Social Media blog

This post is to welcome Oliver Ragg of Flight Comparison Ltd, 77 Queen Victoria Street, London, Gtr Manchester, EC4V 4AY that runs flightcomparison.co.uk owned by Media Corporation plc. It is a real shame to see such crap websites in search results. And you can really tell that its not there by merit.

Naturally Mr Ragg would not have a job if the likes of Airline Network, AdSense and DoubleClick did not help him earn some money.
A truly disgusting site littering search results. I hope that Mr Matt Cutts and Cuttlets are listening in.

Anyone spotted lots of SPAM in travel recently?

There is a lot of buzz in forums recently after Google announced their intention to remove PageRank from the Google toolbar. Many argue that this is a tool used only by webmasters to SPAM the web. Is Google trying to find an easy way out by blocking access to information about it’s algorithm that could potentially help people to manipulate the index? Is this strategy a little short-sighted in many respects?

Firstly Google users are not all the same. There is a great gap between the average user and the advanced user. The latter are the trend-setters, the people that teach everyone else what PageRank is. An indication of page/website importance. In many ways sharing this information is the most engaging social aspect of the Google search engine. It signifies preference from people with websites that link to a particular page they find meaningful and useful. Of course importance is also demonstrated in rankings. Google ranks important pages higher. How are you to determine importance however if you are being referred from another website or a social network? Read more

If you are using site-targeted campaigns with AdWords it’s very easy to root out invalid traffic depending on your goals. If for example you need many pageviews, have a look at your AdWords analysis in Google Analytics or any other analytics software you are using and check how many pageviews an advertiser is bringing on average. If your target is 3 PVs per user and a site is only generating 1.2 PVs then you know that the traffic you get is not really qualified.
Read more

I have had two Firefox crashes yesterday when trying to create new albums in Facebook using Firefox. The Internet Explorer 7 browser requires ActiveX installation but then works fine. However I hate IE so dear Facebook please sort this out asap.

Anyone else had this?

Many business people and especially SME’s are very surprised when consultants suggest the setting up of a blog. Retailers seem to be more shocked by this new-found craze, as they call it. They cannot understand why people would read them and are completely lost as to what to write. Which is understandable as we are not all born writers.

The main problem however is the lack of understanding of the core dynamics of the web. Read more

We normally don’t review products here but here is a post about KeyTrail. If you are a small or medium size business or a search marketing specialist with limited resources then you need to have a look into this. It gives you control over PPC spend, however small or big and helps you understand the activity top-level as well as down to details such as individual keyword performance across time.
It is a very interesting product for tracking pay per click activity and it does what it says on the tin. Great to see a site that does not over-claim what the product can offer. Read more

This is a simple suggestion to Matt Cutts and the Google search engine quality team. UK users do NOT need to see spelling suggestions that are American.

If you follow the search below you will see what I mean: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=search+engine+optimisation

Why do we get the suggested spelling of ‘optimization’ when the correct spelling in the English (UK) language is optimisation?
Sounds like a no-brainer to me. What do you think?

News that Facebook use is spiralling out of control in the UK is of no surprise. It’s also fairly understandable that over 50% of UK employers banned Facebook in the office. So far so expected.

It is nonsensical however to hear that Siemens is leading a corporate relations plan for it’s 6,430 employees on Facebook, not only encouraging them to use the site but also linking Facebook with corporate and staff blogs. They must be insane, right?

Unless Siemens realised that a company’s employees are it’s best marketing ambassadors (as the old marketing saying goes) and giving them the right to use Facebook will boost the company brand image and spread it like a virus. Clever forward thinking or what?
They must be laughing.