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.

Techcrunch thinks so:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/07/google-microsoft-bidding-for-digg/

This is hardly surprising. Google likes to let companies develop a strong infrastructure before swallowing them up. Also, what with search and social media sites becoming increasingly intertwined concepts, it is little wonder that Google would make every effort to tie in with the largest social media site.

Microsoft are also said to be interested, although Google appear early favourites to seal the deal.

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!

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!

Being a sales and marketing bod often involves going to a lot of trade shows. This week’s was the TFM&A (Technology For Marketing and Advertising) at Earls Court 2.

A very interesting day it was too. I was particularly impressed with Danny Meadows-Klue, from Digital Strategy Consulting and his talk on “Marketing to the Facebook Generation”. While there was an element of preaching to the converted about his talk, he raised a number of interesting points about the flow of traditional marketing spend to the internet and how best to manage this change.

One point that he made which really resonated was the current underuse of online channels by many companies of all sizes. It was only a small part of the talk, but was particularly interesting to someone who devotes a lot of time and energy trying to convince companies to devote a larger chunk of their marketing spend to the web.

His point was that, for most companies that now advertise online, this media channel would be the least likely to suffer cutbacks in the coming squeeze. The strange thing is that many companies are yet to even dip their toes in online marketing!

(This seems like a convenient point at which to crowbar in the fact that we are now getting some coverage in the print media - check out my internet marketing column in next Tuesday’s Brighton & Hove Argus - it’ll be in the Business Section and called “The Bottom Line”)

Danny gave some examples of great online marketing campaigns - the two which come to mind are Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty and STA’s great travel blogs, which are offered to anyone who purchases a ticket from the company. These campaigns show how a little thought goes a long way with online marketing. The Dove campaign shot from inbox to inbox around the world in record time. STA, on the other hand, is a grower. Both are examples of fantastic social media (or web 2.0) marketing.

Having worked online for a couple of years now, it is amazing to see how seriously people are now taking our field. Even four years ago, internet marketers were viewed strangely by the traditional marketing world, kind of like a geeky subculture. Now, everyone is scrambling to get onboard. Early adopters have seen fantastic returns in both brand perception (one of the cornerstones of Danny’s talk) and - this is particularly true of SEO users - sales.

Next stop SES on the 22nd!

It’s amazing how many sites we see that have been made by self-proclaimed “SEO experts” but are missing a number of the absolute basics of SEO design.

Here is an extract from an article I wrote for the Brighton & Hove Argus in January, with some of the bare basics to demand from your designers.

Of course, if you want great design first time, you can always ask us!

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Make sure that the search engines can find every page in the site. Search engines look through a site using so-called “spiders”. Don’t worry; these aren’t as sinister as they sound! They are programs which visit a site and follow every link that they can find, making a note of what is on every page. This process of recording is called “Caching”. You can only get results for pages that a search engine can find. To make sure a search engine can find every page, create a site map: a page that links to every other page on the site.

Make sure that the page title of each page reflects what is on that page. You will generally see better results if the title and content of each page are closely related. This is not a huge issue, but as a certain supermarket says “every little helps”. This philosophy hasn’t done them badly.

What are your “keywords”? You should think about what words people use when they are searching for your products. Which words would you use if you were searching for your products? Make sure that these appear on the relevant pages on your site. Be careful not to overdo it though, leading nicely to the most important advice:

Don’t try and cheat! It is not a good idea to try and “stuff” keywords into your site, by repeating them over and over just for the search engines. Other techniques such as using white letters on a white background and hiding lots of links where users can’t find them are also a bad idea! Google is very perceptive (certainly for a ten year old) and will punish sites found to be using underhand techniques to improve their search positions.

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When does “no” actually mean “no”?

When does “no” mean “yes”?

As has been widely reported, the folk at Yahoo! are less than keen on being swallowed by Microsoft. This isn’t stopping Microsoft from pushing on with their attempts to buy their rival.

Where is this leading? It seems that the two companies will just continue losing ground to the Big G while they thrash out the details of a potential takeover. Microsoft apparently feels that it is being more than generous and that Yahoo!’s shareholders are not being provided with all the necessary information to make an informed decision. The money men at Yahoo! disagree.

I fear that the nature of this takeover could lead to the companies falling further behind Google in search. Yahoo! is already a company in the process of absorbing acquisitions and any potential tie in with Microsoft would leave the company in a hugely unsettled condition. If the takeover happens in bad blood, surely this will just slow the process further.

It’s hard to imagine that Yahoo! will be able to resist Microsoft’s advances for much longer. We are all well aware of how ruthless the Seattle company are when they want something and they are, after all, phenomenally wealthy in a way that Yahoo! are not.

The world watches…

Again, blimey!

Microsoft are trying to eat Yahoo!

Both MSN search and Yahoo! are struggling in the UK search market, but this is not true abroad. In the States, for example, Google’s market share is little over 50% (compared to 90% in the UK and 94% in Germany).

This is big news in the world of search. So big, in fact, that I felt the need to blog it at 5pm on a Friday.

Let’s see what happens over the weekend. Have a good one.