Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ category

I recently sat in on the Black Hat/White Hat session at SAScon in Manchester and whilst I learnt a few tidbits of information I was very dissapointed that no-one mentioned that you don’t need to have any technical knowledge – all you need is Dreamweaver (in my case Dreamweaver 8).

Obviously, I’m taking the piss and meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I had to have a little chuckle when I saw this in the Right Click menu.
The cloaking option is in fact to stop you moving folders from your local copy to the live server that might not actually be needed on the live website.

On the 9^th April 2010, Google confirmed what everyone had been talking about for months prior – site speed is a factor in search engine rankings.  Matt Cutts commented on this news by, quite rightly, asking people to not panic as this was a minor signal and not to go overboard with it.  He even went so far as to say:

In fact, if you read the official blog post, you’ll notice that the current implementation mentions that fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking.

So it is with great annoyance that a UK Fast, a UK based hosting company has come out with a brand spanking new suit, a box of snakeoil and a shit-eating grin and jumped on the back of this news.  Several of my clients received this email from them: » Read more: I Introduce To You A New Type Of Snakeoil Salesman

It’s been brewing for a long time, and on Friday 26^th March 2010 it quite literally exploded.  Edward Lewis of SEO Consultants decided to test the credentials of Verified SEO –a self-appointed SEM verification service whose sole aim was to let consumers know if an SEM company was reputable by following up claims/testimonials/case studies etc.  The two major problems the SEO industry had with this idea were:

1. No-one had heard of the person behind the company
2. You had to pay $99/month to be verified and that’s simply not impartial!

Needless to say, this was a bad move (particularly with the claims of having industry veterans backing the company).

However, this did get me thinking about whether the industry needs regulation – and more importantly – is it ready for it? seo, seo regulation, accredited seo, verified seo

First off – I’m addicted.  Hats off to Blizzard for creating a truly, immersive and time-consuming game.

When I first started playing World Of Warcraft I didn’t have a clue what an MMO or an RPG game was, let alone an MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) – I was an FPS (First Person Shooter) freak at this point; little did I and the rest of the world know how addictive this game was going to be nor did I know how much it would have an impact on my life in online & social marketing. » Read more: What World Of Warcraft Taught Me About Online Marketing

Working for an online marketing company whose sole purpose & area of expertise is just that, online marketing, it perplexes me when I get involved in a contract where the client has received “SEO” from their design agency.  I’m not knocking design agencies who have an SEO team who actually do SEO, just the design agencies, development companies and web design outfits that simply have Search Engine Optimisation listed on their website along with every other part of online & offline branding, marketing, design and development and normally on a full-flash website to boot! » Read more: What Really Annoys Me? Non-SEO Agencies Who Do SEO (or claim to)