Google update & social media

As you may recall, we've been doing an seo experiment, trying to get our client on page one for skip hire leicester using only on-page optimisation.

We've had some success, getting to #6 on the first page. However, a recent update (Panda) by Google may be a game changer. Google is now taking greater account of what is termed "user signals" when ranking a website.

"User signals" has been interpreted as "Social signals", meaning how many "likes" and links to your website you have from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. It might also include such things as bounce rates (if people don't "engage" with your website, why should Google send anymore people there, etc).

The implications are that seo has just got harder! You will certainly now need to focus on "social" link building, keeping your "social" profile updated, with more tweeting and "sharing" and extending your social network.

Therefore its time to consider your social media strategy as part of your more general seo strategy. In short, work harder!

Bowl Feeder Sensors from Olympic Automation

Our web design and seo client, Olympic Automation, asked us to add another page to their website. This page is about vibratory bowl sensors, which are used conjunction with vibratory bowl feeders and linear or conveyor feed tracks.

We've had tremendous success with our seo efforts for Olympic Automation, who rank #1 in Google for their key phrases such as vibratory bowl feeders. We expect to repeat this success with this new campaign.

Contact us to see out how we might help your search engine optimisation.

UPDATE - Olympic Automation are now #1 on Google for the search terms 'vibratory bowl sensors' & 'bowl feeder sensors'!

Skip Hire Leicester - an seo experiment part 5

Well, Bakers Waste Services are now 6th in Google's natural search results for the term "skip hire leicester". Three cheers all round - well nearly.

The problem is that while 6th position is normally page one rankings, in this case Google's local search pushes 6th position onto the second page! So, the quest now is to improve Bakers Waste Services' local search rankings.

However, what this experiment does seem to indicate is that things such as page rank, number of inbound links, etc, are not necessarily the key to good rankings. Rather, in this instance it would seem that good, relevant content is the key to success.

The decline of Internet Explorer?

One swallow does not a summer make, & so today's quick gander at my website's Google Analytics does not herald a decisive trend, but ..... for the first time that I can recall, Internet Explorer (IE) is no longer the main browser used to view my Leicester web design company site. Well, its still has the largest market share, just under 40%, but FireFox, Chrome and Safari collectively account for almost 57% of users. A year ago, IE would have had about 70-80% of market share, so that is a considerable decline.

Is my site unique? Is the demographic different? Well, yes and no. Looking at the statistics from some of our client's sites, the decline of IE market share is also visible but not quite so pronounced. The trend appears downward but not uniformly. IE still accounts for approx 60-70% of visitors on some sites but is much lower on others (50-60%). On those sites where IE usage is higher, these sites tend to cater to the B2B user. On those sites where IE usage is lower, their target market is more broadly defined, encompassing B2B & B2C, as well as 'artistic' markets. On one technology consultancy website, Firefox accounts for 51% of visitors while IE only 11%.

As I said at the start, this is too small a snap shot to say definitively that IE is in terminal decline. But one straw in the wind - no Windows based mobile device was recorded in any of the visitor stats on any of the sites I sampled, only iPhone & Android devices were logged. As mobile internet usage grows, IE & its Windows operating system may become irrelevant in mobile market share.

Skip Hire Leicester - an seo experiment part 4

Well, good news for Leicester skip hire company Bakers Waste Services. They are now ranked 13th in Google's natural search results for the search term Leicester skip hire.

So, within less than a month, they have gone from nowhere to page 2, with on page optimisation only. There has been no link building strategy, apart from this one blog. So, that raises interesting questions about the importance of link building - how essential is it, or are quality links the key to higher page 1 rankings?

Watch this space!

Skip Hire Leicester - an seo experiment part 3

We're pleased to announce two developments in relation to this experiment. The first is that a new design of the website has now gone live. The second is that Bakers Waste now has first page ranking for terms such as "skip collection leicester".

So, some significant signs of improvement and it will be interesting to see what influence, if any, the new design has on its Google rankings.

Skip Hire Leicester - an seo experiment part 2

Its been 2 weeks since we started the experiment to get Bakers Waste Services on page 1 for search terms such as "skip hire leicester" using only on-page optimisation and the "power of one" - one external link, that is, this blog.

Well, rankings have improved! Bakers Waste is now on page 2 (from nowhere) for terms such as "skip hire leicestershire" but were still not yet there for "skip hire leicester".

So the quest continues ....

Nuneaton Properties Manager Website

Leicester web design company Fresh Web Services are proud to announce the launch of a Properties Manager powered website, Longshoot Properties. Designed by our friends at R&G Design, the website allows administrators to quickly and easily add new properties and news articles, while tenants looking for property to rent in Nuneaton can quickly find what they want.

Properties Manager is a simple and affordable online property management tool, enabling landlords, estate agents and villa owners to easily advertise their property portfolio online.

Skip Hire Leicester - an seo experiment

I've been tasked with improving the search engine rankings for the term 'skip hire leicester' by a client. So, I've created a single page about skip hire in leicestershire on his website, and was wondering what influence a single blog post on Google's own blogging platform might have on its Google rankings.

This page has some basic information about the type of skips that can be hired and what each skip is best used for. I've not gone in for over the top 'on page optimisations' (like loads of headers, etc) & I've also tried to ensure that all the content is original - ie, not lifted from a highly ranking competitor. So, the page has some good, original and useful content. But good content is not usually enough, especially in a competitive search sector.

Good quality inbound links are usually thought to be key factors in improving page rank. That's one reason why almost all the comments on this blog tend to be spam, with links through to some site or other. The spammers are trying to gain inbound links for their own campaigns. So, I thought I'd experiment with the power of one - one deliberate inbound link.

Todate, this website only has one 1st page Google ranking, for the term 'commercial skip hire leicester'. Domestic skip hire leicester is another key phrase, but the real target is skip hire leicester or leicester skip hire.

So, I'll check back in a week or so & see if this little contribution has had any noticeable effect. Although how I quantify the effect is something I frankly don't know yet!

LiveLink WCM - new roadmap

Well, OpenText recently announced a new roadmap for their LiveLink WCM product. Sometime after announcing its likely demise, it has now risen, not quite Phoenix like, from the ashes and will have a facelift & other cosmetic enhancements. To celebrate, OpenText are now selling new licences for LiveLInk WCM, almost a couple of years after saying no new licences would be sold.

This announcement can't be good news for RedDot, another WCM offering owned by OpenText - it was RedDot that LiveLink users were meant to migrate to. So, not a vote of confidence in RedDot then.

Frankly, if I was an OpenText customer, I'd be more than a little cheesed off, especially if I'd followed their advice and spent big on migrating to RedDot. I'd also be really annoyed if I was a LiveLink developer who had followed their lead & prepared for the end of LiveLink WCM. What now for those that have invested in training and developing LiveLink - RedDot migration services and technologies?

On the upside, LiveLink WCM customers may save themselves quite a bit by not having to consider migration to another platform. On the downside, can they trust OpenText again?

Magento Eccomerce Website Launced

Fresh Web Services are pleased to announce the launch of several websites in recent weeks.

First, is the Magento powered Goldmark Books, selling the beautifully produced books published by the Uppingham art gallery and publisher. This is the first of a series of Magento powered ecommerce websites we will be rolling out for Goldmark Art Gallery.

Our most recent project is a Properties Manager holiday cottage rentals software service, appropriately called LookB4UBook. Those searching for a UK holiday cottage can view videos of the cottages and the surrounding area, as well as viewing pictures and reading descriptions, etc.

Last, but not least, Northampton Probation Trust website is live. Powered by the award winning Joomla!^™ content management system, we were responsible for the design, hosting, training and implementation of the project.

Paypal Scam

I received an email today purporting to be from PayPal, with the subject of "Your account has been limited and will be suspended."

The body of the email is as follows:

        Dear customer,

During our regular screening we have detected that your account 
has been accessed by
different IPs which does not match the IP you've registered 
your paypal account.

PayPal is trying to protect paypal community and your 
account can be
suspended.Please download the attachement, 
read and fill in the form to avoid suspension.
If suspended a copy of your driver license 
will be required and other documents which confirm your identity.

PayPal Validation Department
Message ID 8128F

The attached file is 'Restore Access Account.html' Downloading and completing this form would give these criminals access to your Paypal account. Sending a copy of your driving licence would enable them to steal your identity and Lord knows what else.

So, please be aware and do not reply to such criminal attempts.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

We'll all be watching it on the internet instead - and the advertisers will be chasing online eyeballs. The UK is now the first economy where advertising spend on the internet has outstripped TV ad spend according to a report in the Guardian (online) newspaper.

Will this change the nature of the internet? Possibly - more obtrusive advertising possibly, the decline of amateurism as big bucks crowd out the mom n pop sites, a bonanza for SEO agencies as we all scrabble for Google page one, even more noise and less insight ...

The pace of the decline of 'traditional' TV will quicken as will the growth of the 'synergy' between TV and its online delivery mechanisms. In the UK the Murdoch war on the BBC will grow noisier. It might well be that the real target of Murdoch is the BBC's online presence, which has consistently set high online standards.

Murdoch's abandonment of Labour has more to do with Murdoch's strategy to eliminate competition than it has to do with politics per se, and as the Tories cosy up to Murdoch, they might just throw the old man the bones of the BBC's online output as quid pro quo.

What is certain is that we are witnessing the decline, or perhaps the downgrading, of a once omnipotent medium. For this reason alone, the revolution will not be televised, even if it is taking place within that medium.

Hello Vignette, Goodbye Red Dot

Sometimes one has to feel sorry for a customer base. They buy a product (a difficult and expensive process in the first place), stick with it despite its quirks and its sometimes boneheaded refusal to work, train their staff to use it, and develop systems around it, and integrate it into the core of their business processes. Then, the product gets retired, and the whole shebang starts all over again.

This is undoubtedly the roller coaster ride that some customers of Open Text must feel they've been enjoying/enduring* (* delete as appropriate) in the last couple of years. First Open Text buys the Red Dot Content Management System and retires their previous LiveLink WCM. Not to worry, existing customers are reassured about licence transfers and an easy migration path.

Then Open Text go and do it all over again! This time they buy Vignette and are now retiring Red Dot sometime after 2010. Instead, a hybrid 'Red Vignette' will be unleashed upon their customer base, again with reassurances about licence transfers and easy migrations. This is just as I warned in an earlier posting.

Any migration will be difficult and so will any hybridisation - Vignette is Java based while Red Dot is an ASP/.NET application. Open Text talk of using Vignette as the backend and Red Dot as the front end - great, you now need .Net & Java developers on board if you want to customise your implementation!

So, perhaps your company is forward looking and you decided to train some staff in .NET in order to prepare the way for the eventual migration from LiveLink WCM to Red Dot. Now, lets send them on a Java course as well so that we're prepped for when Red Vinegar comes around. Few companies have such training largesse in the current economic climate - thanks again Open Text.

Does it seem like somebody is taking the piss? You might say this is a valuable lesson that the licence cost is just the start of the expense of owning software. Still, you might think that its also time to start looking at Open Source solutions like Alfresco - which is both an EDRMS and a WCM. Afterall, what's the worst that Open Source could do to you?

Institutional Memory

Recently I was watching an episode of the West Wing, where they deal with the 'institutional memory' of the Bartlett administration and the Santos transition. There is indeed a White House Transition Project for this very purpose, since the US Federal government does not have a permanent civil service in the same was as the UK. New US administrations have always faced the problem of inheriting policies, problems and agendas from the previous incumbents without always knowing the full 'ins and outs' and reasons why certain decisions were made. The government can therefore be handicapped in its approach to these issues.

The importance of the 'institutional memory' was further highlighted to me the other day listening to Robert Peston interviewing the head of Barclays Bank, John Varley. Varley, in response to Peston's question as to why Barclays didn't suffer as much as its rivals in the recent financial meltdown, explicitly referenced the bank's 'institutional memory' of the near catastrophic over exposure to the property market in the early 1990s.

So how do you capture, nurture and learn from your company's 'institutional memory'? For small or family owned businesses, this may not be a problem, but for larger organisations, with higher staff turnover, this can be a problem. After all, when somebody leaves the company, they may take with them 30 years experience and knowledge with them, and the incumbent, especially if an outsider, may be hamstrung without this knowledge and experience.

One method to institutionalise that knowledge is via the exit interview. This has always struck me as too little, too late. Any manager will tell you that the personnel, the human capital, are the most important part of the company, but very little is done to capture and institutionalise their knowledge as part of an ongoing and rationalised process.

Another method is via documentation of decision meeting - minute books, and the like. As a one-time historian, I am very aware how quickly the informational context is lost. I've read many minute books, the context and meaning clear to all who attended but vague and often illusive to readers a generation later.

So, how do we capture the meaning, context and lessons of daily working practice, experience, knowledge and the rationale behind the decisions made? This is something I'll be turning my attention to later.

Offline Advertising is dead - right?

Once upon a time, not long ago, in an office not far from where I'm sitting now, it was once declared that offline advertising was dead! The internet, & Google in particular, had killed it off, it was said.

Well, I'm a skeptical skeptic. Today I received a magazine & out popped a flier from .... Google! That's right, Google is using a traditional marketing flier to advertise the benefits of advertising online with Google! Hmmm, seems the obituary for offline marketing was a little premature?

Simple lesson - if your prospective customers are not using the internet, then you have to use other means to attract them.

Magento How To - override Product Search

We are currently developing a heavily customised rollout of Magento for a client. As part of the modifications, we had to customise the product search within the Admin area. In Magento, this can be done using the 'override' functionality - meaning that core code is left untouched and upgrades shouldn't result in your modifications being overwritten.

To help others get a handle on the correct approach to take when doing this, we've published a guide on the Magento wiki - you can read it here. Please check it out and chip in with any corrections or improvements.

Vignette vs Red Dot = Open Source!

The content management sector has witnessed the start of a consolidation trend that will ultimately leave consumers wondering where their best options lie. Recently Autonomy purchased Interwoven, and now Open Text has purchased Vignette.

In both these cases there had been a fair degree of overlap between the companies. The result is that certain platforms and software are retired. When Open Text bought Red Dot, the casualty was Open Text's own web content management system (WCM or CMS) LiveLink WCM PS. Open Text has since announced the sunset status of LiveLink WCM PS and is offering existing customers licence offers and migration assistance to move to the Red Dot WCM platform.

Now the question is which CMS will Open Text champion - Red Dot or Vignette's rival WCM? Vignette is often considered the more 'enterprise' or 'higher end' offering, but the recent marketing effort undertaken by Open Text to persuade its user base to switch to Red Dot might suggest that Red Dot will win out.

However, if I was either an Open Text or Vignette user, this lack of clarity would be troubling me, especially if I was in the market to replace my existing WCM. My worry would be that I might back the wrong horse and find myself purchasing and implementing a 'legacy' application.

There are alternatives, of course, and open source will be seen by many as the increasingly stable option - less risk of the system being mothballed after a company takeover, the freedom to implement and customise as required, as well as the lower start up costs. Open Source means that you can do more with less, with a greater sense of security that your chosen platform will survive and mature.

Alfresco UK Meetup

Yesterday I attended the Alfresco UK meetup at Sun's UK HQ in Camberley. There were several presentations from customers & partners, as well as from John Newton, CTO & John Powell, CEO of Alfresco.

The elephant in the room was Oracle of course. Both Newton & Powell addressed themselves to concerns about the consequences for Open Source of the proposed Oracle acquisition of Sun. Overnight Oracle would become one of the biggest players in the Open Source arena, even if only indirectly through its ownership of Java & MySQL. Newton was upbeat about the future of both under Oracle, not least because MySQL is fully open source - if we don't like what Oracle are doing, we can use the code to create another 'MySQL'. That said, the fact that were we talking about it illustrates the degree of uncertainty that Oracle's move has caused in the Open Source world.

This uncertainty has consquences. In uncertain times, companies need reassurance when making technology choices. Oracle need to make their position crystal clear with regard to both Java & MySQL - we need actions as well as words. This is a pressing need, because the global recession is actually an opportunity for Open Source solutions to illustrate that they enable companies/Govt departments to do more with less.

The best and most interesting presentation illustrated the last point above. A representative from Islington Council gave an overview of their experience of using Alfresco as a document management and intranet platform. Alfresco was originally thrown into the mix at the requirements analysis stage to act as a 'sanity check' against the three EDRM solutions that were already in use at Islington. In the end only Alfesco met all the requirements - Islington adopted Open Source almost by chance.

Only after adopting and using Alfresco did the opportunities that Alfresco offers for shared publishing, collaborative team working, project dashboards, community forums, etc become apparent. It was then that Islington decided to use Alfresco for their new intranet. Since then their adoption of Alfresco has repaid handsomely.

So, in consequence, perhaps Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun (& Java & MySQL) won't have any real downsides for Open Source, but we need this confirming asap, lest more Islington scenarios are missed due to uncertainty in the Open Source landscape.

New Dawn Fades as Sun goes down

Oracle, the database software vendor, has bought Sun Microsystems. Sun specialised in server hardware and software, but was also behind the Java programming language and various Java related tools and initiatives. Fairly recently Sun had also bought MySQL, the open source database.

So, what are the consequences for us of this acquisition? Well, most open source software uses MySQL as the primary database. Joomla!, Zen-Cart, Magento - to name just three - all use MySQL as the default database. You can add Drupal, and virtually every other open source project to this list.

The key question then is, will Oracle continue to support MySQL or will it allow it to wither as a direct competitor? Is MySQL actually considered to be a competitor by Oracle? The answer to this question will no doubt be a key influence on Oracle's eventual decision.

This decision has consequences for most of us, either directly or indirectly. If our business, website, etc, use open source software, then we may be faced in the future with having to change our database if MySQL goes down. The obvious open source candidate to replace MySQL is Postgress, considered superior by many. However, it is not clear how widespread is the hosting provision for Postgress - almost all hosting plans offer MySQL as a very affordable option, yet Postgress is still not offered by most hosting companies.

There is the real possibility that a fair proportion of open source software will have to be tweaked to use another database (Postgress) and that is again problematical if Postgress provision is limited.

Almost certainly Oracle's acquisition of Sun means we'll see, 'A change of scene, a change of style' with regards to the open source landscape. Whether we'll benefit from this is yet another question.