Morning meetings

I've started to having morning meetings with the entire office before we start work on a trial basis. It seems to be working pretty well at the moment as everyone is getting involved and starting to help eachother out/share information with eachother. We have nettracker coming tommorrow to configure our new analytics software and we picked up a new brochure site today (no SEO required really apart from the basics) Looks like it will be another busy month next month now but I'm hoping to book a few days off anyway to go surfing in cornwall. We have Sir Digby Jones speaking at our www.finditinsandwell.co.uk launch at the end of next week also so it's going to be another busy one with quite a few of us in over the weekend again. Emma has on our Iceblueblog which she will now take over as she's far more design orientated than me. Read it at http://www.icebluemd.co.uk/blog/blog.html

Adwords professional

Oh yes, almost forgot to mention, I finally got round to taking the adwords professional exam today. Passed it but it was a lot tougher than I thought! I just need to get everyone else to take it now and maybe make it into a monthly SEO competition at our place to keep everyone motivated. e have a new member joining the Iceblue team on Monday, Matt. He's done some excellent freelance work for us before and we're relieved to have the cavalry arrive at last! I'm afraid he's going to have hit the ground running though but it should be fun too, we may let him have some time off to update the blog in the future so you can get to hear from him and how he's doing..

End of a hectic week, hence the lack of updated entries! We've decided to sign up to nettracker to do all of our web analytics from now on. We configured it to our server today with help from their very nice support staff and they're sending a consultant up to us next friday to set up the analytics for the launch of www.finditinsandwell.co.uk at the end of march. We've been beavering away at this site as we have a fairly big launch with sir digby jones speaking, television crews etc etc. The good news is that we've got loads of press coverage for it so it's ranking high already even though it's just a holding page with a registration form on it at the moment so when we've launched it for real it should really take off. The Iceblue team went to see ricky gervais at the NIA on Thursday for a bit of a diversion from our hectic schedule, it was the best i've ever seen him, absolutrly awesome show, I was crying laughing at the end. Next week should be another hectic one (in fact this whole year will be) Our next line up of clients have multi million marketing budgets and it looks like our goal of cracking the top 25 design and multimedia agencies is going to become a reality over the next few years as long as we can all keep up with it... exciting times

Busy

First post of the week is going to be a short one I'm afraid. We have got to spend all week running around Birmingham ith launches, meetings and new clients from the previous two exhibitions tht we put on last month. It's nice having the work to do but I'll be glad when the week is over. As for our site, we're doing quite well now as I finally managed to spend half a day on it last week so hopefully we should start to seethe results ofour own SEO paying off over the next couple fo months or so.

New blog

Well, it's been a while but we've finally got round to updating the blog with proper technical things like ATOM feeds, posts archives, searches and all the other clever things that should make this blog quite nice to use (if you're a bit geeky) or just nice to read as now anyone in the office can update it.

Future of SEO

I had a thought today in the shower (where I get most of my good ones). With SEO becoming the industry that it is, it is becoming harder and harder for people who aren't involved heavily in the industry to get their sites noticed. This means that the search engines can remain effectively manipulated by a small handful of professionals i.e. "us". I can't see many people remaining too happy with this in the future and my thought is this:

1. New languages and functionality will become more and more important and replace links as the primary route for optimising websites.

2. Human editing will come back into fashion along with a greater importance placed on getting people to vote for sites.

Hits and visitors

I have lost count of the number of companies that come to me proudly saying that they recieve thousands of "hits" a day but they can't understand why they aren't converting them into sales.

Unfortunately they have been told about these "hits" by their web companies but haven't actually been told that a hit does not = a visitor to the website. One visitor can create unlimited hits from a server so when your web company proudly tells you about your amazing number of "hits" ask them about the unique visitors, you'll probably be in for a nasty suprise! I don't know if these companies are misleading their clients knowingly or not and I'm a firm believer in innocent until proven guilty etc however, a web firm should really know the difference between a hit and a visit.

NOYDIR

Just heard that yahoo have added a useful new meta tag "NOYDIR" which basically means that you can tell search engines to ignore the information held in the yahoo directory about your domain. This is pretty useful, especially for domain names which may have changed usage over the years such as iceblue's (it was originally a webcam directory - we still get visitors wanting to see the Eiffel tower etc etc). Another useful meta tag which has been around for a bit longer is NOODP which does the same thing but for the open directory project which is great seeing how difficult it is to edit your listing on that!
Just a thought for the day on these directories, it seems that they are still given far too much weight in google along with domain age so that I often see really horrendous old sites appearing for searches just because they've been listed in the ODP for 7 years, surely there must be a case for putting less emphasis on domain age so that we can see some of the fresher, 2.0 sites returned as results...

New York SES

Well the time has come to start planning our trip to the New York search engine strategies conference. Everyone in the office has suddenly taken an unusual interest in search engine optimisation which is odd because no one seemed as interested in the London event in February. I'm looking forward to flying back over as I was in Chicago for last years SES event and found it a real eye opener. Friendly people, nice (cold) weather etc etc. It was also great to get chatting to everyone in the industry over their as everyone seems to keep themselves to themselves in the UK pretty much although the idea of having search engine "parties" afterwards seems slightly geeky!

I hate Mondays!!

Well, I've finally managed to get the reports out inbetween phone calls, meetings, dramas and a sandwich. (didn't even have time to get to subway, so had to settle for a greggs instead! Have been recieving a steady stream of emails all day about SEO leads that we picked up during our exhibitions last week. Now it's a matter of sorting out the good leads from the bad. It seems to me that a lot of the time talkng to clients initilally is taken up by apologising for previous cowboys who have overcharged them for "SEO" I can't belive that I still recieve "number one in Google" faxes on a daily basis, it's no wonder that we have such a bad image as an industry. It also doesn't help that clients generally know next to nothing about SEO and would probably be impressed with a mass submission to search engines / directories and ranking first for their own domain name!

Monday morning

It's Monday morning and I've just made it into work so this is my first real blog entry. The office is pretty quiet at the moment apart from my dog, Harry, who is barking outside as he doesn't feel he's getting enough attention. Loads of work to do today, writing the end of month reports for all of our clients. I normally find this bit pretty interesting as it's when I get to review peoples rankings and see how well we're doing. Back to work now then as the phones are getting busy.