SEO: Using keyword semantics

December 13th, 2010 |

So, you’re in the process of optimising your content for a given keyword but have hit the age old problem: How do you make sure your text doesn’t sound like it was written purely for SEO? As a site owner or SEO consultant this is something you’ll deal with on a day-to-day basis.

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Wikileaks: The start of a digital skirmish

December 8th, 2010 |

We all know the story by now: Whistle-blowing website gets a few big scoops, annoys a government or ten and gets itself cut off by the ‘neutrals’ that it relies on. Paypal, Visa and Mastercard have all pulled the plug on helping Wikileaks take donations, while late last week EveryDNS and Amazon put a spanner or two in the works by removing DNS and hosting services respectively.

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New Facebook Profile

December 6th, 2010 |

The new facebook profile is something that’s causing a bit of a stir on this chilly (at least it is in the UK) December morning. As always, change brings annoyance and the reaction from users has been somewhat mixed. Many users have asked, unsuccessfully, to be allowed to go back to the ‘old’ profile design. (When Facebook tell you to ‘try’ the new layout, that doesn’t mean you have the option to un-try it. Once you’ve moved forward there’s no going back!).

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Amazon Route 53

December 6th, 2010 |

Amazon have just announced the launch of their ‘Route 53′ DNS service. Priced at $0.50 per million queries for the first billion and $0.25 thereafter it’s the first step in creating a cost effective DNS lookup service that will eventually integrate with the rest of their offerings. Their aim is to offer a service that is scalable (as with the rest of their cloud services) and, just as importantly, fast. By automatically routing traffic to a location near to the end user look-up speeds should be much faster, meaning a better experience.
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Social Media and SEO

December 2nd, 2010 |

Confirming what has been suspected for a long time, it seems that Google and Bing do take the tweeting and sharing of URLs into account when calculating search engine rankings.
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SEO Basics – Content Optimisation

November 29th, 2010 |

So, you’ve decided what search terms you want to target and you’ve built your site. You thought about SEO and made sure that your site is search engine friendly, but now it’s time to do the time consuming task of content optimisation.
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SEO Basics: Anchor Text

November 23rd, 2010 |

Over the past couple of months we’ve been working with a few people helping teach them to do basic SEO on their sites. One question that often seems to appear surrounds anchor text. What is it? What impact does it have? Why is it so important?
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301 redirects in .htaccess – redirect http to www

November 10th, 2010 |

Search engines think of http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com as completely different domains, which means that you split the potential value of your website content by keeping them separate. Fortunately there’s an easy fix which involves creating what is called a 301 redirect.
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WordPress Maintenance Mode – Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

November 2nd, 2010 |

A very quick note on the WordPress maintenance mode ‘feature’ that many people seem to be having trouble with.
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Too late to get into Social Media?

October 5th, 2010 |

In the past month I’ve been contacted by three or four different companies, based in various countries, all wanting to know how to break into Social Media on a relatively low budget. Being the decent guy I am, free advice was duly handed out (partly in the hope that it’ll help sell our services, partly because I find it interesting).
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