Crazy idea: rapping about SEO. A bit of fun but he does make some very valid points!
My favourite is his rap about “conversion”: basically, stop focussing on ranking and hits, and work on converting visitors to paying customers.
Whoever would have thought SEO would have its own budding hip hop star. 
Catalogue|E-Business - one of the leading magazines for online and catalogue retailers has posted an article about using Email and Social Media as your marketing tools in the tough times ahead. These marketing methods are both cost-effective and measurable.
I would also add Search Engine Optimisation into this mix.
Most SEOs will tell you that if your site is built in Flash it will essentially be invisible to Google (and most other search engines).
Thats about to change as Google has announced improved indexing of Flash-based content.
However, as e-Consultancy quite rightly point out, designers should not see this as a reason to build websites totally from Flash: Google still cannot use the tag structure as it can with HTML to work out the importance of keywords through their use in titles, headings and links, so Flash should still be used sparingly.
Also, designers often create Flash-based sites that “re-invent the wheel” when it comes to user interface design, often making sites difficult to use and usually in-accessible to those with disabilities. You also often cannot link to a page within a Flash site as they are all essentially part of the same page.
Advanced Javascript and CSS effects can often help create a feature-rich interface without the need for Flash, but Flash does still have it’s place in certain areas of presentation, not least in streaming video where it is now the most popular format (as seen on YouTube).
If ever you think SEO is just a long list of boxes to tick, you get a wonderful impression of how complicated the search engines’ algorithms are when these odd things happen.
Here in England, we have the option on Google to search “the web,” or “pages from the UK.” Watch what happens to Apple - the world’s 33rd biggest brand - when you check the “pages from the uk” option…
Google Search “Apple”
Google ‘Pages from the UK’ Search: “Apple”
So what’s going on here? Why aren’t they #1 ? Read the SEOmoz Blog for more info and an entertaining read.
Firefox 3 is officially out of beta testing — first release today (17 June) and the team behind it are aiming for a Guiness World Record for the most number of downloads in a 24 hour period.
Firefox has a long and distinguished lineage, all the way back to the Netscape browser which grew out of the Mosaic Browser — one of the first browsers I ever used back in the early days of the web in about 1993. It took Microsoft by surprise then and they took a while to catch up with what was still an inferior offering. Fast forward a few years and fed up with Internet Explorer’s rapidly aging features, lack of support for modern web standards and major security flaws, those of us who use the web a lot moved to the Firefox browser from the Mozilla Foundation. Most of us still use it to this day, even since Microsoft belatedly joined the web standards table with Internet Explorer 7. There is a tremendous community behind Mozilla and also a lot of great add-ons that extend Firefox functionality and make our jobs as web developers and SEO’s a lot easier.
According to BBC News “New features in Version 3 include automatic warnings when users stray onto webpages booby-trapped with malicious code. Also in Version 3 will be “Smart Location Bar” that lets people return to places they have visited even if they have not bookmarked them or cannot remember the full web address. ”
I highly recommend checking it out if you use the web a lot. Get it here.
My favourite add-ons:
Ebay Companion - Ebay features integrated into the browser
Fireshot - take and annotate screengrabs. We find a picture tells a thousand words. Much easier than trying to explain what changes you want making in words!
Web Developer - lots of tools for looking more deeply at website code: one for the geeks (this must be popular as it is #1 in Google for the search “Web Developer”!)
I would also recommend SEO Quake but unfortunately that does not yet work with v3. I’m sure it will soon and it integrates a load of useful SEO tools into the browser so they are just a few clicks away.
Loads more add-onscan be downloaded here.
Any other Firefox users like to share their favourite add-ons?
Congratulations to Dave Haygarth and his wife Kate who have just received delivery of a baby daughter! Elsie Annice was born at 13.06 on Saturday 24th of May.
Mother and baby are well, and Dave and Kate are looking forward to a few sleepless nights
Sometimes people can tend to put so much effort into design and layout that content suffers. Even worse, text content’s great, design and layout are great, but your visito think… ‘okay then… what now?’
Your website - and particularly your business website has got to strongly motivate people to do something before they click away. Some people can spend literally thousands of pounds on state of the art sites, Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click, but when someone gets there, they just go out through the same door.
Great blog post on this here containing 34 incredibly strong Calls To Action.
Google Webmasters have provided a handy guide on what to do when moving or updating your web site.
We always recommend these tips as best practice but good to have at hand in a concise article:
Regular readers (yes, you two) may have recalled me advertising my “World’s first MP3 player” for sale a few weeks ago.
I jokingly said it was for sale. Well, the power of the web showed itself in full force.
If you Google “Buy world’s first MP3 player” you’ll see my article at position 3 in the results.
The world’s a big place, and MP3 players are pretty popular, so I guess I should not be that surprised that it has sold for more money than it costs to buy an iPhone, to a US based buyer. Hey, thats all I asked for!
Unlike the iPhone, this only stores 2 or 3 tracks, and is not also a phone!
Recruiter Magazine has recently published an interesting article about search engine optimisation for Recruitment Companies. Nothing new here as far as we are concerned, but a good industry-specific summary of why search engine optimsiation should be important to recruitment companies.
If you are interested in Search Engine Optimisation for your recruitment company website then by all means feel free to discuss this further with Reverse Delta or, of course, with one of the other recruitment web design and SEO companies mentioned in the article.
