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.

Stepping away from internet marketing for a minute (I’m technically on holiday), I’d like to draw attention to a charity that particularly grabbed my attention when we met at a trade fair a couple of weeks ago.

In Kind Direct take goods which are unwanted by big business and distribute them to charities. You should definitely have a look at their website.

Look out for some other Upstream peeps posting on this blog next week… have a great weekend.

If you want an idea of where Google is going in the coming months and years, Google Labs is generally a good place to start.

We all know that Google is an organisation that likes to put time and effort into development. While Microsoft made a song and dance (of sorts) about the “release” of Internet Explorer 8 while still in a very early Beta, Google’s fantastic Gmail is still in beta after over four years.

What’s great about Labs is that you can watch a new idea grow from seed to fruition.

One great program to come out of Labs is Google Desktop. This is a free, downloadable program that adds a little bit of search magic to your desktop. Click the CTRL button twice and a box pops up from which you can search your computer and the internet for any particular keywords. One or two other features are a little more annoying - feeds with Facebook status updates and images can pull up some embarrassments when they are least welcome. Still, you can always switch these off.

Another great “graduate” from the labs is Google Maps, which is well on its way to squashing the opposition. It’s rather like Multimap but somehow “Googlier”.

Rather like an emperor with hundreds of children by various concubines, not all of the labs’ spawn are fit to rule. Google Video was dwarfed by YouTube. Froogle died in its sleep one night. Google Reader… meh.

Of the current tools in development, my two favourites are:

Trends, which is very useful for SEO companies like Upstream Connections. This allows you to compare the search volume for up to four keywords over a period of months and years. Results are presented as line graphs and are shown alongside related news stories.

Google Mars. Which is rather like Google Earth but with maps of the Red Planet. Sadly, after hours of searching, I have been unable to locate any of the familiar landmarks from Total Recall, but that Cohaagan always was a sneaky one.

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Upstream Connections - SEO Brighton

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.

Microsoft has made Internet Explorer 8 available for download here.

At present, the download is in Beta form and is aimed mainly at programmers and developers, although there is nothing stopping regular browsers downloading and having a play.

Initial impressions: IE8 is quite a handsome beast but it won’t be replacing Firefox or Opera in our hearts (or on our desktops) anytime soon. Basically, this offering appears to be Microsoft playing catch up, trying to offer extensions a la Firefox but not quite “getting it”. The lines are clean, usability is improved from IE7

Some of the more interesting features include

• Facebook integration, whereby you can get your friends’ status updates in the IE toolbar. While the latest figures suggest that Facebook use has peaked and that it’s all downhill from here, this is undeniably a cool feature.
• Ebay integration. Rather like the Facebook updates, you get updates in the toolbar for specific pages. In theory this should mean alerts when something you are waiting for becomes available, and updates on the cost of items you are watching, bidding on, etc.
• Look up on Encarta (remember that?)
• Stumbleupon toolbar.
• Live Maps integration.

One key development in the browser is called Webslices, which allows information from sites (like Ebay, Stumbleupon and Facebook) to be included in the browser. This works a bit like an RSS feed and offers you “highlights” of sites that you are interested in.

Microsoft, being Microsoft, will never release software which can be adapted like Firefox. In reality this means that people with very specific demands for browsers (SEO companies, for example) will continue to use, modify and love Firefox for the foreseeable future.

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Upstream Connections - a Brighton SEO

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!

Following on nicely from Dave’s post on Digg, the Guardian Unlimited site today offers a great example of the power of Digg to drive traffic.

Here are yesterday’s most read stories:

Nothing fascinating here, you may think.

What is interesting is that the top story “Mysteries of Computer from 65BC are Solved” was posted on the site in November 2006. Why would such an old story suddenly become the most popular story on the UK’s most popular newspaper site?

That’s the power of Digg!