Mr Happys online journal

I’ve heard tell of this for a while but I’ve never seen it before. If you do a search in Google for “Bar Chocolate” the first result is for http://www.barchoc.co.uk/ and the entire content is hidden inside a flash movie file. The result from Google shows content indexed from within the menu section of the website!

Nice result by Google. Especially as the website itself doesn’t do the bar justice. I ate in the related place Elk in the Woods the other day (having the rabbit for dinner) and it was a pretty damn good dinner (but that could be the bottle of Fleurie used to wash it down talking).

At SES one of the topics that came up over a few pints was negative SEO – using nefarious SEO techniques to get competitors pages/sites removed from the Google index. Anyway the first thing that came into my mind was Spy Vs Spy…

Which side are you on?

Projections are one of the most important things that an SEO will ever do in a campaign. They tell clients what we think we can give them as a return on their investment. Which is nice. The problem is that if you’re not careful when doing projections you can often portary scenarios that may never arrive – just to make the numbers look even better.

If you think about it the client relies on us to give them an accurate portrayal of what we think is achievable on a specific budget. And it is encumbent upon us to be realistic rather than just give them the numbers they want to get back. Below are a couple of things to make sure you actually do projections and do not prophesize what will be delivered.

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How do. quick post on some nice bits and pieces I’ve seen today.
Over at Equator the Flash monkeys have been beavering away (can monkeys beaver? – answers on a post card please to the usual address) on some cool little sites for HTC – you’ll have seen their advert on the tv for the HTC Magic I’m sure.

Anyway here’s a list of sites they’ve been doing:

• www.htc-android.de
• www.htc-android.es
• www.htc-android.nl
• www.htc-hero.co.uk
• www.htc-hero.de
• www.htchero.dk
• www.htc-hero.dk
• www.htchero.es
• www.htc-hero.fr
• www.htchero.no
• www.htc-hero.no
• www.htchero.se
• www.htc-hero.se
• www.htc-magic.dk
• www.htc-magic.no
• www.htc-magic.se
• www.styledforperformance.co.uk
• www.touchdiamond.dk
• www.touchdiamond.no
• www.touchdiamond.se
• www.touchdiamond2.cz
• www.touchdiamond2.es
• www.touchdiamond2.fr
• www.touchdiamond2.nl
• www.touchdiamond2.pl
• www.touchhd.dk
• www.touchhd.no
• www.touchhd.se
• www.touchinhd.de

(my hand is now sore with cutting and pasting – Ctrl+c/Ctrl+v – must be getting old)

Alongside this the guys at Flock (my second favourite browser after Chrome) who I follow on Twitter were mentioned over at CNN alongside some other browsers – including the Kid Rocket Web Browsers (designed for weans – which I’m going to try out on my own little bundle of energy later this week).

Also thought I should say I was messing about with a Personality Test – am little bit spooked by my results.

I’m sure my link to content ratio is a touch on the high side but hey I cant please the Google gods every day.

L8rs

It seems like so long ago I got to post as Mr Happy but I’ve managed it – at last.

I thought I’d break my self in nice and easy with a quick link rolling post – where I’ll bung up some links to some cool/not so cool/funny/ interesting things I’ve seen on the old interweb in the last couple of weeks.

1. Terminator Salvation Film Review – one of the most scathing reviews of the new terminator film – ternimator salvation – that I’ve read so far. From what I gather it’s pants and no one should waste their time or effort on going to see it. But hey I’m a sucker for crap movies so will probably go and see it. On a similar note Transformers 2 is a it naff – Megan Fox aside.
2. No Follow Post by Matt Cutts – not as cute as Megan Fox but equally interesting post by Google Guy about WTF Google actually see nofollow as being and WTF they do with links that are nofollowed.
3. Falkirk take on Vaduz of Lichtenstein in the Europa Cup – YAY. But I cant get to the away leg. Minor disaster. but getting to Europe is a great step forward for my – almost relegated – fitba team.
4. Susan Boyle Kicking Hollie Steele – nuff said. snick snick.
5. 
   Song of the week – Beaver Patrol by Pop Will Eat Itself (inspired by Nick)

Right promise to post something serious soon.

I go out the office for one day – don’t check all my RSS feeds and miss the fact that Google has update its algorithm. Anyway thought I’d do a quick overview of the changes here. 

What are the changes?

1. Keyword/Conceptual Relationships: You’re all probably bored when I talk about using keyword relationships to improve content and anchor texts in links but guess what for once I may have been a little bit ahead of Google. Basically they’ve updated the importance of relationships within results – if you do queries with a couple of words you’ll start to see that the related searches have changed to include more related words So we can get more info in the things
2. Longer snippets under Titles: Snippets under the title of a page (the clickable bit) have traditionally been two lines of content – generally the meta description from the page, the Dmoz description or some relevant section of onpage content. Now they’ve extended this in some cases to include longer exceprts.

What does this mean for you?

If you do website content writing, link development or are incharge of a website development project you may want to take it into account when you start making changes to a website:

1. Write good meta descriptions when you write the on page content: title/meta description/meta keywords/navigation./body content are all parts of trhe on page content so when you write them write with related keywords (find these by querying google with a ‘~’ in front of the keywords – bolded words in results are the related words). Take every part of your page content into consideration and mark it up correctly (hx tags, content tags etc)
2. Use these related keywords in your anchor texts where possible : internally and externally. 
3. Create a glossary which includes sensible use of related keywords and link back to other pages within this page : enhancing anchor text and domain relevance.

Three wee tips, nice and simple. If you want more info have a look at the Google Blog and ask any questions that you may have in the comments below.

As a quick post I thought I’d talk about furry handcuffs. With Valentines day almost upon us I thought of what all the mad online folksies would be looking for and for some reason it came to me that they were probably looking for furry handcuffs: not exclusively pink fluffy handcuffs but certainly furry handcuffs.

This got me thinking what kind of handcuffs do people really look for in the search engines: those for pleasure and those for law enforcement purposes.

So a wee rummage in WordtTracker later and I found:

• handcuffs – 171 searches
• james parker hancuffs – 38 searches
• furry handcuffs – 35 searches

I have no idea about james parker handcuffs and neither does google – anyone know why people would be searching for this?

Anyway, cheers to fi for raising this idea in my head – she forwarded http://www.agentprovocateur.com/love-me-tender.html onto me earlier on – which kinda raised the idea of handcuffs initially.

More details on the female model in the ad can be found @ tokyito post about Rosie Huntington-Whiteley

As part of our annual calendar @ Equator Halloween stands out as one of the days when things generally end up a bit messy. Everyone gets dressed up – paying a fine to charity if they do not indulge in the costume merriment et al.

Here is this years team shot – and yes its Scotland and its perishing

Below are links to the bookmark pages within del.icio.us (I know its now delicious.com but I prefer the old skool version – kinda like Lynns note taking)

1. PalinAsPresident.com – Political Satire of what would happen in Sarah Palin was president of the United states. Is kinda funny.
2. John McCain is Your Jalopy – Nope I’ve no idea WTF this means but it did make me laugh
3. Big List of Obama Jokes – I thought I better provide some balance in a BBC stylee
4. Watchmen Stuff - God I love that comic book

Right thats enough delicious.com/del.icio.us stuff for today. Toodles

Funniest thing in ages. Steve McLaren should do comedy. It would appear that he can’t speak English without a really strange accent. Am sure the Dutch will be thinking he’s an idiot already – having only been in the country for a matter of weeks he’s already mucking it up. And not even an umbrella in sight. Idiot.

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