Blog

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all visitors and regular readers of this blog a very merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year.

For me, this year has been a very busy, both physically, mentally and emotionally. I’m therefore looking forward to spending the Christmas break with my family and taking the work free opportunity to kick back and relax, formulate ideas, plans and generally chill out.

Once again, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Alongside my daily work as a search engine optimisation specialist I’m very much involved with the design and development of websites. For the development of dynamic database driven websites and applications my programming language of choice is ASP (Active Server Pages). However, for a long time now I’ve always been plagued by a very irritating SQL/ASP ism which I’ve never been able to find a definitive answer for, until now.

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Recently, I’ve been reading a few articles regarding an algorithm change that Google has implemented and about the way it handles subdomains and subdirectories. This reported change seems to have got many people worried that their subdomains would be removed from the search engine results, but today Google’s Matt Cutts posted an article clarifying the situation on this matter. Read the rest of this entry »

When dealing with the search engine optimisation of a website the issue of duplicate content is something any website owner needs to be aware of, including the causes and correct solutions in dealing with any problems that may arise.

What is duplicate content and why should you be bothered?

Simply put, duplicate content is when two or more web pages or even separate websites contain the same or similar content. But why is this a problem? A search engines aim is to ultimately return the most suitable and relevant results for any given search. For this reason, search engines, particularly Google, apply duplicate content filters to a website should they detect that there’s a possible duplicate content issue on a site. They then give the pages a lower ranking in their search engine results by placing them in a supplemental index. Read the rest of this entry »

This photograph was taken at Tan Y Bwlch train station on the Porthmadog to Ffestinog railway line in North Wales. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to the search engine optimisation of a website it’s commonly known that ‘content is king’. The continued development of a website’s content is a key ingredient if you’re serious about long term search engine results for your websites. As someone working on the online marketing for many websites, one of the most common dilemmas I continually encounter is that of who should take responsibility for the continuing content development of a website. Should it be the client or should it be the SEO consultant as that is what they are being paid for? Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend has seen Google roll out and make public its latest page rank information. This update has been a long awaited event and as with the majority of Google updates has caused quite a stir among the web community and particularly with those working in the field of search engine optimisation.

This David and Goliath update has seen many long established, big name, high ranking websites such as Apple, Microsoft and IBM take a drop in page rank, in some cases from PR10 to PR6 or PR7, while other smaller websites have seen the expected boost in their page rank score. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent holiday to Porthmadog, North Wales offered me the chance to forget about the stresses of everyday work, relax with my family and endulge in my passion for photography. Read the rest of this entry »

Wordpress is one of the leading blog applications around with it’s strength lying in its ease of use and installation. It’s extremely customisable through the use of a whole host of themes and plugins which allow you to easily change the look, feel and behaviour of your Wordpress blog. When setting up this blog these were some of the deciding factors which influenced my decision to choose Wordpress over its other rivals.

Following the recent release of Wordpress 2.3 I was forced to review some of the plugins I used as several were no longer compatible with the new version. In searching for alternatives I managed to turn up a few gems and felt the resulting collection of plugins essential for the successfully search engine optimsation of any wordpress blog. Read the rest of this entry »

I regularly come in contact with many print designers who insist on designing websites as well as promoting their services as web designers or so called ‘interface designers’.

So I’d just like to take this opportunity to say that, in my experience, print designers can’t design websites. Why is this the case though? What does a print designer need to consider when attempting a new website design project? Here are my thoughts on the matter. Read the rest of this entry »