Mr Happys online journal

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

I was just reading some of the other blogs on Equatorlive and saw that none of us really talked about what we do here at Equator. So I thought I’d do some stuff on what us Search Engine Optimisers are upto here at Equator.
If you’ve not heard of Search Engine Optimisation, or are scared by it, don’t worry. Its not a black art – and those who tell you that SEO is are lying. All SEO entails is ensuring that you give search engine evidence that your website is relevant for a users query.
In simple terms we make sure your web pages use the relevant words in the appropriate ways and get other people to talk about you and show search engines why your website is relevant for a query. As our SEO is focussed around generating sales for clients all these query are business related and designed to drive traffic which is likely to convert into a sale.
SEO folk are geeky – but the good ones will help you understand the whole process without getting into horrendous language such as “keyword co-occurance theory” (which I find interesting but know that only a few others do) or Link Velocity tracking.
Its you SEO companies job to monitor these – and keep you abreast of developments without bombarding you with ‘geek speak’.
At the moment here at Equator we’re doing some cool work, and driving great results, for a number of companies throughout the UK including:

• De Vere Hotels
• Ramada Jarvis Hotels
• Scottish Hydro
• Southern Electric
• Swalec

Over the next couple of months we’re kicking off more work for some great UK based brands from our Glasgow based HQ which has got us all really excited.

If you’d like to find out more give us a call on 0141 299 1800.

As someone who dabbles in affiliate bits and piece one in a while I am highly interested in how affiliate programs are managed. Working in an agency you see how agencies manage their affiliate programs and from sitting on the other side of the fence (trying to make money for myself) I have an interest in how the programs I work on are managed.
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Was sitting last night trying to work out what to do – girlfriend at work and had little interest in watching football. So instead I started to go round and find stuff out about the Watchmen Film which is due out soon.
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Yesterday I heard one of the fuinniest things in ages – Theo Paphitis paid 200 grand for 30% of an affiliate site. Colin sat and told me this while I looked on in awe – I thought he was making it up. I dont know if it was a rush of blood to the head of Mr Paphitis or a cunning ploy by a couple of shysters to get money out of him. Anyway this made me happy as the money I lost on Scotland against Georgia now looks like small potatoes compared to this.

Other people have been blogging about this also:

• Kierons Blog

So for once I’m not alone it thinking that the worlds gone mad – am off to build a site, develop a widget and sell the whole bloody thing off and retire to St Kitts