitors and for search engines. Now he’s moved it back, […]

Authors Beware – a common mistake made by self-publishing authors

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

We’ve started work on a site for a self-publishing author recently, who already had a basic site setup at one of the more prominent free website networks for authors. He has his own domain name, and – frustrated at how poorly his site has worked thus far, in terms of search engines in particular – […]

Google’s Wonder Wheel

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

Google are rolling out various search options that, in theory, will change the way you search for things. It’s unclear how widely available they are at the moment, but plenty of people are seeing a small ‘show options’ link at the top of their search results, which opens up  a new page of tools to […]

Content ownership – the biggest myth online?

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

.Net magazine have a good series where they pose a question to various online professionals. Their latest one is on ‘The biggest myths online’. The answers are interesting (though to be taken with a pinch of salt, given that these are experts reasonably enough suggesting that the biggest risks online relate to their own areas […]

Twitter turns its back on advertising

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

The big question that has hung around Twitter – like many other startups (and remember, the micro-blogging service is scarcely three years old) – is how will it make money? The conventional approach has always been around advertising. The other big social networking names Myspace and Facebook have both based their business models around advertising […]

#wossybookclub teaches some twitter lessons for authors online

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

The power of twitter (and social networking / online presence in general) to shift books has been forcefully demonstrated by the almost impromptu launch of the #wossybookclub. Jonathan Ross, the tv celebrity who tweets using @wossy and has over 250,000 followers, decided last week to set up a book club on twitter. Browse over to […]