Search Engine Optimisation Forums

Search Engine Optimisation is the Wild West of web design. Once up on a time web design itself was the Wild West, a time when anything goes and what was right and wrong was not clearly understood.

These days most clients have a reasonable idea of what they want in a website (that is that have a general idea of what the website should do for their business), but few people in the real world know what SEO is and why they would want it. Most businesses understand the benefit of good Google results, but most don't have any idea how google works.

Because of this there are a whole lot of Snake Oil Salesmen out there trading of the ignorance and naivety of large and small businesses. People who traditionally trusted advertising sources like The Yellow Pages, newspaper, radio and TV advertising which no longer gives the returns it once did, are desperate for an advertising angle that works. This desperation makes them easy prey for Internet Marketers who phone up and, by mentioning the word Google in their spiel, appear to be from Google and offering them the number one spot in the search results.

Fast forward 6 months and the business owner has forwarded a number of thousands of dollars to this previously unknown Internet Marketing company and seen very little if any return. The Internet Marketing company has either gone into hiding or suggests upping the ante (i.e. sending them larger cheques) in order to achieve the results they promised in the first place.

With this scenario many businesses go looking for information on the Internet themselves as to how to improve their chances of being found online. Enter the SEO forums. Full of sharks and those same Snake Oil Salesmen promising the works and insider secrets for a (proportionally) very small amount of money. Their offer is to good to be true, they are sharing it because they want to give back, they've made so much money anyway it doesn't really mater to them anymore. The techniques are simple and will take very little time yet set you up for a life of luxury for ever.

Why does this sound too good to be true, because, of course, it is.

If you're doing any Search engine optimisation, Search Engine Marketing or Internet Marketing (there's a subtle different to all of these) you should ring a few local SEO businesses in your area, find someone you can trust, negotiate a fee that makes sense for you and is enough that that company will want to do your work and get started. Most SEO strategies take time and regular work, there really are very few shortcuts. Get going because the Yellow Pages and other traditional means of advertising are only going to get less viable.

Twitter

We've decided that Twitter might be useful after all, it certainly gives an easy way to post links to new websites.

Although a lot of tweets are simply daily static and mindless chatter that's impossible to understand unless you know the people involved and rewind all the tweets in a particular conversation, it has it's uses.

A quick way of letting the Internet, read Google, that a new website has been launched is always useful. An inbound link from an established website may also be a good thing, we'll see.

WordPress Websites

Wordpress as a way of building data driven websites for small to medium businesses has really come into its own over the last 2 years. We find ourselves building more and more websites using WordPress as it gives the advantage of a quick take up with a plethora of themes and plugins ready to go.

Of course you still need to know a bit more above and beyond WordPress to have a succesful website but wordpress, in the right hands, is a great place to start.

SEO is possible in Wordpress but usually only when you have the right plugins and the knowledge to drive them. No plugin will do the research to tell you what keyowrds are right for each website or the best way to use them in general content, but with the right plugins an experienced SEO person can get the most out of WordPress.

Melbourne Self Storage

We've just used Melbourne Self Storage to store all our furniture, happy to recommend them on price and service.

Engadget

Quoted from http://www.engadget.com/:

Engadget

Well, that must have been all the buzz Acer could take -- just a week after cryptically teasing the "Gemstone" concept and five days after "officially" unveiling the new design, it's announced the Core 2 Duo-powered Aspire 5920, the first machine to feature the new look. Acer's bizzare PR campaign notwithstanding, there's a lot here to distinguish the top-of-the-line 5920 from the rest of the thundering Santa Rosa herd: a 15.4-inch screen powered by 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M-GT graphics, Intel's Robson cache-to-flash technology, an HDMI port, an HD DVD drive, a DVB-T tuner, and Acer's Bluetooth VoIP phone, which charges when it's stored in the 5920's ExpressCard slot. No word on pricing or availability, but at the rate Acer's going, we wouldn't be surprised if they unveiled a new design concept to replace this one tomorrow.

Paul Horvath Solicitor Melbourne

Paul Horvath has been a practising solicitor since 1991. He has handled cases for a wide range of people, from television stars, AFL football players, various corporate executives, trade unions and their members, through to individuals with minor police or driving offences or unfair dismissal cases.


Accredited
criminal law specialist, Criminal
law,
Sports solicitor,
Employment
lawyer,
Melbourne solicitor

BBC NEWS - Search users 'stop at page three'

BBC NEWS | Technology | Search users 'stop at page three'
Most people using a search engine expect to find what they are looking for on the first page of results, says a US study.

At most, people will go through three pages of results before giving up, found the survey by Jupiter Research and marketing firm iProspect.

It also found that a third of users linked companies in the first page of results with top brands.

The study surveyed 2,369 people from a US online consumer panel.

It also found 62% of those surveyed clicked on a result on the first page, up from 48% in 2002.

Some 90% of consumers clicked on a link in these pages, up from 81% in 2002.

And 41% of consumers changed engines or their search term if they did not find what they were searching for on the first page.

Internet users quick to judge

Internet users can take just one-twentieth of a second to decide whether they like the look of a website, researchers say.

Dr Gitte Lindgaard and colleagues from Carleton University in Ottawa flashed up websites for 50 milliseconds and asked participants to rate them for visual appeal.

When they repeated the exercise after a longer viewing period, the participants' ratings were consistent.

"Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression," the Canadians report in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.

Associate Professor of psychology Bill von Hippel, from the University of New South Wales, says it takes about 50 milliseconds to read one word, making this a "stunningly remarkable" timeframe in which to process the complex stimuli on a website.

"It's quite remarkable that people do it that fast and that it holds up in their later judgement," he said.

"This may be because we have an affective or emotional system that [works] independently of our cognitive system."

He says that in evolutionary terms, this ability helped us respond rapidly to dangerous situations.
Halo effect

Professor von Hippel says the study also reflects the so-called halo effect, where an initial bias towards something drives subsequent judgements.

"This suggests that we make very quick judgements based on some sort of emotional reaction and our more considered judgements still reflect that first impression," he said.

Australian researcher Sue Burgess, who evaluates website useability and is a senior lecturer in information management at the University of Technology Sydney, says the finding comes as bad news to anyone hoping to convey information.

"There's no doubt that people do respond very quickly to websites and decide very quickly whether to stay on them," she said.

She says the appeal of a website is usually tied to colour, movement and interactivity, with the way the information is structured coming second.

Ms Burgess says it is unclear whether the Internet is changing our ability to concentrate for long periods or if we are adapting to the medium.

"There's so much information and ... there's always going to be a lot of clicking around just to see what's there," she said.