Fuse Optimisation

SEO vacancy advertised in a robots.txt file

2012-01-04T12:36:00.002Z

Where better to put a job advert for an SEO position?

The SEO Rapper

2011-12-28T12:11:00.003Z

The SEO Rapper teaches us how good design improves rankings and consequently conversions.

Did you ever imagine you'd hear the lines

"do your layout with divs make sure that it's aligned
please don't use tables even though they work fine"

"when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker"

in a rap song? If you enjoy absorbing SEO information through the format of rap then you can also try his other masterpiece Pagerank or perhaps his battle with the PPC MC

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The 'Reasonable Surfer' patent

2011-12-15T13:28:00.002Z

Google's recent patent, dubbed the 'Reasonable Surfer' is making the SEO community re-evaluate the way internal and external linking is carried out on a site.

For more information see SEO by the Sea and SearchEngineLand

insurethebox on YouTube

2011-11-29T11:09:00.003Z

Optimising for the most popular video platforms on the web is more about social networking rather than traditional SEO. YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion have the largest share of this market with 82%, 9% and 4% respectively.

I'll be using insurethebox's videos to illustrate where improvements can be made and where the optimisation is working well.

insurethebox | Fitting the Box

The first things to consider are the standard SEO factors of title, description and tags. insurethebox are a car insurance company selling a more hi-tech type of insurance policy which involves fitting a telematics box in each car which through the use of GPS and accelerometers can record how far you drive and how well you drive. The title in this case should read something along the lines of

"insurethebox car insurance | Fitting the Box"

The description should ideally be 2 or 3 sentences, roughly 20 words and the tags should include somewhere between 5 to 10 words.

insurethebox | Fitting the Box

After title, description and tags, the next most important aspect of ranking well on YouTube involves all of the social media factors such as likes/dislikes, views, shares, subscribers, embeds and comments. This video has 13 comments and nearly 9,000 views which will help with the rankings on YouTube and also in the Google search engine.

insurethebox | Miles

This video has no description or tags, but does have 3 likes and nearly 7,000 views. With a more optimised title and added description tags, it would probably become the company's most popular video on YouTube.

Driver of the Year 2011 at Rockingham | insurethebox

This video, despite being the most visually exciting that insurethebox have posted on YouTube, only has 240 views, however overall their YouTube channel has approaching 30,000 views across all the videos which means using YouTube they have reached out to a large number of potential customers.

Over the next few weeks Fuse will be working on the video optimisation to see how we can further promote and improve the optimisation on these videos and future videos in the pipeline. We'll keep you updated.

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Google's Webspam Team is Run by Stick Men

2011-11-29T09:15:00.004Z

Matt Cutts asked his followers on Google+ to suggest what he should wear for his halloween costume. One follower suggested the black hat stick man from xkcd.

Google Analytics in Real Time

2011-11-16T15:57:00.001Z

How can you not be impressed with Google's real time analytics

A truly staggering free offering from Google

Google algorithm update affects 35% or websites

2011-11-07T10:47:00.000Z

Google announced "a significant improvement" to their ranking algorithm at the weekend. They predict the change will affect 35% of websites. The aim of this latest change, currently known as Google Freshness,' is to determine when to serve up 'fresh' search results for users who are looking for information on hot topics or recent events and when to present older results where they are more relevant to the users search query.

The change appears to give more weight to pages with recent timestamps. This means website owners would be well advised to re-visit the frequency of blog posts and how rss feeds are syndicated.

For more information watch Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz discussing the change with Mike King from iPullRank.

Analyse followers using FollowerWonk

2011-11-03T13:14:00.001Z

FollowerWonk allows you to analyse twitter accounts and extract data about any account's followers, to see which user or which user's tweets are the most influential or reach the widest audience.

The 'Analzye Followers' tool can be used to track your own twitter account or your competitors accounts. The data is presented in a pie chart showing a variety of stats including how many tweets an account's followers have made,

or how recent their last tweet was.

The 'Search bios' tool allows you to quickly find twitter accounts by specific keywords in their bios.

If you allow FollowerWonk access to your account you can use the follow button next to each user's account.

Google hide keyword data for search but not Adwords

2011-11-01T09:18:00.001Z

If a user is logged in to their Google account, performs a search and then clicks on your website in the organic search listings, the keyword or phrase they used will no longer show up in Google Analytics. But if a user clicks on an advert, the keyword/phrase is still being passed to Adwords.

Logged-in searches will now use the https protocol which makes search for secure but is going to make it difficult for website owners to distinguish between the different types of visitors to their sites, for example they will no longer be able to tell which users searched for their brand name and which found their site looking for a category of product or piece of information.

Read more on the Google Analytics Blog here

Google buys restaurant, hotel and shopping review site Zagat

2011-09-12T17:25:00.001+01:00

Zagat Guides, orignally a publisher of printed pocket restaurant and hotel guides for over 100 cities worldwide, has been bought by Google. The quality of the reviews and ratings on Zagat means Google will no longer have to scrape reviews from other sites such as Yelp.

When the data is integrated into Google Local search, Google will be able to provide the best restaurant, hotel and shopping recommendations and reviews in the industry.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google Maps and Location services, praises Zagat on the Official Google Blog. "Zagat provides people with a democratized, authentic and comprehensive view of where to eat, drink, stay, shop and play worldwide based on millions of reviews and ratings.

"For all of these reasons, I'm incredibly excited to collaborate with Zagat to bring the power of Google search and Google Maps to their products and users, and to bring their innovation, trusted reputation and wealth of experience to our users."

Greenpeace fights VW on Facebook

2011-09-08T13:09:00.001+01:00

Greenpeace started a campaign today to turn Volkswagen away from it's "dark lobbying practices" against climate change reform.

Facebook users are being encouraged to visit VW facebook pages from around the world and register their protest.

SEO Periodic Table

2011-08-24T11:21:00.003+01:00

I'm a huge fan of Dmitri Mendeleev the Russion chemist, inventor and creator of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements.

Sso when I saw Search Engine Land's SEO Periodic Table, I couldn't fail to be impressed with the way, like Meddeleev's table, it simplifies and unites a wide range of complicated factors in an easy to understand graphical form.

Visit the article on Search Engine Land's website to read more.

Angry Birds added to Google Plus

2011-08-15T11:40:00.001+01:00

This weekend saw Google's competition with Facebook step up a notch with the addition of games to Google+.

Opening the games tab displays the first 16 games available on Google+. Below the games you can find a 'Games Stream' which keeps you up to date with what you and your friends have been playing, achievements earned and other information provided by each game manufacturer.

Visit the Google+ Project to find out more about Google Plus

Google Plus for Business.

2011-07-22T12:03:00.000+01:00

Google Plus for businesses is due to be launched in the next few months according to Christian Oestlien the Google+ project manager.

In the meantime businesses are encouraged not to create accounts as private individuals. Google has been removing accounts for businesses as they breach the terms of Google Plus.

How Twitter tracked the News of the World scandal

2011-07-13T15:11:00.000+01:00

The Guardian analysed half a million tweets sent with a hashtag of #notw throughout the crisis. Click here to watch the frenzy unfold.

The Pope concedes that Facebook is a more important social network than the Catholic Church

2011-06-29T10:01:00.003+01:00

The Pope used an iPad to send his first tweet yesterday.

His Holiness also conceded that the Catholic Church is no longer the most important social network in the world in the description of their new Facebook app, Pope2You.

"Pope2You for Facebook lets you receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world. So you can meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures, receive his messages of congratulations through “virtual postcards”. The postcards can be sent to your “friends” on Facebook and the application can be shared with anyone."

Pope2You also includes a YouTube channel and an iPhone app.

3 ideas for optimising landing pages

2011-06-28T17:23:00.005+01:00

Using Eye Contact

We've known for a long time through trial and error that images of faces capture customers attention, especially if they are making eye contact.

But did you know that you can also use faces to guide people to important content, headings and calls to action. Read this blog post written by James Breeze from UsableWorld.

Usability testing of 106 people illustrates that not only will customers focus on a human face, but they will also look at what the person in the ad is looking at.

Testimonials

Using testimonials on landing pages immediately generates trust with visitors to a website and can be incredibly effective in converting visitors into paying customers.

Assurances

If your site has accreditations or is a member of a professional organisation, place 'trust icons' as close to your call to action as possible. A quick search for "London Plumber" found a site which illustrates this point well.

This has been proven to work with security certificates, credit card logos and industry awards.

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Google's new voice search

2011-06-15T16:41:00.000+01:00

Google has released Voice search for desktop PCs. All you need is Google Chrome 11 or higher and microphone. Voice search can speed up the time it takes to find what you're looking for, especially if your search term is long such as "Magento developers and search engine optimisation in West Sussex" and your typing speed is slow.

Voice search also has an advantage when you're struggling over the spelling of crepuscule or sesquipedalian. It may also be helpful when your hands are otherwise occupied such as cooking or knitting!

If search by voice is not appropriate perhaps the new search by image feature will help. Simply drag an image from a webpage or the desktop into the search box and Google will do the rest

Yahoo, Bing and Google join up for new search project

2011-06-07T10:41:00.001+01:00

The three search giants have joined hands and launched a new project called schema.org.

Schema.org explains that "many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data.

Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web.

Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure."

Specific schemas have been developed and documented for many different types of data such as books, movies, TV programmes, local businesses, restaurants and general products. There are also embedded 'non-text' objects for audio, video and images.

Inside Search - New blog launched by Google

2011-05-19T14:34:00.001+01:00

The new Google blog Inside Search has been launched today.

Google describes the subject matter of the blog as a place where "you’ll find regular updates on our algorithms and features, as well as stories from the people who work to improve Google every day."

The new blog will take the place of This Week in Search as users prefer updates as they happen rather than a weekly summary.

Google Reading Level

2011-05-16T17:19:00.005+01:00

Google have added a new feature to their search results to help users find web pages suitable for their reading level.

In the left-hand menu find "All Results" and click on "More search tools"

You will see the new tools marked "Dictionary" and "Reading level" Dictionary replaces the old "Define:" command which was used for quickly looking up a dictionary definition.

Reading level however is totally new. Google describes what it can be used for in their help files.

"Sometimes you may want to limit your search results to a specific reading level. For instance, a junior high school teacher looking for content for her students or a second-language learner might want web pages written at a basic reading level. A scientist searching for the latest findings from the experts may want to limit results to those at advanced reading levels."

A few quick tests bring up some interesting results. When searching for the phrase "UK newspaper news," the top two newspapers requiring a basic reading ability are The Sun and The Times, spot on!

The number one spot for the newspaper requiring an intermediate reading ability is The Independent.

I can't help feeling that webmasters will be testing their sites against competitors to see in which category Google has placed their site.

Using Reading Level with the Google "site:" operator

If you use a search such as site:http://www.fuseo.co.uk you can get an overall Google Reading Level score for an entire site. Here is what Google thinks of the Fuse site.

Interestingly when you click to view the basic pages, there is only one. A news story about a gadget called an IdeaPad from the Chinese company Lenovo.

A few experiments seem to suggest that Google has definately got it right. Consider this site search of the CBeebies site, the young childrens (under 5's) section of the BBC website.

And finally, the other end of the spectrum. This is a site search of the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University.

Will Google Reading Level have any affect on the SEO industry

We now know that Google has recorded the reading level of every websiste indexed. It follows that it will also have an idea of the general reading level of all sites in a particular industry or niche. With data such as this Google could use it in a number of ways. For example, sites in the middle of the 'bell curve' of reading level may be favoured above those at the extremities. Or perhaps the reading level of search phrases may be used to match the person searching to the right level of website.

Fuse relaunch the YouClaim personal injury website

2011-05-06T12:14:00.000+01:00

Fuse are proud to announce the relaunch of the YouClaim website.

YouClaim are the leading online compensation claim website dealing with personal injuries such as whiplash, accidents at work, asbestos claims, car accident compensation and all other types of no win, no fee claims.

With a good customer experience as the main focus, Fuse have been able to present the huge wealth of information available on the site in a way which no longer overwhelms visitors.

Fuse designed and developed the website in 2002 and have been managing the SEO campaign right from the start. Many of YouClaim's key search phrases have been at the number one spot in Google for over 5 years so it has been crucial to maintain the SEO integrity of the site.

Careful analysis and optimisation of the site structure, incoming links, 301 redirects, seo friendly expanding 'divs', optimised images and cleaner code should all help the site maintain the high search engine rankings that it currently enjoys.

The compensation calculator has been rebuilt in 3DMax and displayed using Adobe Flash, bringing it up to date and reflecting the new site colours and design. (see left)

The initial signs for the site are good, page load times are below 1 second (0.7s at the last test) and Fuse will continue to monitor bounce rates, average time on site and pages per visit to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Google +1

2011-04-20T11:26:00.004+01:00

Google are trialling their version of a Digg or a Facebook 'like' +1 is Google's attempt to break into the social bookmarking sector. In the trial, each website in the search results has a +1 button next to it and each time a user searches for a particular product, the results will indicate not only sites that the user has +1'd themselves but also sites which have been +1'd by friends in their (Google) social network, i.e. contacts from Gmail, Google Talk and Buzz.

The increase in popularity of social media has forced Google to use some of its metrics such as diggs, likes, tweets and retweets in their search algorithms. The use of these metrics allows Google to deliver search results for events as they happen, something they have been criticised for in the past, particularly after Michael Jackson's death when Twitter became the only site for users to turn to for the laterst information online.

Google now has all the pieces needed for a social network (Google profiles, Gmail, Buzz, Google Talk, +1, Android and an app store) but still nothing to link them all together.

Google have stated that +1 will not be used as part of the search algorithm at launch but it is something they will be starting to look at.

We’ll also start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals we use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, including social signals from other services. For +1's, as with any new ranking signal, we'll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality over time.

See the Webmaster Central Blog for more information
Opt in to +1 here
You will be able to add a +1 button to your site here

Google Panda rolled out for all English language users

2011-04-12T17:03:00.000+01:00

The Google Panda algorithm update was rolled out to all English language Google users around mid-afternoon yesterday (10th April 2011.)

Overnight reports which ran here at Fuse are showing all our clients sites gaining significantly in rankings.

We will be analysing the impact of the new Panda algorithm on visitor numbers for all our client's sites once we have a full day of Analytics data to work with.

New Magento eCommerce mobile phone site launched

2011-04-05T14:21:00.001+01:00

Fuse have launched their latest Magento 1.5.0.1 site, www.tuffphones.co.uk

With a whole host of tweaks to the core Magento code, the Tuffphones site is now up and running.

Tuffphones sell tough, almost unbreakable phones for customers in construction, building, operators of heavy machinery and other trades, but the largest customer base seems to be those interested in outdoor pursuits such as snowboarding, skiing, sailing and mountain climbing.

Read more about tough phones and Tuffphones!

Google's April Fools Day Roundup

2011-04-01T10:20:00.004+01:00

Mail Goggles

For people prone to sending drunken late night messages via Gmail which they later regret, Google has created a foolproof way of detecting whether you may be too intoxicated to be responsible for your actions.

A number of simple mathematical problems allows the software to detect your blood alcohol level.

Google explains. "Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together.

"Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help. "

The Voice-alyzer

Following the same theme, the Google Voice-alyzer protects you from sending out poorly thought out texts and making drunken late night phone calls.

"Ever wake up after a long night and see you called a bunch of exes but don't remember what you said? We're sure you haven't, but, well, we've heard it happens. Quite a bit.

"That’s why we’re excited to announce that today we’re launching the Voice-alyzer setting to hopefully prevent this from ever happening again.

"The next time you know an eventful night is in store, head to the Calls tab in Google Voice Settings. Check the “Enable Voice-alyzer” box, and set the hour that you want the feature to go into effect."

Gmail Motion

Introducing Gmail Motion -- now you can control Gmail with your body!

"Gmail Motion uses your computer's built-in webcam and Google's patented spatial tracking technology to detect your movements and translate them into meaningful characters and commands. Movements are designed to be simple and intuitive for people of all skill levels.

"Using Gmail Motion is not only safe but also healthy and fun. As with any physical activity, certain precautions are recommended.

"First, make sure to clear the area around you. Second, try to take short breaks every 30-40 minutes, just as you would if you were typing. And finally, take time to stretch after each session to give the muscles you'll be using some relief."

Google Discusses the Panda Update

2011-03-13T09:37:00.001Z

Do you think you have been affected by the Panda update? Google has been answering questions over on the Google Webmaster Central help forum

'Panda' monium

2011-03-08T14:46:00.001Z

Wired.com have published a question and answer session with Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts about the new Google algorithm changes. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land had named the update 'Farmer' as its main purpose is to target content farms but Amit Singhal explained that Google have named it internally after one of their engineers, his name is Panda.

Cutts and Singhal explain how after the Caffeine update, the Google index grew quickly, and pages have been crawled at a much faster speed. This led to the addition of a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good.

"The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow."

The spam teams and the engineers have come together to produce the new Panda algorithm and Cutts and Singhal are pleased with the results. When they compared the data from their new algorithm to the user data from the Chrome Site Blocker they found an 84% overlap which showed they were on the right track of providing users with better quality search results.

New Google algorithm combats content farmers

2011-03-01T09:52:00.000Z

In an effort to combat the effect of 'content farms,' Google have announced the roll out of a new algorithmic change in the USA which has affected the rankings of 11.8% of sites.

Sistrix has been monitoring the effect of the update, known as "Farmer," on a dataset of one million keywords. Their list of the top 25 'losers' includes a number of popular article submission websites including wiseGEEK and eZineArticles.

UK website owners are expecting to see the effects of Farmer over the coming weeks. On the Official Google Blog, Amit Singhal states.

To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.

Libyan unrest Twitter mashup

2011-02-23T09:04:00.003Z

@Arasmus has created this map using reports from trusted accounts on Twitter. Each post is reviewed manually before being added to the map. There is currently no independant media in Libya, so Arasmus's mashup is perhaps one of only a handful of methods for understanding the full extent of the Libyan protests.

Google Maps enthusiast Virender Ajmani has created a realtime mashup which gives live tweets from Bahrain, Libya, Iran and Egypt.

Ajmani has also created a Google Maps mashup of tweets from the area hit by the recent earthquake in New Zealand.

Major American online retailer punished for black hat SEO

2011-02-16T12:12:00.000Z

In the months leading up to Christmas 2010, J. C. Penney was out-performing all retailer's websites for hundreds of search phrases such as skinny jeans, furniture, tablecloths and hundreds more. They even ranked higher than manufacturers such as Samsonite for the manufacturer's own products.

The New York Times asked Doug Pierce an SEO expert from Blue Fountain Media to look at the reasons for J. C. Penney's success in the search engine listings. He found that the company had been using techniques which Google regards as deceptive and had embarked on "the most ambitious attempt to game Google's search results that he had ever seen."

Somebody appears to have bought thousands of links from hundreds of websites all over the internet. They all point back to the jcpenney.com website and use link text which contains the keywords and phrases that the company would like to rank highly for in search engine searches.

Yahoo's Site Explorer is showing 139,000 links which point to the site. Here are three examples

The link text "Furniture Sales" on a Chemistry News website.

The link text "School Backpack" on a diet and slimming website.

The link text "Peronalised Jewellry" on a website about travelling in China

Following the New York Times article, Google has reviewed the J. C. Penney site and given them a manual penalty in all their search engine listings. Where they were number 1 for most phrases it is now difficult to find them in the top 100.

J. C. Penney's response was to claim that it was

"in no way involved in the posting of the links discussed in the article. We did not authorize them and we were not aware that they had been posted. To be clear, we do not tolerate violations of our policies regarding natural search, which reflect Google’s guidelines."

They fired their SEO firm SearchDex. They also said

"Our natural search program has never included paid web links, like those described in the article. It is against our policy, and the fact is, we don’t need to them to build our Google rankings. We have millions of links from our web partnerships and programs that already gave us link popularity. These included links from our 1.4 million Facebook fans"

They later back-tracked and admitted that they do not actually have 1.4 million links from Facebook pages. Read this great post on Search Marketing Wisdom for more details about the Penney responses.

Sites with original content given boost

2011-02-09T08:44:00.001Z

As part of Google's war against web spam, Matt Cutts has announced that a small tweak to the Google algorithm should see sites which copy other sites content pushed down the rankings.

"The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content."

If you believe your site may be affected by these changes, contact us at Fuse. We have a team of specialist copywriters who write original SEO friendly content for clients all over the world.

Bing search results are a cheap imitation of Google's

2011-02-02T13:37:00.001Z

Amit Singhal has posted an in-depth description of Google's sting operation which was carried out to investigate whether Microsoft's Bing search engine has been using the Google search results to fine-tune its own search results.

Google engineers made up 100 nonsense queries such as "hiybbprqag" and inserted fictitious results in their own search results. After a few weeks, the same results were being returned in Bing searches.

Amit Singhal has told the SEO blog that Bing is "pure and simply cheating"

Will Google crack down on paid links?

2011-02-01T09:33:00.000Z

Bruce Clay has warned site owners this week to stop buying links, stating:

I want to be very clear that we think Google perceives deceptive linking methodologies and the ramifications of these actions as deceptive acts worthy of a penalty.

In the middle of 2010 Scott Willoughby from SEOmoz revealled that as an experiment, Rand Fishkin the SEOmoz CEO had bought a number of paid links to test their effectiveness. The results can be seen in the Whiteboard Friday Post titled "We bought links and it worked!!"

There still seems to be no answer as to what happens if you buy thousands of links and point them to a competitor's site. One comment on the SEOmoz article suggests that 99% of paid link penalties are placed on the site selling links rather than those buying but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that sites buying links have also been penalised.

If you would like to report a competitor for buying links, Matt Cutts has explained how to go about doing so here.

Google, Microsoft and Mozilla to add new privacy features to web browsers

2011-01-27T14:23:00.003Z

Updates to the Chrome and Firefox browsers, which include a "do not track" feature, are due to be rolled out early this year.

The US House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce Trade and Consumer Protection concluded that more transparency and consumer control regarding the practice of tracking users' activities are needed to protect consumers.

Mozilla have been working on implementing the recommendation, but believe that for a do-not-track option to work, tracking companies would need to agree not to monitor surfers who have the feature enabled.

Google recently announced an extension called ChromeBlock which gives you an easy way to shut down around 90 different web tracking networks. The extension prevents the networks from personalising their ads which are delivered to your PC and from tracking data about your usage for online advertising.

On the Chrome Web store site Google wrote.

"We recognize that some users are uncomfortable with the personalization of ads that they see on the web and we offer many levels of control over this personalization. Two years ago we launched two ground-breaking innovations, the Ads Preferences Manager and the industry’s first persistent cookie opt-out. Now we’re giving users who don’t want their ads personalized the same permanent, one-click control for advertising-related cookies across our industry."

Microsoft have said that Internet Explorer 9 will include "do-not-track" functionality when it is released early this year, but they are said to have backed out of releasing the option in Internet Explorer 8 after advertisers became concerned about the impact on their business.

Larry Page replaces Eric Schmidt as Google CEO

2011-01-21T10:20:00.003Z

CEO Eric Schmidt has been replaced by google co-founder Larry Page after 10 years in the job.

In a blog post on the Official Google Blog, Eric Schmidt stated that the change was planned over the Christmas period and timed to avoid wild speculation over the latest financial results, (revenue was up 26%.)

The reasons for the change are unclear, but it follows a number of problems with Google's execution and strategy over Android, Google Buzz, Google Wave, the accidental collection of personal data via Wi-Fi and their failure to purchase Groupon, the discount voucher company. The latest rumours suggest that Google is developing its own clone of Groupon called Google Offers.

Google Goggles Upgraded

2011-01-18T09:40:00.002Z

Google has released version 1.3 of Goggles, the mobile application which uses a phone's camera to search the internet by taking a picture.

Search speed has been improved and a number of new features have been added too.

Point your phone at an unsolved sudoku puzzle and your phone will show you an image of the solved puzzle within 5 or 10 seconds.

Barcode scanning of QR codes and EAN13's is now faster.

Contact details from a business card, newspaper or magazine can be quickly imported into the phone as text.

If you are in a bar or at a dinner party and you like the bottle of wine on the table, take a picture and you'll still be able to remember the name of it the next morning.

Google Goggles also allows you to translate text from English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and translate it into many more from Albanian and Catalan to Swedish or Portugese.

The tranlate feature works by taking a picture and drawing a box around the words to be translated then choosing the source and destination languages.

Start thinking about Google Goggles and SEO

Google states that taking images from a computer monitor may not work perfectly, but thinking about Goggles when planning an SEO strategy for retailers is now essential.

Ranking well in Google's image search is the key, so in addition to images of products on a website, a clear image of the product's label, along with good alt tags and a well named image name should be spiderable by the Googlebot.

A user who finds your product in a shop or at a friends house and searches for it using Goggles should then be taken straight to your website.

Changing the UK VAT rate in Magento

2011-01-04T16:10:00.001Z

Login to your Magento Admin interface.

Goto Sales > VAT > Manage Tax Zones & Rates. You should see your VAT rate listed.

Click on the relevant entry and simply change the value from 17.5 to 20.

Google sends Android into Space

2010-12-23T15:25:00.004Z

Google attached Nexus S phones running Android to weather balloons in order to capture data about how the Nexus S's sensors (GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer) perform in extreme temperatures, high wind speeds and changes in pressure.

The Android character was attached to the payload and was filmed by the Nexus phone at 100,000 feet. Google explained, "We secured a nylon load line to the cooler and attached to it a radar reflector, a parachute, and finally, a weather balloon.

Every payload had an APRS transmitter attached to a GPS that was known to work at high altitudes, as well as batteries for power. The remainder of each payload was different for each balloon: some had digital cameras taking pictures and some had video cameras mounted at various angles (up, down, and at the horizon)."

Click here to see the video

The world mapped by Facebook friendships

2010-12-14T17:32:00.000Z

Paul Butler from the Facebook data infrastructure engineering team wanted to visualise the way political borders affect friendships and realationships around the world. This map of the world was created by sampling data from Facebook's 500 million user base.

The map displays friendships as lights. The USA and Europe shine the brightest. Parts of the world where Facebook is banned or has little presence are dark or missing.

Poor customer service can boost search engine rankings

2010-12-09T09:34:00.003Z

DecorMyEyes, an online retailer of contact lenses and glasses stumbled across a unique way of boosting their Google rankings. The New York times story explains that due to their poor customer service, DecorMyEyes received a large amount of negative customer reviews on Get Satisfaction, ComplaintsBoard.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and other similar sites.

However, the Google algorithm only saw a hive of activity and due to its lack of sentiment analysis, perceived this 'social buzz' as a positive thing. As the poor reviews increased, the website rose higher and higher for a number of very competitive keywords and phrases.

In one cheeky response to the criticism on the Get Satisfaction site the owner posted:

“I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

Now that Google have heard about the controversy, the site has disappeared from the search results. Google employee Amit Singhal is part of the team convened to look at the issue, he said:

"We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience, even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results."

Chrome OS Pilot Program

2010-12-06T22:57:00.002Z

Google are looking for users to test their new operating system known as Chrome OS. Each participant is to receive a brand new Cr-48 Chrome notebook and in return is expected to provide regular feedback. The cut off date for applications from US users is the 21st December. Testing will begin in other countries in 2011. The Chrome OS Pilot program page states:

"We have a limited number of Chrome notebooks to distribute, and we need to ensure that they find good homes. That’s where you come in. Everything is still very much a work in progress, and it’s users, like you, that often give us our best ideas about what feels clunky or what’s missing. So if you live in the United States, are at least 18 years old, and would like to be considered for our small Pilot program, please fill this out. It should take about 15 minutes. We'll review the requests that come in and contact you if you've been selected."

The Cr-48 Chrome Notebook

WikiLeaks suffers denial of service attack

2010-11-28T23:56:00.006Z

The whistle-blower site WikiLeaks is experiencing a distributed denial of service attack, according to the @wikileaks Twitter account.

The entire site has been made unavailable to internet users. When surfing to wikileaks.org, users are being presented with the following message.

Some of the American Embassy documents leaked contained nicknames for a number of world leaders. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is referred to as "Hitler," French President Nicolas Sarkozy as a "naked emperor," the German Chancellor is called Angela "Teflon" Merkel.

One of the documents refers to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddhafi's full-time nurse as a "hot blond," and another states that Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi loves "wild parties."

Using Google Insights to spot trends in keyphrases

2010-11-25T13:12:00.000Z

Google Analytics does a great job of listing the keywords and phrases that customers are using to find your site, but where do you go to find the keywords that nobody is finding your for, or keywords which are taking your potential customers to your competitor's sites? Your first call will be to Google Adwords where you can discover monthly/yearly search volumes and ask the tool to suggest new phrases, but website owners often overlook another useful Google tool, Google Insights.

The screenshot below is taken from Google Insights and shows a typical representation of the amount of 'interest' in two different search terms, wetsuit (blue) and wetsuits (red.)

The first thing which stands out is how searches using the plural decrease as those using the singular increase, crossing over in August 2006.

Google Insights provides a list of the top searches and all the data is filterable by geographic location, time period (i.e. the last 7 days, month, year etc.)and category (there are many categories ranging from shopping, recreation and health to property, auto or business)

Using a combination of filters, you can view a list of "Rising searches."

This list (right) was created by selecting shopping, over the past 30 days, UK and containing the word cheap.

This type of information would prove very useful to a retailer selling christmas party dresses.

Website Preview in Search Results

2010-11-13T18:17:00.001Z

By hovering over the magnifying glass in the Google search results, you can now see a quick preview of the site. This will hopefully allow people to spot spammy sites without having to click through to them first.

Indexing problem for WordPress and Blogspot sites

2010-11-01T16:18:00.005Z

Thousands of Wordpress and Blogger powered sites have been affected by a problem Google seems to be having with the Googlebot. Some high profile sites have had no new content indexed for 3 days.

Sites thought to be affected include The Guardian, Techcrunch and the Wall Street Journal

Webmaster Site Clinic is Launched by Google

2010-10-25T22:05:00.015+01:00

Google has launched an online website clinic for webmasters in the US. The clinic will provide advice via a site clinic on Googles Webmaster Central blog.

On the Google Webmaster Central page, they state.

"This site clinic will focus on non-profit organizations, but chances are that our advice will benefit small business and government sites as well"

Google has trialled the idea before in India, Norway, Sweden and Spain.

Google have also launched "Think Holiday" to prepare retailers for the Christmas holiday season.
Visit the Think Holiday site.

Google's SEO Starter Guide

2010-10-01T12:21:00.001+01:00

Google have released an updated version of their SEO starter guide. The biggest change to the guide is the inclusion of a section titled "SEO for Mobile Phones".

The main chapter headings are SEO Basics, Improving Site Structure, Optimizing Content, SEO for Mobile Phones and Promotions and Analysis.

Each page is referenced with links to a variety of interesting resources such as Cloaking, Tips on hiring an SEO and 301 Redirects.

Site Architecture and Google Chrome Bug

2010-09-26T11:27:00.000+01:00

Stoney deGeyter has posted an interesting article on SearchEngineGuide giving some good reasons as to why choosing the right site architecture prior to building your website is essential.

With the right directory and linking structure you can distribute your 'link juice' more effectively, funelling it into areas of your website which need it most. A good structure also makes the analysis of visitor traffic much more straightforward.

Google has announced this week that it has fixed a problem with Google Chrome and Google Analytics which has led to webmasters seeing dramatic increases in visitor numbers and decreases in page views. The latest version of Google Chrome fixes the problem.

The Google Chrome bug affected the way Google Analytics JavaScript code was interpreted by the browser.

Google Real Search

2010-09-08T11:34:00.002+01:00

Rumours today suggest that Google is about to unveil a version of its search engine which will gather results as you type.

Magento and Duplicate Content Penalties

2010-09-07T10:42:00.002+01:00

As a Magento developer, I am often researching the various aspects of SEO for our Magento projects, today I came across an interesting article published by Jill Cocher about duplicate content myths. Jill argues that Google does not penalise duplicate content within a site, but having duplicate content issues can dilute a site's link popularity.

Armando Roggio discusses how to avoid link dilution in Magento by setting the "Use Categories Path for Product URLs" option in the setting found at System > Configuration > Categories > Search Engine Optimizations.

Like Fuse, Armando is very impressed with Magento's ability to provide users with all their SEO needs straight out of the tin.

"Magento is very solid where search engine optimization is concerned. As an example, note how easy it is to restructure the product URL to the SEO flavor one likes best. Producing 301 redirects is exactly that easy, as are many other SEO options.

"What's more, I have seen site traffic increase when a merchant moved to Magento from another platform, recognizing that the search-engine re-indexing process takes time."

Magento are predicting sales growth of 300% for 2010. With an estimated 60,000 websites using it, Magento is the fastest growing eCommerce platform. They estimate that $25 Billion in transactions are processed through Magento powered websites each year.

Arcade Fire and Google in HTML 5 Experiment

2010-08-31T10:55:00.000+01:00

Although The Wilderness Downtown can only be viewed with the Google Chrome browser, it is a stunning example of what can be done with HTML5.

The band Arcade Fire supply the music and the visuals include a 'mash-up' of animation and images of your house and street.

Friday Round-Up - Facebook "Friending" and Google Patents

2010-08-13T11:01:00.000+01:00

Google published research this week showing what proportion of Facebook users follow or "friend" brands on the site and the reasons why.

The research suggests that for 25% of users, the biggest motivation for "friending" brands is to receive discounts on products.

The second most common reason given was "to show others I support the brand" (18%) and next with 10% were users who answered "it's fun and entertaining."

Why are SEO's Hated? - Paul Carpenter's blog post p gives a number of good reasons such as:

People cannot tell the difference between spam and good SEO
Sites which SEOs work on rank higher than others who think they should be in the top spot because they are superior and don't understand why Google cannot tell
We make content writers speak the language of searchers
We make web developers re-write their code and re-architect their sites.

Can Google change the content of your website? A patent application by Google with the catchy title of "Enhanced document browsing with automatically generated links to relevant information" seems to suggest that when a website page is loaded, Google (possibly using the Google Toolbar) will insert links into the content on the page.

It would be desirable to provide improved techniques for enhancing document browsing by providing automatically generated links to relevant information to the reader.

Other documents submitted to the US Patent Office suggest that Google has been taking the idea seriously since 2006. Read more here for a good overview

"We Guarantee you a Google Page One Listing!"

2010-08-03T17:22:00.001+01:00

If all spam was this entertaining, clearing out my inbox wouldn't be so bad.

This is a screenshot of an email we received today. The company guarantee a page one listing in Google, or you get 50% of your money back. This should set alarm bells ringing immediately. What a fantastic business model, it reminds me of the websites which offer to correctly predict the sex of your unborn baby for £20 or your money back.

They claim to have achieved page one rankings for hundreds of websites, but if this is the best example they can come up with, then I dread to think what the others were. And yes, they have also bought spaghetticarbonara [dot] net too!

(the childish highlighter pen is theirs)

The world's 20 billionth tweet

2010-08-02T11:12:00.000+01:00

A Twitter user from Tokyo has been flooded with congratulations after posting the world's 20 billionth tweet.

Twitter took four years to reach it's 10 billionth tweet and only 5 months to reach the 20 billionth.

Finding the Blogetery Blogs in Your Industry

2010-07-20T16:19:00.000+01:00

After searching around the internet for ways of finding all the 70,000 blogs which have gone missing I stumbled on the piece of text which is added to the page title of all Blogetery blogs (Just another Blogetery.com weblog) Google is showing 2.8 Million results for this phrase. So I started to break down the results by industry, here are some of the ones I found

Car Insurance - 218 results
Real Estate - 2,550 results
SEO - 8,360 results
Personal Injury - 7,580
Christian - 3,680
iPod - 1,860

With British phrases such as "personal injury" it is clear that many UK SEO companies have been using Blogetery as an easy way to gain links to their sites.

Using Google's "inurl:" command...

inurl:Blogetery.com - 287,000 results (This includes some non Blogetery sites)

...we can see that if 73,000 blogs were taken down then on average only 4 pages were being indexed per blog. Taking the top result for the inurl:blogetery.com command we can see that Smartech had 771 pages indexed. This can only mean that thousands of the blogs were either not indexed by Google at all, or perhaps just had one page.

The startling thing for me is that out of the 2.8 million pages that Google lists only a small percentage seem to be optimised for specific industries. The SEO result above was the highest I could find, even gambling sites and adult sites don't seem to feature. I can only assume that the majority of the blogs were personal blogs by real every day people.

.

70,000 Blogs Taken Offline after FBI Investigates Terrorist Links

2010-07-20T11:39:00.003+01:00

Blogetery, a company providing a blogging platform to over 70,000 bloggers has been taken offline by its hosting company following investigations by the FBI. Although only a tiny percentage of the bloggers had posted illegal material, the hosting company Burst.net took the whole platform down.

Implications for SEO across the world could be dramatic as the number of links disappearing from the net could number in the millions.

The offending blogs contained lists of assasination targets in the US, bomb-making tips and messages from Osama bin Laden.

There was no prior warning and many bloggers who had not backed-up their personal blogs may have lost their entire blog archive.

Read more...

Friday Round-Up - SEO's Biggest Mistakes and McKeith vs Goldacre

2010-07-16T10:12:00.002+01:00

Rand Fishkin lists five of the biggest SEO mistakes he has ever made in this week's Whiteboard Friday, including recommending that clients update all their H1's to include keywords and phrases which later proved to have no more effect than including the same keywords in normal text or bold text at the top of the page.

The rumours about Google's potential new 'Facebook Killer' called 'Google Me' are gaining momentum with the news that they have been conducting focus group research into social networking. Digg founder Kevin Rose was the first to break the news on Twitter and since then the evidence has been mounting.

There have been some interesting discussions this week about a patent issued to Google in 2005 concerning the use of mouse movement in search relevancy. The movement of the mouse into specific areas or hovering over specific results for certain periods of time may indicate greater relevancy and in turn boost the ranking of a page or website.

And my favourite of the week, a great lesson in how not to use social media. Paul Carpenter has posted an excellent summary of the public spat between Gillian McKeith (from the TV program "You Are What You Eat") and her arch-nemesis Ben Goldacre (a regular Guardian columnist and author of "Bad Science") McKeith's use of Twitter is good lesson to all public figures about how social media can be a double-edged sword and that once information has appeared on the internet it is very difficult to remove it without leaving traces behind!

Read some other summaries here including a hilariously titled one from Cubik’s Rube.

Zynga to feature in Google Games?

2010-07-12T11:13:00.000+01:00

Techcrunch report that Google has contributed a substantial quantity of money toward the $500 million capital that Zynga is raising for their new ventures. Zynga Games are expected to feature prominently in 'Google Games' which is due to be launched in late 2010.

Zynga were formed in 2007 and in three years have cornered the market in Facebook games. Their first half revenues are expected to be in the region of $350 million.

SEO News This Week

2010-07-02T12:51:00.000+01:00

SEOMoz have been asking the question What if My Competitors Point Spammy Links to My Site? And can paid links be used as weapons in the search engine results?

Matt Cutts is inviting Google users and the SEO community to submit a new round of webspam reports and ideas. He is asking people to suggests aspects of spam that Google should be working on over the next year.

WebProNews have been talking about Google's recent advice on how to gain quality links to your website.
According to Google, engaging with your community is a good way to get links and build credibility, which in turn leads to more links.

Magento have launched Magento Mobile, which allows eCommerce sites to be viewed and administered on multiple mobile phone platforms.

Search Engine Roundtable are talking about how many users have seen a dramatic increase in inbound links that Google is acknowledging in Google Webmaster Tools. Many thought it was a bug, but Google have confirmed that it is related to the Caffeine index update.

7 Tips on Buying Blog Reviews

2010-06-29T09:53:00.000+01:00

Buying blog links and reviews is becoming a major part of online marketing strategies. From an SEO point of view the advantages are links, link text and the relevence of the page which hosts the link, but don't forget other benefits such as increases in traffic and building brand awareness in a particular niche. However, the best links/reviews don't come cheap so invest your money wisely.

If it is at all possible, deal directly with the blogger. It will always benefit both parties if customers and search engines are unaware that any money has changed hands.
Researching the blog and the blogger is essential. Analyse the type of visitors the blogger is receiving and whether they represent your target audience. If you are using Google Analytics, don't buy a review which sends your bounce rates soaring. Make sure that when Google sees the surge in traffic, it also sees that visitors remain on your site and visit other related areas of the site.
Ensure that the blog or blogger is not openly touting for 'blogger review' business with links back to sites such as PayPerPost as the blog could easily incur a 'selling links' penalty making your link worthless and (although less likely) possibly harmful.
Once you have a review, don't forget to spread the word and gain links to the review yourself. Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Facebook and StumbleUpon will all help to get your review found by others.
4. PageRank is not the only reason for buying a blog link, think more about relevence and the potential traffic that the link may bring and be ready to convert the visitors when they arrive on your site. Combine the new link and traffic with a special offer or customise the landing page specifically for those visitors.
Building up a relationship with a blogger can give you long-term benefits. If the blogger recognises you as an authority in a particular area, you're more likely to pick up links when he is blogging about news or information relating to your niche.
Finally and possibly the best method of all if you are a retailer, send some high-profile bloggers your product for free. Provide them with as much information as possible, make it fun, offer to supply the prize for a competition.

Google or Bing?

2010-06-10T10:23:00.004+01:00

Following hot on the tails of Bing, Google have added a background image to their search page. If you have a Google login you can choose an alternative image from your computer or from any images uploaded to your Picassa web space. Images must be at least 800 x 600 pixels in size.

Unfortunately many of the images make some of the text hard to read and worst of all, there seems to be no way to turn the image off unless you upload an off-white background, (a pure white background no-longer works as the text colour has changed)

But with the right background shade, some basic photoshop skills and a bit of inspiration anybody can customise their Google homepage now. (see below!)

The big bang visualisation of the top 140 Twitter influencers

2010-05-24T13:11:00.001+01:00

The Information Architects team have constructed a map of the top 140 twitter users encompassing such diverse personalities as Lady Gaga, Stephen Fry, Bill Gates, Jonathan Ross, Deepak Chopra, Britney Spears, Al Gore and Rubens Barrichello.

Users are grouped according to category and influence.

Download the free PDF here

Google Analytics Application Gallery

2010-04-29T12:45:00.001+01:00

The Google Analytics Application Gallery now contains a number of third-party apps which extend Google Analytics in a variety of ways.

Applications such as Analytics Visualisations (see image) can be granted access to your analytics stats via the analytics API, it will then create visualisations based on your most popular keywords or most frequent referers.

Other applications include enhanced reporting tools, analytics plug-ins for Microsoft Excel, phone call tracking integration, analytics applications for mobile phones and many other widgets and gadgets for wordpress, powerpoint and Excel.

UK Airspace and the Volcanic Ash Cloud - Data Mash-ups

2010-04-15T12:04:00.000+01:00

At Fuse we are big fans of taking data and using it in interesting ways. We have fond memories of the #uksnow twitter mashup and Will it Rain Today a useful real-time rain radar website.

Now we have a new one, Radar Virtuel, which has been brought to our attention after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Iceland.

Radar Virtuel plots the positions of aircraft traffic in realtime across the UK, parts of the USA and Africa. Clicking on an individual aircraft gives you the flight number, company, model of plane, speed and much more. Filters can be applied to the data in order to, for example, show only RyanAir flights departing from Paris and travelling to London which are flying below 25,000ft.

Viewing the site today is particularly remarkable as you can see areas of UK airspace being closed as the ash cloud heads south across the country.

New Equestrian Magento Site Launched Today

2010-04-08T08:56:00.095+01:00

The eCommerce team at Fuse today launched Dogwood London an equestrian clothing and online tack shop. We moved close to a thousand products from the old e-commerce platform and imported them into a custom designed Magento based system.

Dogwood London supplies high-quality clothing and footwear, from some of the world's top equestrian brands. In order to demonstrate the quality of the products, Fuse incorporated a hover and zoom image plugin, youcan see a good example here on these De Niro Ottaviano riding boots. The zoom allows the user to view the quality of the leather and stitching without cluttering the page with large images and slowing down the loading time of each page.

The back-end provides much more functionality than Dogwood's previous system. Managing customer details is straightforward, customers can checkout as a guest or store their details online (e.g. billing address, multiple shipping addresses and multiple credit card details) allowing easy one click re-ordering. Customers who register can opt in or out to receive company newsletters, create wish-lists of products, set up product alerts and use the compare products features.

The Magento back-end means that the staff at Dogwood have a whole suite of reports showing most viewed products, abandoned shopping carts, who is currently browsing the site, which products they are interested in, VAT reports and many many more.

Site speed incorporated into Google search rankings

2010-04-06T12:48:00.001+01:00

Matt Cutts has posted a blog about Google's use of website loading times (speed) in their ranking algorithm. It comes as no surprise to most webmasters as Google made the initial announcement last year. But they have now confirmed that it is live on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Both posts point out that webmasters need not panic as it is not a major factor in the rankings, but where all other factors are equal it may give you an advantage over your competitors.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog provides a number of links to free tools that can be used to evaluate a website's speed and if a site is registered with Google Webmaster Tools, there is a new menu option giving specific examples of how to improve speed on each individual site.

Matt Cutts - Effective techniques for building links

2010-03-23T12:08:00.000Z

The Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel have released a video in which Matt Cutts describes some of his ideas for effective link building techniques. Here are some of the main points covered.

Building good content
Original research where somebody diggs deeper into a subject are always linkworthy. Many bloggers are lazy and will just re-hash existing content without adding anything new. If you can go that little extra and provide new insights, present new research, people will link to you. Matt uses the example of Google's Public DNS Service where a blogger called Manu took the time to test the speeds of their new service and published the data on his blog. Yahoo has recorded over 150 backlinks for his blog post already.

Controversy
Some people have made a profession out of hating somebody. Whether it is Microsoft, Apple, homeopaths or the Conservative Party, having a good rant will attract positive and negative responses in equal measure. A link is a link, so gaining hundreds of backlinks from people who disagree with your opinion will still benefit your website. Matt points out that humour will do the same job, funny pictures, videos and blog posts will all attract links.

Participate in a community
Involve yourself in forums and answer questions that help other people. People appreciate the help, and are often willing to link to somebody who has a good knowledge of their industry and is happy to spend some of their time helping others.

Social media
Spend time where your customers are, if they are spending 4 hours a day on Facebook or Twitter, you should be there too. In some industries customer loyalty is so strong that having a Facebook group or page allows you to connect with more people than mass mail-outs or spamming mailboxes. The customers will actively seek you out and sign up for newsletters and latest articles.

Lists
Spend some time building lists of valueable resources. "50 ways to build backlinks", these lists are a bit tiresome but the titles are eye-catching and they are easy for a reader to scan and pick out the information that they are looking for. Spend some time writing "How to's ..." and simple tutorials. Even if you don't get links from these, you'll have extra content.

Start a blog
Become an authority in your niche or industry.

Run a free service, build a free application, plugin, template, make a video
Providing something for free may seem like madness, but people will remember you and come back for help, updates and advice. The beauty of all of these is that you only have to put the work in once. You may be reaping the rewards in terms of links for the next decade or two.

Good site architecture
Don't make it difficult for people to link to your site! It sounds obvious but if your URLs can't be bookmarked or if Google can't find pages on your site then you could be missing out on backlinks and returning customers.

SNOWPOCALYPSE hits West Sussex!

2010-01-05T16:08:00.003Z

The whole of Fuse is abandoning ship as a mighty 1cm of snow cascades from the skies.

The UK's obsession with the weather seems to be bringing twitter to a grinding halt and the roads are clogged with people leaving work early.

Here at Fuse we've been hooked on Ben Marsh's #UKSnow map which is a Google Earth and Twitter "mash-up" showing the slow grisly progress of the snowfall around the UK.

Twitterers are invited to tweet their postcode and a 0 - 10 rating for the snowfall in their area.

The result is a realtime map of snowfall which updates every minute and also includes photos and messages from the various twitter users around the UK.

Thanks to the person who tweeted and coined the phrase "snowpocalypse," genius!

Google Nexus One Launched Today

2010-01-05T11:23:00.003Z

The Nexus One is due to be unveiled today at Google's Californian HQ.

The phone is expected to cost a little over £300 in the UK for an unlocked version, or just over £100 with a two year contract from T-mobile, although so far, no details have been released about the phone's release outside the US.

Early reviews of the Nexus One have been fairly underwhelming, with most critics saying that it is no different to existing phones running the Google Android operating system such as the Droid from Motorola.

Details are sketchy but it has been confirmed that the phone contains a fast processor, camera, flash and accelerometer.

Fuse are Recruiting for a Web Developer – Chichester Office (West Sussex)

2009-12-29T14:27:00.002Z

Are you a web developer and live in the Chichester/Portsmouth area, or in the vicinity of the West Sussex – Hampshire border?

We are looking to recruit a website developer for our Chichester office. We’re looking for a hard-working and enthusiastic person who has proven experience in building websites and a sound knowledge of cross-browser CSS. Applicants should also have some (or all) of the following skills.

PHP
MySQL
Magento
Joomla
Wordpress
SEO
VB/.NET

Either Click here for information on our company and how to contact us...

..or email your CV and covering letter to info@fuseo.co.uk including examples of websites and projects which you have worked on in the past.

Salary will be judged according to age and experience.

Insane People use Google Search

2009-12-18T16:20:00.006Z

Today I discovered that there are some extremely crazy people out there, searching for some equally bizarre search terms. These all come to you via Auto Complete Me, a highly addictive site which will eat up your spare time on a Friday afternoon.

They range from the cruel..

to the surreal..

to religious persecution?

embarassing..

puzzling...

confused...

and downright insulting!

See many many more at Auto Complete Me

Google Favourite Places

2009-12-09T17:00:00.002Z

Hardly a day goes by without Google launching a new product, and today is no exception.

Google Favourite Places is both an online and offline initiative. Google are sending out window stickers to 100,000 businesses across the USA.

Each sticker contains a QR code which shoppers can scan using their mobile phones. Once scanned the shopper is taken to the businesses 'Place Page' on Google Maps.

A 'Place Page' can contain vouchers, images, video, reviews, opening hours and a wealth of other details.

To create a Place Page visit the Google Local Business Center and register.

If you would like to find out more, click here for information on QR codes and to see a gallery of example places.

Google real-time search

2009-12-08T16:32:00.002Z

Ever since the death of Michael Jackson and the protests against the Iranian government, internet users have been well aware of the shortcomings of the search engines when it comes to breaking news. When a big news story breaks, users turn to Twitter, Facebook and blogs to find out what is happening.

Google seems to have bridged that divide with their latest rollout, which includes up-to-the-minute tweets and blogposts on any major story. See the video below for an example of how these new results are being displayed.

Google allows publishers to limit free news access

2009-12-02T16:22:00.007Z

The recent wave of discussions among media companies and publishers on how to charge for content on their websites, has led to Google modifying its First Click Free service to allow users to view the first five pages of a subscription-only website. After this they are likely to be forwarded to a subscription or payment page. The pages concerned will be labeled in Google News as "subscription"

This latest change from Google follows claims from Rupert Murdoch, that the search engine is profiting from online news provided by newspaper groups. Murdoch has recently been threatening to make the content of The Times and Sun websites subscription-only and to exclude Google from crawling the sites, a move which most internet marketing guru’s consider is suicidal as the vast majority of visitors to The Times website currently come via Google.

From an SEO perspective, making a website subscription-only can only do harm to the website's rankings, it certainly can't improve them.

Josh Cohen, Google's senior business product manager put some people's minds at rest by saying, "The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free," but then ominously added. "Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it."

Cohen is quite rightly suggesting that the number of inbound links for a subscription-only website will be lower due to the lack of access to the site. The Times may have the best news content on the web but if only a select few have access to it, then visitor numbers, search engine rankings and advertising revenues will ultimately fall.

So 'First Click Free' is an inspired move by Google, keeping news providers and users happy, whilst simultaneously avoiding a mass exodus of content from the Google index.

Serious Flaw in Bing Cashback

2009-11-11T09:09:00.003Z

Samir Meghani the co-founder of bountii.com a price comparison website, has been threatened by Microsoft lawyers for exposing a serious flaw in the way that Bing "cash back" tracks purchases. The affiliate scheme offers users of the search engine cash back every time they buy a product through the service.

Microsoft sent Meghani a letter demanding he remove his post about the subject from his blog or face the consequences. The original blog post has now been replaced with a post titled "Surrendering to Microsoft and Bing cashback" which includes the letter send by the Microsoft lawyers.

Microsoft have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to compete with their main rivals Google and must have red faces now as a cached version of Meghani's original post is still available via the Google search engine, as well as Yahoo. (I notice that it doesn't appear in Bing!) The cached versions provide a link to the cash back implementation documentation which Meghani says contains enough information for anybody to post fake cash back transactions. The exploit would also allow a malicious user to block another user's legitimate purchases from being reported correctly.

The final paragraph of the post states that in his next post Meghani will demonstrate other reasons to avoid using Bing cash back but it looks unlikely it will ever see the light of day.

Argleton - Fictitious Town on Google Maps

2009-11-04T17:33:00.002Z

Twitter is all a flutter with the news that Google has added a fictitious town named Argleton to Google Maps. The town has been placed in Lancashire in an area consisting of open countryside.

Opinions are divided as to whether the town is a joke, or simply a way for Google to stop companies stealing their maps.

See Twitter for information on the latest revelations

Google launches online Powermeter tool

2009-10-30T08:34:00.004Z

Google's new online Powermeter tool allows householders to monitor their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Google believes that being able to see your electricity usage in real time will encourage consumers to reduce their overall consumption and save themselves money.

UK users wanting to use the tool will need an advanced electricity meter or "smart meter."

The Powermeter home page states that

Many of today's smart meters don't display information to the consumer. Consumers should have access to data on their personal electricity use, control who gets to see this data and choose from a range of services to help them understand and benefit from this data.

The new tool could lead the way for companies claiming to be 'green' to show their customers real-time data of their energy consumption.

Will visible Google PR become a thing of the past?

2009-10-22T11:08:00.004+01:00

Marvel's Comic Book Creator

Magento - Importing configurable and simple products

2009-10-19T09:34:00.004+01:00

At Fuse we are nearing the launch of another eCommerce site using the Magento platform. The biggest headache we have found with Magento is handling products where different sizes have different prices. The Magento documentation suggests that this type of product should be set up as a 'configurable product.' However in Magento, to create a configurable product, you have to create your parent product and then another product for every size and colour variation.

This means if you have a shirt in 6 colours and 12 sizes, you need to create 72 products and associate them all to your main product. Importing the data for all these variants using the standard Magento import function works, but you still have to manually associate all the products to their parent which is incredibly time consuming.

Brian at his Magento Developer Information blog has an impressive work-around for this using custom attributes. With a few code changes to one of the core Magento php pages you can import your product as one 'simple' product and use the custom attributes for the sizes and colours.

Using the standard Magento import format with Brian's code you can add your extra columns, determine whether you want the field to appear as a dropdown, radio button or text field and specify prices.

Thanks Brian, you have made our job so much simpler and saved us hours of time.

One other thing we have learned along the way is that Brian's import method loads the images (place them in the /media/import directory) but they are invisible due to a bug in Magento's import code which automatically flags uploaded images as 'exclude.' See this post on the Magento site to fix the bug in another of Magento's core files.

Does Yahoo still support the keyword meta-tag?

2009-10-15T09:13:00.001+01:00

At Fuseo we have always believed in adding good quality unique non-spammy meta-keywords to every page where possible. You can never be sure which search engines are gathering the data and when they may change their algorithm to incorporate the meta-keywords.

SearchEngineLand recently published an article about how Yahoo has quietly dropped the use of meta-keywords but as a test they placed a string of non-sensicle characters (xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk) in the meta-keyword field. 2 days ago they searched for the string again and the page appeared in the Yahoo results even though the string of letters is nowhere in the copy.

It remains to be seen what will happen if the Bing/Yahoo deal is finalised as Bing does not support the keywords meta-tag either.

Beta Testing Begins for Google Wave

2009-09-30T17:09:00.002+01:00

Google first showcased Wave in May 2009 creating an internet buzz that led to their Wave video on YouTube being viewed 4 million times.

Wave allows multiple users to collaborate on projects in real time, speeding up the the writing process by allowing users to add, quotes, videos, maps and and audio. Wave also has an in-built translation chat tool which allows two users who speak two different languages to chat to each other in real time with Wave translating instantly.

Images, video and text can be dragged from external applications and dropped straight into the shared 'Wave.'

Each 'Waver' can view the history of how each Wave has developed over time with a simple slider.

Using robots, Wave links easily with other applications such as Twitter and Picassa via their APIs.

The only drawback seems to be that Wave works in all browsers except Internet Explorer and currently is open by invitation only.

Yahoo launches new-look web portal

2009-09-23T09:03:00.002+01:00

Yahoo have relaunched its web portal with an enormous $100 million dollar advertising campaign.

The new look portal will allow users to integrate other third party web services such as Hotmail and social networking services. The left-hand navigation now features customisable bookmarks which when the user mouses over, pop-up to show a snapshot of the site. These bookmarks include a large number of links to non-Yahoo websites such as Kelkoo and BBC News, potentially taking the user away from the Yahoo site.

Yahoo's chief executive, Carol Bartz is hoping that the relaunch will bring in more users and greater advertising revenues. Their deal with Microsoft also allows them to control the sales team which will sell banner advertising for both companies.

Hasbro team up with Google to launch Monopoly City Streets

2009-09-09T16:11:00.005+01:00

Toymaker Hasbro bills it as "the biggest game of Monopoly of all time." Monopoly City Streets uses Google maps data, allowing users to buy any street in the world and add it to their real estate empire. Once you own a street, you can charge other players rent and build new property.

The website www.monopolycitystreets.com is currently responding slowly due to the rush of people eager to buy their own street. But the experiment will run until the end of January 2010.

This is the first time Google data has been used in a worldwide game and we expect similar ventures to follow from other online partnerships.

Whole new streams of advertising could be generated for Google in the virtual world. Perhaps virtual billboard advertising could outstrip the real world at some point in the future.

On the downside we may see private citizens battling for control of their virtual streets preventing companies from erecting virtual eyesores outside their virtual houses. Or PPC adverts fly-posted on our virtual national monuments.

Predicting 'going viral' - SEO research

2009-09-01T10:46:00.003+01:00

New research has been published that examines how viral messages spread around the web. A predictive model has been developed to forecast the spread of viral messages across the Internet.

SEO firms, online marketers and consultants will be interested in the model that helps understand how new information spreads when distributed online.

It is possible to predict how many people will receive viral messages to within a one per cent error rate.

Monster found on Internet search of Scottish lake

2009-08-28T17:25:00.005+01:00

A prehistoric-type marine creature is making waves across the world wide web after it was claimed to have been spotted on satellite images taken over the UK.

The Loch Ness monster - affectionately known as Nessie - is believed to be a myth and a hoax because evidence is minimal and much disputed. But a potential sighting in the Scottish lake known as Loch Ness on an image used on Google Earth has tongues wagging across the globe.

We've cut and pasted the disputed picture of Nessie here, or simply visit Google Earth and type in the following co-ordinates: Latitude 57°12′52.13″N, Longitude 4°34′14.16″W. More information about the sighting is described in in national media reports.

The search behemoth Google has reportedly sent its Google camera bike to circle the lake and record further imagery for the Street Maps project, hoping to capture more evidence. Extraordinary!

British NHS goes global on the web

2009-08-13T16:58:00.003+01:00

Some Americans sure know how to stir up a hornet's nest. It seems quite a few (dumb?) right wingers / Republicans think the UK's NHS (National Health Service) deserves to be attacked.

Fuse is pretty sure there can't be many Brits who are ungrateful to have the NHS. It's a world class service. One of the Fuse team's relatives had a heart transplant recently - if that's not remarkable, we don't know what is.

Anyway, the world of search, social media etc is buzzing with this international healthcare row. The British Prime Minister has joined Twitter to defend the NHS against what is reported as major 'right wing' USA opposition to President Obama's suggestion to potentially build a similar health service across the Atlantic.

Twitter crashed at one point because it was inundated with Brits using the social media tool to speak up for the NHS. Hundreds of comments are being added every few seconds currently.

You can join the debate on Twitter. Support #welovetheNHS and add an NHS #twibbon (like these 'Love NHS' twibbons) to your avatar now. It's almost like a fun online game... fighting Americans (the uninformed ones).

Power of the web at work again :-)

Yahoo! share price takes a nose dive following new search partnership announcement

2009-07-31T15:24:00.001+01:00

Wednesdays unveiling of the long-term partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo! to run their search engines jointly has hit Yahoo!’s share price hard, whilst Microsoft’s seems to be holding up. Wall Street clearly sees Microsoft as having come out with the better deal from the agreement despite Yahoo! reportedly receiving 88 percent of the ad revenue from the long-term agreement.

An address to a gathering of financial and industry analysts by Microsoft’s Chief Executive, Steven Ballmer on Thursday did nothing to halt the slide despite revealing how surprised he was with the markets reaction to the deal. He also suggested that Yahoo! were forecast to gain more from the new agreement because of the way the deal was structured. Yahoo!’s stock slipped 12 percent shortly following the announcement on Wednesday and a further 3½ percent in Thursday’s trading.

Many in the search marketing industry clearly see the convergence of the two former rivals as having a much greater chance to compete with Google than when they were separate. It is yet to be seen whether the financial analysts concur with this view in the longer term. Meanwhile search engine optimisation firms will be looking hard at what this will mean for them and their clients as Microsoft roll out the search engine technology behind the recently coveted Bing platform into Yahoo!’s web portals.

Facebook dominates the social networking world

2009-07-30T09:38:00.010+01:00

Average worldwide traffic of the search terms Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Badoo and Bebo from Google trends

Even though MySpace had a head start in the global market for social networking, in the Spring of 2008 Facebook caught its main rival in terms of search traffic and was receiving over 100 million unique visitors per month.

Perhaps the secret to Facebook's rapid acceleration in customers was down to the decision to involve its users in translations for the foreign language versions of the site instead of setting up regional offices and employing teams of paid translators. The timing of this move was perfect in terms of beating off the opposition from other up and coming social networking sites such as Orkut, Badoo and Bebo. By the end of 2008 Facebook was increasing its lead over MySpace and with the launch of the Facebook Platform for developers and over 20 language translations, there was no looking back.

UK Trends - Facebook catches and passes Bebo and MySpace in mid-2007

In the UK, Facebook not only caught MySpace in terms of searches made via Google, but also passed Bebo ("Blog early, blog often"), a UK social networking site popular with younger users, currently the sixth most popular website in the UK receiving more visitors than the BBC. Facebook uptake in the UK seemed to be a year ahead of the USA where MySpace was more established and dominated social networking for a year longer.

The UK Google trends are also showing searches for Orkut gaining (slowly) on the declining MySpace and Bebo and may soon exceed them.

USA Trends - MySpace and Facebook dominate

Understandably there is always a spike in social networking searches before the holiday period and in the winter of 2008 it may have contributed to MySpace users signing up for a second account with Facebook. In the UK the same effect can be seen exactly a year earlier.

In February 2008 the Spanish translation of Facebook was launched which may have contributed to the steady rise in USA Facebook users throughout the year.

Brazil - Orkut Domination

Named after Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, Orkut is one of the most visited sites in Brazil and India. Roughly 50% of Orkut users are Brazilian. Other up and coming social networking sites in Brazil include Sonico and Minglebox an Indian based education network

MySpace and Facebook still have no market share even though Facebook's Portuguese translation was launched in June 2008.

Ireland - Bebo Domination

MySpace has made little impact in Ireland as Bebo has dominated the Irish social networking scene for over 3 years. One Irish user told the Guardian website that 'before Bebo, the folks in his small town were not getting along. Then everyone independently joined Bebo, and got to know each other and now there's a community spirit in the town pub that wasn't there before.'

Only recently has Ireland seen a steady rise in the number of Facebook users, Google trends is showing searches for Facebook surpassing those of Bebo for the first time this month.

Japan - Facebook challenges Mixi

The Japanese market for social networking like Ireland has been dominated by one website, Mixi, although since the middle of 2008 Facebook has been increasing rapidly in popularity after the launch of their Japanese translation. If the take-up continues at the same pace, Facebook may pass Mixi in terms of searches made by the end of the year.

China - Facebook makes gains on Xiaonei

Social networking in China took off in 2007 and in mid-2008 Facebook launched the Chinese translation of their site, but unlike other markets, the rate of Facebook searches in China is holding steady. It is Xiaonei, a social networking site popular among college students, which is leading the market. Xiaonei is widely considered to be a Facebook imitation or clone and as such Facebook may find it difficult to gain a wide user base in the most populous country in the world.

Microsoft and Yahoo to join forces in deal to challenge Google dominance

2009-07-29T14:23:00.009+01:00

The internet search engine rivals Microsoft and Yahoo! have this morning announced a collaborative deal to challenge the dominance of search engine giant Google.

After the collapse of a bold $47 Billion attempt by Microsoft to take over Yahoo! last year failed many industry commentators had expected the relationship between the two rivals to become hostile after Yahoo! rejected Microsoft’s mega deal offer. However last year’s fall-out appears to have been put to one side as the two technology giants reached agreement with a clear distinction of duties which plays to each of their strengths. An attempt by Google to strike a deal with Yahoo! also failed last November, when in the face of stiff opposition by the US Department of Justice, Google withdrew from negotiations.

Early indications suggest that under the new deal, Microsoft will provide search technology to power Yahoo!’s web sites. Interestingly this comes just months after Microsoft unveiled its new ‘Bing’ platform which has received widespread acclaim from industry pundits who have time and again given short shrift to the many previous attempts Microsoft have made to play catch-up with the market leading Google. As Bing continues to tweak its technology and make improvements to its algorithm many believe that it will eventual be able to establish itself as a serious rival to Google.

New management within Yahoo!, headed up by Carol bantz their new Chief Executive are said to have championed the deal which sees the company benefiting from 88% of the ad revenue generated from the ten year agreement.

This deal sees the duo commanding up to 28% of the American market and slightly less in the UK. Annual revenues are said to be worth circa $12 Billion in the US alone, of which Google dominates a massive two thirds of the market.

Online marketers are likely to be cheered by the alliance which will provide a more credible platform with bigger market share, thus slightly eroding the powerhouse Google’s monopoly as the world’s largest advertising vendor. In the past marketers have overlooked both Yahoo! and Microsoft because the pairs’ market share was considered too small to bother with. Now, effectively three times the size, advertisers will be lining up to negotiate with the enlarged player.

"This deal will make for an interesting new element of competition in the paid search space as advertisers recognise that a sizeable chunk of the search market is now controlled by a third party", commented Fuse Optimisation Ltd’s, Head of Search, Mike Page.

Using Twitter to Market Small Businesses

2009-07-24T09:55:00.005+01:00

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth and Twitter is the digital manifestation of this process. These are three examples of small businesses who use Twitter as a marketing tool and example tweets broadcast to their followers who in each case, number in the thousands.

Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco and has followers who wait for him to post the current location of his cart and list the flavors of the day. 5,698 followers.

"I will be in dolores park tonight with vanilla bean, dark chocolate grand marnier and baileys creme brûlée."

Shamus Booth, the co-owner of Umi, a sushi bar in San Francisco, says that he sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about his business on Twitter. 3013 followers.

"One of my favorite Japanese mackerel in tonight- Goma Saba (spotted mackerel) such an amazing flavor and so tender."

Scott Seaman from Christopher's Wine and Cheese Shop, also uses Twitter to expand his customer base. He uses TweetDeck, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby and converts them to customers 2,670 followers.

"Gearing up for Blowing Rock Farmer's Market. Bringing plenty of sourdough, seeded bread, chop blocks, bagels."

Google is not liable for defamatory snippets in search results

2009-07-22T15:00:00.003+01:00

In a case involving Google and Metropolitan International Schools, David Eady, a High Court judge ruled that Google could not be sued as it was not the publisher of negative comments about Metropolitan.

In many European countries and the USA, search engines are protected from liability for the contents of search results gathered from third-party websites.

This ruling is the first of its kind in Britain and follows many "libel tourism" cases brought by non-British citizens taking advantage of the different laws in this country.

A Google spokesperson told www.out-law.com, "We are pleased with this result, which reinforces the principle that search engines aren't responsible for content that is published on third party websites."

"Justice Eady made clear if someone feels they have been defamed by material on a website then they should address their complaint to the person who actually wrote and published the material, and not a search engine, which simply provides a searchable index of content on the Internet,"

In 2005, Mr Justice Eady also presided over the "libel tourism" case brought against the American Dr Rachel Ehrenfeld for documenting Khalid bin Mahfouzhis' alleged financial support of terrorism in a book called Funding Evil.

As a result of this case, New York State passed a law that offered New Yorkers

"greater protection against libel judgments in countries whose laws are inconsistent with the freedom of speech granted by the United States Constitution."

Etail 3.0 - New e-commerce buzzword to take off?

2009-07-07T16:08:00.004+01:00

From a spark to a flame... a new (commercial) web development and design term looks to be building up a head of steam.

Etail 3.0 is generating some buzz online with tweets, blogs and news articles starting to mount up. What do you think?

Not wanting to miss out on the latest craze, the acutely fashionable Fuse ecommerce and copywriting team got to work straight away to try to earn some kudos online by posting details of our etail 3.0 services.

Our experienced view is that etail 3.0 builds on the back of Web 2.0 - a seamless integration of all business processes and IT systems end-to-end, enabling customers to interact brilliantly via retail websites. Let's face it, current processes and IT systems are not as well connected as many businesses would like.

As they say in the news business, this buzzword looks like its got legs (i.e. could run and run)! Guess we'll see.

Using Pseudo-Scientific Surveys as Linkbait and Brand Recognition

2009-07-07T10:08:00.006+01:00

Pseudo-science is the linkbait of the future. In order to gain nationwide publicity for your brand, all you need is a survey, a 'scientist' and a formula. These are six of my favourite PR campaigns which have been disguised as science, fooling not only the general public but science journalists from all over the world.

Scientists Say Jessica Alba has the Perfect Wiggle

This study commissioned by Veet the makers of hair removal cream was carried out by Cambridge University professor Richard Weber. The Daily Telegraph reported the story saying

it is the ratio between hips and waist that puts the sway into a woman's walk

the perfect ratio is 0.7 according to the scientists and Jessica Alba beat off opposition from Marilyn Monroe and Kate Moss amongst others. But further research by Ben Goldacre from www.badscience.net uncovered the fact that the whole study was commissioned on the understanding that Jessica Alba would win and the PR company concerned looked around for a 'scientist' to back up their findings with a suitable equation. Veet received plenty of publicity from the mainstream press and a number of backlinks from websites critising the research.

The perfect way to pull a Christmas cracker

Commissioned by Tesco, this research published by Paul Stephenson of the University of Surrey conlcluded that you should pull straight and steadily while your opposite number weakens the bonds that hold the cracker together. This piece of PR resulted in widespread coverage across all the British media including the Daily Telegraph and the BBC, but the BBC news piece gives a link back to the researchers Qinetiq rather than the Tesco website. A huge opportunity missed in link terms but plenty of brand coverage for Tesco.

The Perfect Penalty Kick

hit the ball at a speed of at least 65mph and aim for one of the top corners

Now I'm not the greatest footballer in the country but isn't it a little obvious? Even the England team understand the principles here. The actual formula doesn't seem to be available, but this research sponsored by the betting chain Ladbrokes and carried out by Liverpool John Moores University resulted in plenty of brand exposure especially in the sporting press but no links back to the Ladbrokes site.

The Formula to Find the Happiest Day of the Year

This equation sponsored by Wall's Ice Cream and developed by Dr Cliff Arnall at Cardiff University has appeared in the press in 2007 and 2008. The symbols are explained as follows

O - being outdoors and outdoor activity
N - connection with nature
S - socialisation with neighbours and friends
Cpm - childhood positive memories
T - mean temperature
He - holiday expected

Walls Ice Cream received a lot of press coverage and the association of the brand with a lovely summer's day is obviously beneficial to their sales, but once again there are no lasting links to their website from the articles or news stories.

The most miserable day of the year

Another equation by Dr Cliff Arnall but this time sponsored by Sky Travel who succeeded in receiving a number of links from travel websites and large amount of coverage in the UK and US press. But once again when you look at what the impressive looking symbols represent you begin to see a pattern emerging.

W - weather
D - debt
d - monthly salary
T - time since Christmas
Q - time since failed quit attempt
M - low motivational levels
NA - the need to take action

Journalists can be lazy, a neat little equation backed up by an academic from a well known university can gain you plenty of publicity for your brand and plenty of links back from websites critical of your research!

The Beer Goggle Equation

Sponsored by Bausch & Lomb the eye care specialists this piece of PR genius disguised as scientific research has everything a reader of a tabloid wants to hear. Produced by Dr Nathan Efron from the University of Manchester the symbols represent:

An - the number of servings of alcohol
S - the smokiness of the area on a scale of 0 to 10
L - the lighting level of the area, (candelas per square metre)
Vo - Snellen visual acuity
d - the distance between the observer and the observed, (metres)

The basic premise is that the more you drink, the more attractive persons from the opposite sex appear. Links back to the Bausch website from articles about this study are few and far between, the only one seems to be from SEOBook suggesting that in the future, 20% of linkbait will come from commissioned 'scientific' studies, I have to agree entirely.

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Technorati

2009-07-01T16:55:00.000+01:00

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Magento ecommerce solutions for business

2009-06-30T10:57:00.006+01:00

Finally, details of our Magento-based ecommerce solutions are online. On top of everything else, this has taken ages to write. Fuse develop Magento ecommerce solutions because it is such a powerful e-business and web marketing package. We find Magento allows us to combine our leading search engine optimisation (SEO) expertise with our design, development and online marketing know-how.

What do you think of Magento? Let us know by commenting here.

Michael Jackson's death takes down Google and Wikipedia

2009-06-26T08:58:00.008+01:00

Search volumes described by Google Trends as Volcanic brought Wikipedia and Google Search and News to a halt for up to an hour last night as fans flooded the internet with queries such as "Michael Jackson died" and "Michael Jackson heart attack."

Jackson's wikipedia page had to be taken offline as hundreds of fans bombarded the site with requests to view or update it.

Twitter registered the highest ever percentage of tweets for a specific subject with Jackson based tweets reaching 15% of the global total.

Bing was the slowest search engine to break the story with some people claiming it was hours behind Facebook and Twitter.

Many Google users who searched for news about Michael Jackson's death received an error message which stated

"Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application"

The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site a 4.00am was 48% higher than average.

TMZ the website who initially broke the story also crashed through shear weight of visitors.

Google PR Update Underway

2009-06-24T17:11:00.001+01:00

We are already seeing a number of our client's sites rise in PageRank, but the process seems to be on-going as we speak.

Political Parties and SEO

2009-06-23T12:47:00.006+01:00

Who would have guessed that if you look at the number of backlinks each of the four big UK parties have (Labour, Conservative, Lib Dems and Greens) the Liberal Democrats are first past the post with a staggering 8,000 estimated (by Google) links.

The numbers reported by Google (and Yahoo in brackets) are

Green Party - 2,000 (93,000)
Conservative - 4,940 (323,000)
Labour Party - 5,290 (297,000)
Liberal Democrats - 8,000 (445,000)

All four sites have a PageRank of 7 except for the Green Party who have a PR6. All four sites are using Google Analytics. And all four sites registered their domains around 1996/1997. This is where the similarities seem to end. The Lib Dem website stands out not only by the number of inbound links but also by their decision to use frames across the site. Could this be the reason why today the cached version of their homepage is 4 days old, whereas the other 3 sites have been updated today?

Apart from the title tag, most of the four sites have missing description or keyword tags. One tag which is present on the Liberal Democrat's website is

<meta name="ICBM" content="51.49731, -0.12735" />

This is a geo-tagging meta-tag whose name is derived from the cold war's intercontinental ballistic missile era specifying the geographic co-ordinates of a target, is this asking for trouble? Or are they using the co-ordinates for a UK-wide mapping application of all their regional headquarters?

And finally, the Green Party website is built on an open source CMS system called Modx, which seems to be dealing with the SEO aspects of their site rather well. Definately one to download and try out.

You can find all the four party's websites here
The Labour Party
The Conservative Party
The Liberal Democrat Party
The Green Party

Google NoFollow and Link Sculpting

2009-06-12T15:20:00.003+01:00

Link sculpting comes from the idea that a Google spider will not follow every link on every page. Depending on the length of a web page and the number of links it contains, the Google spider will 'get bored' after a certain point and stop following the links.

The link sculpting idea involves placing a 'no-follow' on all but the most important links on a given page.

This way you are encouraging the spider to concentrate on your most valued pages and so increase the amount of authority, page rank or indexibility for those pages.

Unfortunately Google doesn't like the idea of websites controlling the value of their own links.

The outcome is that many SEO companies are expecting Google to start analysing the way websites are using 'no-follows.' Their technology can easily see what percentage of links on each page are 'no-follows' The question is, where will they draw the line between fair use and deliberate manipulation.

Recent turmoil in Google rankings seem to be associated with 'no-follow' links, but we will have to wait and see what Google's purpose is and how they are going to use this data to improve the search results for end users.