This was my article about blogging in the Brighton & Hove Argus last week (we are a Brighton SEO, after all). Sorry if it’s a bit simple for the more technologically-minded out there.

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There’s a saying that you hear increasingly in the world of website optimisation: “content is king”.

A rough translation from geekspeak to English is: “if you want people to come and visit your website, there should be something interesting for them to see when they arrive.” The more often your site is updated with interesting content, the more people will come back.

Traditionally, this has presented a problem for many business owners. Even if you have a website, you can’t necessarily update the pages, either because you don’t know how or don’t have the necessary access.

Nowadays, with the availability of free blogging software, there really are no excuses.

A blog (abbreviated from “weblog”) is like an online diary where you can post text, images, videos or music for the world to see.

This may bring to mind images of Trekkies hunched feverishly hunched over their keyboards debating the twists and turns of the Starfleet, but this is increasingly distant from the truth. Keeping a blog is now the easiest way to ensure that your website is interesting and fresh.

Here are some simple tips:

Think about what you are trying to achieve. If you are keeping a blog for your business, goals could include showing more of your company’s personality to potential customers, demonstrating your awareness of current events by responding to developments in your industry, offering your customers a forum for debate or sparking debate of your own.

Whatever your goals, update your blog regularly. It is very easy to start blogging and then forget about it. This has the opposite of the desired effect – while the blog is there partly to keep your site fresh and keep people coming back, it will quickly look dated if your last entry is more than a couple of weeks old.

Be consistent. As well as posting regularly, make sure that the voice in your blog is identifiable. Try and avoid just posting press releases without any comment or analysis.

Read other people’s blogs. Comment on other people’s blogs. Whatever business you are in, there are blogs out there dedicated to it. There is a real sense of community among bloggers.

To make the most of a business blog, you should host it on your own site. This is because you want to have the blog closely associated with you and your work. If you write an interesting or useful blog, it will also drive more traffic to your site, which usually means more business.

Happy blogging!

Today (at the fourth time of asking) Vodafone delivered my shiny new Nokia N95 8GB. I am just coming to terms with the universe of features on the phone, more details of which can be found here. Three of us in the office now have N95s and we are well and truly smitten.

Now I can see why my N95 owning flatmate shakes his fist at the television every time one of those insufferably smug iPhone adverts comes on – Nokia’s flagship phone was out before the Apple and has higher spec, more user options and a lovely two way slider. And it’s 3G.

Which leads nicely on to the topic of this post: a great new website called Qik, which allows you to stream direct footage from your 3G mobile phone to the internet.

We have been spending a frankly upsetting amount of time in the Upstream office playing with this site. You register your mobile phone on the site, receive an sms to confirm and later receive a link from which you download the necessary software.

It is still very much in its infancy, but looks to be a revolutionary development (please correct me if this has been done before). At the moment, the majority of videos being streamed are people sitting in their offices checking if the site really works. A number of them have come from Upstream’s Brighton SEO office. One cool thing is that you can comment on people’s videos as they are streaming… these comments appear on their screens as they are filming. This hasn’t been fully integrated yet, but does have tremendous potential (for both honest interaction and juvenile entertainment).

The potential for streaming from mobile phones is great… lets just hope it doesn’t end up the great big fleshfest that sadly seems on the cards!!

We are based in the city of Brighton & Hove.

For those of you who don’t know the city, it is on the south coast of the UK and is well known for its piers (well, pier and a bit), Pavilion and pebble beach.

We are proud to be a Brighton SEO. One of the main advantages is that there is a great digital community and spirit of entrepreneurship down here. There are two universities in a town of 250,000 people and many students don’t want to leave after 3 years of hedonism, hence a young, creative workforce that you are as likely to meet in the pub as in a networking event. And as for those networking events in the pub…

If you are looking for an SEO in Brighton & Hove, give us a call and find out what we can do for you. While our clients are based around the world (including Brazil, USA and Spain), we are very much a Brighton SEO and enjoy being a part of the thriving digital community down here. We are members of Wired Sussex and Sussex Enterprise, not to mention keen supporters of the local pub (the Wick Inn)- check out our Flickr page for documentary evidence of this.

Some of our longest standing clients are based in Sussex. If you fancy catching up with us in Hove, or our clients at the top of Google, give us a call!