Hello there, and a happy Monday to everyone.

Upstream Connections is very much a Brighton SEO. Some of our longest-standing clients are based in and around the fine city of Brighton & Hove, with more around the whole of Sussex. In fact, Brighton is home to a bewildering array of internet startups, websites, design companies and marketing companies like ourselves.

The whole new media boom is very good for a city that, despite appearances, is not especially wealthy. Sure, property in and around town sells for a small fortune and you often see Aston Martins and Bentleys rolling along Western Road, but this wealth is generally generated out of town. The internet boom has allowed local companies to compete on a national level. Brighton SEO companies, web designers, programmers, developers and marketers have lower overheads than their equivalents in the Big Smoke and can offer much better value. There are even parts of London that can be reached more quickly from the coast than from the other side of London.

Brighton’s Search Engine Optimisation community growing by the day. Alongside the longest established Brighton SEOs, companies like ourselves are growing at a rate. We are very proud to be attracting major clients like the Carphone Warehouse, who would traditionally have gone with more a more famous name. That our relationship will shortly be going into its third year should speak volumes about our work.

On another note…
Keep your eyes peeled in tomorrow’s Argus for another “The Bottom Line” column. This week I have written about handling negative blog or forum posts – an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant as Google has recently started launching forum and blog posts to the top of SERPs in record time. What should you do if you find yourself victim of a bad post? Picking up a copy of tomorrow’s Argus would be a good start.

Hello there people of the internet! I’m Benjamin, the “video guru” at Upstream Connections. Our department focuses on the proliferation of media on the internet, something that is always on the up thanks to ever-increasing bandwidth and the recent growth of social bookmarking sites such as Digg. As much as we’re starting to dislike the term, Web 2.0 is very much upon us!

As a short example of the kind of thing we do, here’s a short demonstration video of the building that houses the Upstream office, the illustrious Intergen House.

Talk of white hats brings to mind cricket, the man from Del Monte and the Lone Ranger.

In the world of Search Engine Optimsation, “White Hat” is an umbrella term used to describe legitimate techniques for gaining rankings. This generally means ensuring that your site is choc-full of relevant content that is updated on a regular basis. It means ensuring that your site is visible to the search engines’ spiders and that every page can be cached. This is achieved through well planned design that sticks to some established SEO principles.

At Upstream Connections, we use only White Hat techniques to get top results for our clients. Fortunately, this offers us a great array of opportunities to be creative! It is probably easier to list a few things that Upstream Connections, or any SEO worth their salt, would never dabble with:

Link Farms. Spammy spammy spammy. Basically, you can purchase thousands of links from websites that only exist for SEO purposes. Google will promptly ignore these links, and probably give you a shunt down the listings for good measure.

Doorway Pages. Again, these are spamilicious pages which are stuffed with keywords. You will rarely actually  see one as you are instantly redirected to the real front page of a site. BMW hit the headlines a couple of years ago when their website disappeared from Google’s results.

Keyword Stuffing.  Amazingly, you will still find websites that are stuffed full of hundreds of keywords, misspellings and all. White Hat SEO involves making sure that the right keywords appear in the right places, Black Hat SEO generally involves cramming the words in there in text which is all but invisible.

Link Spam. Not all links are good links. Did you know that inbound links to your site from the wrong places can actually damage your site’s performance in natural search?

White Hat SEO means ensuring that visitors to your site see the  same site as the search engines. Google and the other search engines aim to offer the best possible results to their users, and rightly punish those seen to be abusing this service.

At Upstream Connections, we would never do anything to threaten our clients results. Yes, our work takes time and results are not achieved over night, but if you are online for the long haul, you will need an SEO partner with the same long term vision. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, drop us a line.