A UK SEO

It’s a new year and a good New Years Resolution is to upgrade any software running on your site. Before Christmas Wordpress 2.7 was released with a lot of hype due to the major changes to the administration section. Although many have been happy with the upgrade many Wordpress users have had problems with the new release.

The general chat and forum posts (e.g. tin68) seemed to pin point the problem not with Wordpress but with web host or plugins not compatible with 2.7.

So if your planning an upgrade or have upgraded here are a few tips.

Before doing anything take a backup of your entire MySql database and all files that Wordpress uses.

If you have done the installation and Wordpress 2.7 is running slow switch off all your plug ins and try the back end.

If it’s still not working install a second version of Wordpress 2.7 add some posts into the blog. Try the backend, if it works the problem might be corrupt database on your original blog, try exporting articles from the old blog into the new installation. If the second installation doesn’t work at all then it looks like your host is the problem. Your now going to have to get in contact with your hosting company, but before that open a thread at http://wordpress.org/support with a link to a php info file uploaded on your site.

If your still not having any luck after a post on Wordpress you might want to get in contact with your host to ask if they are running the latest version of PHP.

So if you are planning on a upgrade, Good luck, and if you have upgraded and your having problems then you might want to check out the old versions of Wordpress.

The BBC iPlayer videos are now showing in Google results with a thumnail of the video. For example a search for “Have I Got News for You: Series 36:” will return episode 8 of the last season.

This is done by using Video sitemaps which can be submitted to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. The sitemap contains information such as length, title, description, rating, views, publication date etc etc. So if you are publishing video content on your own site and not using a site such as Vimeo or YouTube then get a video sitemap created. More information over at Google video sitemap page.

Well the blog is only been running for four months but already there are 43 post on the board, some good content building and a few ideas ready to be implemented in the next 6 months.

So Merry Christmas to one and all!

Think Visibility is a mini seo conference taking place next March in Leeds. It’s only ¬£30 to attend and there is a limit to only 100 tickets which makes it sound like a great day.

The topics covered are SEO, PPC, Blogging, Accessibility and Usability. There are some well know speakers too Dave Naylor, Tim Nash, Tom Critchlow and Kieron Donoghue to name a few.

Around 45 tickets have been bought already so if you want to go grab a ticket from http://www.thinkvisibility.com/

The BBC have announced that the iPlayer will now be able to handle downloads on Mac and Linux OS. The iPlayer is one of my favorite sites since it’s launch in July 2007. The only negative is a lack of ability to download content to watch offline if your on a Mac but this all seems to be sorted now.

The next Christmas wish must be for Channel 4 to make their 4OD service work on Mac’s. There has been chatter that BBC would allow other channels to use the technology behind the iPlayer which must be a good thing!

So Woolworths have gone bust and there are many reason for it. A lack of direction, a lack of online marketing maybe? The number of search for Woolworths has gone through the roof as it always does at this time of year.

So search volumes are going through the roof, you have a 50% sale on to get rid of the remaining stock and what happens. Your site goes down.

A few tv and radio adverts are now asking listeners to search for a phrase or product name. The latest is the Nokia mobile phone that comes with free music downloads, your asked to search for ‘comes with music’.

If you are going to take this approach you have to be pretty confident that you can rank for the key phrase, if you don’t your going to be losing out on a heck of load of traffic. Nokia have managed to rank at number 1 for the phrase but at the moment the URL is an IP address http://62.61.85.218 with a flash site, with a chunky no script which looks legitimate. Must be a error from Nokia?

I’m a big fan of Google Webmaters help, it’s great for learning new SEO techniques, keeping on top of algorithm changes and also have a laugh at the odd person who wants help but doesn’t help themselves.

The forums have moved last week getting a new url http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en for the UK users. Theres a slight change to how things work with now the use of the answered button, so if you think that the questioned as been answered you can hit the button. Stats will show up for how many answers and questions made by each member.

Look out for posts from seo101, Phil Payne, John and Google employees. I’m posting under the name aukseo.

The X Factor is huge in the UK, on average it pulls in around 10 million viewers every Saturday night for its 18 week run on ITV. Some of the 10 million viewers each week go on to make the odd related search on Google. Using Google insight you can gain a rough idea of the popularity of each contestant.

At this late stage into the competition (semi-finals next saturday) there are four contestants left in the competition. Diana Vickers, Alexandra Burke, Eoghan Quigg and the band JLS. If you stick those four into Insight, select UK and the past 90 days you get a little graph with four lines for each term search for.

Blue = Diana Vickers
Red = Alexandra Burke
Yellow = Eoghan Quigg
Green = JLS

A few point to take into consideration, numbers are bound to increase as the competition comes to a close as the hype builds. Numbers will also increase as the number of contestants decreases, less people in the competition less people to search for.

From that graph it’s clear to see that Diana Vickers has been well in the lead since the searches picked up in September, JLS are on the rise in the last month, Eoghan Quigg has been pretty steady and there’s only been a slight increase in searches for Alexandra Burke in the last week or so.

What is interesting if you add “xfactor” to the start of each contestants name you get JLS in front of Diane Vickers.

Playing around with key phrases also showed that you can get traffic trends on an almost daily basis. By adding a 5th key phrase “xfactor Diana Vickers” the traffic levels show each Saturday when traffic peaks, lulls during the week and then increases again when the show airs on the Saturday.

So from those stats it looks like the Diana Vickers is the front runner to win. But what do I know, I’m just an SEO my other half thinks it will be Alexandra Burke.

The lesson behind the story, use Google Insight for checking out key phrases, play about to find traffic levels, compare to other key phrases but sometime you need to need use off line key phrase research to pick the best key phrases for your site.

In my last post I pointed out a problem with the Cineworld site, I’ve had a response today

Thank you for contacting Cineworld.

We have recently changed our website and as with all things new, we are
still tweaking it to make it perfect for our users. We truly appreciate
your comments and these will be forwarded to our Web Team for their
consideration.

Many thanks again.

Kind regards,

Natika Morrison
Customer Services

So a good reply and lets hope that the web developers get to work on the fixes!