Don’t forget about local search

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

There’s a good article posted by Nine by Blue’s Vanessa Fox (who, when working for google was responsible for google’s webmaster central), about why restaurants should care about local search. Amongst the key points that it makes is that your business needs to take on a holistic approach to its online presence, not concentrating solely […]

Free Content isn’t the problem – free advertising is the model killing online media

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Following on from the earlier post about Smashing Magazine’s cash crisis, and the extraordinary measures they’re taking to raise funds, and in response to a comment made there, it struck me that while there’s plenty of talk about how free content is an outdated and unworkable model, hardly anyone talks about the real elephant in […]

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 […]

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’ – […]

Matt Cutts is a big fan of Google’s ‘Spellmeleon’ – should you be too?

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

The head of Google’s web-spam team, Matt Cutts has been talking about some features that are already in google’s search results, though you may not have noticed them. In particular he’s been talking about the google spell-checking features – giving us a glimpse into the internal workings by revealing two different features and their inhouse […]

Learning a lesson from Facebook’s localisation into Hindi

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Localisation is the over-technical term used by software developers to describe the translation of their programs into other languages. It serves a purpose, though, to stress that translation is far more than simply substituting words from one language to another. For a program to work in different markets different cultures need to be taken into […]