A UK SEO

The Shakira song goes “You know my hips don’t lie” but in the case of Google there is a bit of confusion over hips, are they Home Information Packs or are they the hips that Shakira can shake so well?

This is a screenshot from a Google.com search, all Home Information Packs relevant results in the paid and natural results but there are four images of lovely ladies hips!

Interestingly when searching from the UK the images don’t show. For any American readers out there HIP’s are packs of information required for when you sell your house. Google tries to show relevant content according to your search and also your location. It looks like in this case it’s almost got it correct.

In business not everyone gets along, generally in SEO were a friendly bunch but I’ve been in the middle of arguments between clients and ex-web designers. The disagreements are usually about payments, missed deadlines or lost contracts.

I’ve seen on three occasions web developers get their own back by making little changes to stop sites ranking in Google.

So what can you learn, give all third parties a temporary FTP access to the site, when they finish work delete the account. Check after work your htaccess file and for any Google Webmaster Tools verifications (either a html file or a meta tag in the home page).

The only way to avoid any problem is not to be a dick and annoy web masters or SEO’s!

There’s been a a few screen shots recently of a new looking Google SERP which splits the universal search results from the organic results. So pictures, Video, and ads are placed on the right sidebar where paid ads usually appear.

This screen shot from Search Cow Boys shows the result page for the search “Zen buddhist temple” from Google Korea.

It’s not know yet if this is an experiment which is going to be rolled out across Google, if it’s hoax! If you see any results get them screen shotted up and get in contact via a comment below.

Well the new year has seemed to bring plenty of SEO predictions so I thought I’d list some from a UK point of view.

1. More and more business will be looking to invest in SEO, as we know business who invest in marketing during a recession generally come out of the period stronger compared than those that make cuts, but…

2. Business looking to invest in SEO will go for the cheaper option, it will mean quite a few getting their fingers burnt as you get what you pay for. The companies that know what they are doing will pay for a quality service.

3. Google will continue to try and personalise trends and keywords tools to help UK business target local search.

4. Companies in the UK will start to take notice of the opportunities that advertising on social networks. Sites like facebook, MySpace and Bebo allow you to precisely target your key demographic.

5. More UK companies will look into ‘company blogging’ rather than general content generation. Similar to ‘company blogging’ some UK companies will start to use and publish information on twitter.

6. Due to the increase of personalised search hopefully SME will understand that SEO isn’t all down to achieving ranking on one key phrase.

7. Dedicate mobile sites will cease as the UK starts to move over to newer generation of phones which can handle full browsers, as a result….

8. More UK companies will be trying to ensure their website work on not only all browser but on mobile browsers, iPhone, Blackbury, Nokia I95 etc etc.

9. Firefox usage in the in UK will continue to grow with IE reducing, also Chrome will start to increase to around 5-10 % share.

10. Companies will start to shift old style link building to paying for links on other blogs, either paying bloggers or going onto content networks.

So there are the ten, if there are any UK predictions please add them in below in a comment!

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.