Seven Things About Me (that you may or may not know already)

1. When I left school I initially wanted to be a sound engineer. I even went to university to study this but a combination of pneumonia and some dislocated knees as a result of my love of the ‘rock’n'roll lifestyle’  later I decided that maybe my future lay elsewhere. So I went and studied politics!
2. My first experiences of blogging led me to misplace/lose/throw away a girlfriend,  I forgot that anyone could read blogs – not just those people I thought were reading it. First rule of blogging/being online don’t write online what you don’t want read! Second rule of blogging – dont do it drunk after having a fight with your girlfriend.
3. I’ve been to see the Manic Street Preachers more than I care to remember (I got to about 90 times and stopped counting). Been to see them everywhere from London to Newport to Glasgow to Dundee and numerous other back waters for over 18 years now! Eek I hadn’t even realised it’s been that many years now. In recent gigs the price of tickets has gone up whilst the number of songs I like have fallen making the cost per good song from around £0.57 per good song (£7.50 face value for a ticket with a great 15 song set list) to around £11.66 per good song (£35.00 face value and 3 good songs). That said I’d probably pay the full value just to hear ‘Motown Junk‘ one more time.
4. Comic books are one of my great loves. Not graphic novels – that’s what people call comics when they’re embarrassed of collecting comics. I have a complete collection of the ‘Tomb of Dracula‘ series from the 1970′s. 
5. Chocolate is my one big addiction – I stopped smoking as a professional endeavour a while back (that said it is no smoking day today so I had a cigarette just for the hell of it). Basically I eat far too much really dark, rich chocolate and am constantly scouring the Internet for better and better chocolate. See the Kaori chocolate from Galler for my current favourite.
6. I hate Twitter. Its a complete waste of time (they don’t even give real links). 
7. CPE Bach was a better composer than JS Bach. Thats my opinion but it is also a fact.

Folksies who I’ve tagged

Sorry to all those I left out and the following is in no particular order what so ever…

1. Peter Hoggan. When I started SEO I worked with Pete for a while – until he sold the company. Now works does SEO in Spain for a living (jammy swine).
2. Petes SEO offspring Chance now blogs at seoscotland.net. 
3. Bill Marshall – I used to hate HTML and CSS when I did my postgrad. All this talk of valid coding and standards seemed a waste of time – if it worked it worked. Bill showed me that code could be ‘elegant’ a strange word to use in relation to HTML code at the time when embedded tables were the norm for websites.
4. Colin Boyd – currently developing some travel engine affiliate social media advertising solution thing over at IWantToBook.com. One of the funniest SEO guys I’ve ever met.
5. Paul Steven – runs NorthSouthMedia – and still owes me a pint for passing him a client
6. Richard Kelly – Currently working far too hard over at Dog Digital – as an all round marketing guy you’ll find few better.
7. Andrew McDonald – one of the guys in my SEO team – just started a new blog about the Terminator Film. Great link builder. Nuff Said.

Apologies to Gav from the link dev team too – but he’s not got himself a blog yet as he’s too busy writing about health related issues to have a blog of his own.
TTFN

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.

“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”.

He must be having a laugh – he must’ve thought this would make excellent link bait and drive them links.

• WP Themes Free – Ronseal website (it does what it says on the tin) and gives you loads of free WordPress Theme which is lovely. My first attempt at a theme can be found here. I keep thinking about building one of these but can never find a wordpress theme that’ll give me the flexibility to do it in an elegant way.
• Our Cool stuff – a  link developer I know has launched hiw own directory (is about a week old) – get in quick and get your links close to the home page for more Pagerank.
• Elegant Resorts – Nice looking website built by the guys @ Equator.

Have fun this weekend.

Andys Website

Well Andys site isn’t here yet. But during my chats with him he’s gonna be building his own social bookmarking website. Having just tested Pligg out he seems to be well on his way to building a nice little niche website. You can find his current look at fashion @ cheapclothesrule.wordpress.com. His tongue in cheek opinions on cheap clothes are a good laugh (Rupert the Bear being featured in the Cheap Golf Chic post was pretty damn clever)

Gavins Website

Gav is going one step further and has decided to enter the hugely competitive – and lucrative I guess – golfing market. Selling golf clubs online. From what I’ve seen and heard should be finished in the next couple of weeks. Have a look @ GB Golf Gear to see how he’s getting on.

Other Stuff

On a related note I’m just finishing off the final touches to the Whisky Blog I run with Bill, from Spiderwriting. This should be online next week. After much feverish nights with only coffee as my friend I’ve worked out how to develop custom functions for WordPress so that we can start running a more magazine style – and professional – looking blog. I hope to have this done for the tail end of August. Oh and cheers to Colin for having helped enlighten me about the stuff that is possible in WordPress,

Alongside all this I’ve been reading some cool stuff about SNOWL for FireFox – not got it working yet. Also been messing about with Firefox personas (nice idea but my tabs keep vanishing (so get it fixed guys). Away from FireFox I was pleased to see that the guys over @ North South Media have moved into a new office -  and don’t forget the beer you promised me for putting that client onto you :p

L8rs

For years I’ve tried to explain to people what I do for a living. Most look like I’ve just fallen off a spaceship and others think this isn’t a real job – internet marketing’s a fad and will die out in a while. Two years ago I met the first ‘real’ person who knew what search engine optimization was! They were an american so as usual they were probably a few steps ahead in their knowledge on online compares to the majority of UK residents. So imagine my surprise when I get talking to my cabbie on the ride home ony to find he was doing his own SEO – and he brought up the subject.

For kicking me out of my post-holiday stupour  and getting me to my train on time here’s a link to his website that provides Glasgow Airport Taxis. Maybe those rankings that everyone goes after for SEO terms will start delivering more traffic than sales historically as the knowledge of everyone in the UK increases. The market would appear ripe for a company specialising in affordable SEO for small companies when this growth takes place as I expect that many wont be able to afford the thousands of pounds that larger established SEO companies will be charging.

So here I am with a wee flash movie telling me about the PDFs I’d blogged about a wee while ago. But the flash movie aint a link! Yep when you click it nothing happens. Its telling me specifically about something which isn’t contained within the content of the page and its not a link.

Its not a unique thing to the BMM site all over the Internet people are making websites with nice images and flash movies that dont have links on them. I did some work last year for a hotel website where I found that over 40% of the inactive clicks, clicks occuring by people clicking on non-linking areas of the webpage, were on images. So the picture of the wedding was being assumed by people to be a link to the wedding section. By updating the CMS to get these images to be links we increased conversion by more than 10%. By not having these links functioning properly they were losing sales!

To find out how people are really using your website – and where they are clicking and expecting responses from the website have a look at installing Crazy Egg or Click Density. I prefer Click Density but that because I like to do sitewide tests rather than testing just one page at a time – giving better overall understanding of how the website is being used.

Please note that tracking of flash objects is a bit dodgy at times – with clicks not being effectively tracked. so remember to cross reference all your click data with your analytics click path data to get a better picture of how visitors are using/trying to use your website.

• Shave the Beaver
  
• Chocolate Bar Mashups – now we know what happens when you cross breed a Galaxy with a Milky Bar
• Lauren Laverne Season – I was going to link but can’t remember the URL but the concept of us now entering Lauren Laverne season fills me with happiness

Social Network – Ning

At Ning you can set up your own social network- woo hoo. Who cares these things are mostly rubbish and have no traction and no way of ‘leveraging’ the traffic that you get. Its all fine and well getting traffic but if it doesn’t go where you want it to why would anyone invest in it.

So having set up a network on Ning and started doing all the things you should I started to find that people joined it. OK we’re upto about 10 now – but thats nine people I never connected with before. thats nine people who have now given me links to a website and nine people who are saying nice things about the things we do @ the social network and we’re starting to get some traction. The traffic this is delivering isn’t great but I can directly attribute 200 IBL from related websites/blogs to the core website gained through this network – oh and the target site got a mention in an email newsletter (which has generated a decent set of clicks). And its only taken about 2 hours to get up and running. Normally to get 200 good links would take longer than this and the quality/relevance would be a heck of a lot lower. And these links keep growing. If I blog about something these guys are interested in the site gets more links.

Social Network – Bebo

When I sat through the recent Omniture Summit the dude speaking was talking about how social networks help to influence buying decisions and the websites we all visit. If someone we trust on a social network gives us an opinion – and we trust them – we’re likely to take the opinion on board. I went to my brothers Bebo page and was reading his comments – and someone had posted something about a website selling collars (leather/rubber collars in an S&M stylee). I have no interest in this particular product (or any related products) but I clicked on it. Here was someone I don’t know reccomending a website I have no interest in but I went and had a look at it.

Social Networking – What is it good for?

So here’s the problem. Can you use/leverage/abuse social networks to get your site traffic and sales. I’ve been reading for ages about how you can do X, or to try Y on a social network and you’ll get the benefit. And most of its baloney. The truth is to get the most out of it you need to be building relationships. If you have a blog on a topic let the community guide you on which content to write – if they’re talking about it, they’ll read it and then they’ll link to it and they’ll tell their online friends about it – getting you links and traffic at the same time (think of it like targetted link baiting). And remember, as with all blogging, to link out. don’t hoard your links people will use your site as a conduit and if you link out well people will trust your links. the more trust you get the mroe you can ‘frmae’ debates rather than just ‘follow’ them.

So have fun networking online – don’t take it too seriously and make it easy for people to come to you.

A Big Shout Out

• Hobo Web – if you’re looking for stuff about SEO then have a look at the blog well worth the effort
• North South Media – These guys are doing some cool online marketing things just now
• Oyster Web – Nice chaps. I used to work there. If you need a new website on a budget these guys can probably do something for you

Where We’re Listed

• Our Page at the GEO URL Project – so you can see who’s close to use in a geographic list kind of way
• Our Page on Technorati
  

That’s all folks