19 Nov

Manchester SEO | December 10th 2009

Category: Seo | Leave a comment

Details of the next Manchester SEO meeting are over here at Shane Jones’ blog

Read more

19 Nov

New Portugal Football kit is Just wrong.

Category: football | Leave a comment

It’s hardly going to look good on the average pie eating beer guzzling Football fan is it?

Read more

19 Nov

Twitter Officially Rolls out Retweet

Category: twitter | Leave a comment

Twitter have officially rolled out the retweet function on their website, as anyone who has been using Twitter via anything but their website will know this is old hat. But anyway its official now.

From Twitters Blog:

We’ve just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know.

You may remember that we shared the mechanics of this feature with developers a while back so they could think about how to work it into Twitter apps. Now we’re ready to start trying it on Twitter. The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we’ll know right away. If things look good, we’ll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100%.

Read more

19 Nov

Google is messing about with sitelinks again.

Category: Google | Leave a comment

The other day Google added another way it displays sitelinks for some searches.

On a Google search for the keyword if you look  beneath the main search result,we see links to various areas of the web site. This would help a searcher in two ways: they can get a better understanding of what the site is about before they visit, and they can take a shortcut from Google to the topic that interests them.

Now Google are changing the goalposts again and providing breadcrumbs as well, this is instead of the green link you see underneath the usual result, Quite why they are doing this is anyones guess.

It doesn’t seem as helpful to me.

From Google themselves

Google usually shows a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each search result to let you know where you’re headed. Today we’re rolling out an improvement that replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new display provides valuable context and new navigation options. The changes are rolling out now and should be available globally in the next few days.

Some web addresses help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site hierarchy. For example, consider a search for the biography of Vint Cerf (Google’s Internet Evangelist). The URL for one result, “www.google.com/corporate/execs.html,” shows that the page is located in a page about “execs,” under “corporate,” which is on the “google.com” site. This can provide valuable context when deciding whether to click on the result.

Often, however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information. For example, consider this result from ProductWiki for the query [spidersapien reviews]:

The URL of this result is “www.productwiki.com/spidersapien,” which doesn’t provide much additional information about the site or this result. Now take a look at the result with the new site hierarchy display:

The new text provides useful information about the page. You can tell that the ProductWiki site has information about many different products, organized in different categories, and you can even tell that Spidersapien is a robot toy. In addition, each phrase in the green line is actually a link. For example, clicking on “Toys & Games” takes you to ProductWiki’s listing page for all toys, and clicking on “Robots” takes you to a list of their robot toys. This way if you realize that you’re interested in a more general category than this specific product (there are a lot of cool robot toys out there) you can easily access information on broader topics.

The host and domain for the site (in this case www.productwiki.com) will always be shown, so you always know what website you’re going to before you click. There’s not always enough room to show the complete hierarchy, so sometimes we use ellipses to replace some of the intermediate levels, like in this result for [how to make granola]:

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you’ll see a series of similar links at the top, “Home> Toys & Games> Robots.” These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called “breadcrumbs,” which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

When we design the way results appear on google.com, our goal is to get you to the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible. Sometimes that means improving how we represent websites, and other times that means giving you new ways to explore content. We’re always happy when we can introduce a feature, like site hierarchies, that does both!

Read more

18 Nov

Problem with our Portfolio

Category: news | Leave a comment

Blimey we seem to have created a bit of a wave on the internet this afternoon, regarding a template that we have used to create our Portfolio pages here on creativesuit.

When we were adding websites to the portfolio, we used as many people do when they are dealing with a static website, a template system. You just retype the text, change the pictures and away you go,  a new page is done. In our haste we appear to have left the words “Search Engine Optimisation” in a lot of the clients, that don’t actually have any search engine optimisation done to them. It was one of those things where we intended to go back and do them properly, like we intended to remove the entire box proclaiming keyword postions, as this was put in to flesh the design out a bit, and quite frankly is a pain in the ass to update, as everyone knows that Google these days bounces round like Zebedee. The site was built a few years ago, when Googles ranking were a bit more stable and we discussed nice things like Google Dances, not nasty things and name calling.

We never have had, or never would have an SEO portfolio. That would be madness, we like to keep our relationships with our Search clients private, and we always will do.

Thanks for the Twitter user @thehodge for spotting the error. We are really sorry if any confusion has been caused by this. To be honest, many of us, you include, dear reader, have probably made mistakes. Mistakes that you hope you cant forget or wished you didnt make to start with. This is one of them…

As a company, we take on board that we are handling people’s work and if we offer SEO to them, we try and deliver just that. I will personally make sure that we revisit clients sites and make sure we are doing the best we can.

Ironically, we’re a few weeks away from a completely new company website, which drops everything that has been complained about anyway.

Read more

9 Nov

WordPress is well known

Category: Another, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

WordPress is well known for its ease of installation. Under most circumstances installing WordPress is a very simple process and takes less than five minutes to complete. Many web hosts now offer tools (e.g. Fantastico) to automatically install WordPress for you. However, if you wish to install WordPress yourself, the following guide will help, and with WordPress 2.7 and future versions, upgrading is even easier.

Read more

9 Nov

Hello world!

Category: Another | Leave a comment

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Read more

22 Sep

Google Confirms what we have known for a long time

Category: Google | Leave a comment

Finally, Google has come out and confirmed that the Keywords meta tag, is not used whatsoever by Google.

We don’t use it, we never have,

But here it is in Black and white

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?

A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.

Read more

16 Sep

We’re Melting. TMC to the rescue.

Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Its September, generally the start of the downward spiral into the doom and gloom of the miserable british winter. But not here in hale, where it seems we’re having a relapse of the short summer we had back in June. Unfortunatley this morning, all hell broke lose when our air conditioning broke in the office. Luckily we have a client for that! Our good friends at “thats my climate” came over and fixed it in a jiffy. So if you need your air conditioning fixing, you know where to go.

Read more

15 Sep

me.uk Domain name registration times

Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Here’s a little snippet of info we picked up today whilst in conversation with Nominet. me.uk domains do not take longer to register than other domains, despite what some registrars will have you think.

The fact that in the who-is database it says “registering domain” for anything up to 3 months, this is actually to do with the registrar not paying for the domain yet.

I hope this helps someone else who has been baffled by it. Like it has myself for the past week.

Read more