I felt compelled to send the author a response with my own views as to why this is, and thought it might be useful to show my reply here…

SEO really is about common sense and patience. Anyone who says they will get you onto page 1 of google should really be treated with a barge-pole, especially if they make such claims without having first understood your website AND the search terms that are important to you – after all, no point being on page 1 for a search term that nobody will ever use.

I mention being patient because Google (and presumably other search engines) prefer websites that have been around for a while as this suggests longevity and reliability (although obviously it isn’t always a good indicator). I watched a video by the head of googles spam team some time ago and he indicated that a websites position on a search results page was determined by a combination of a couple of hundred factors, some obviously carrying more weighting than others. They don’t change their fundamental policies very often, but they did change a couple of months ago to start favouring sites whose content changed regularly – so think regular blogging!

Your point about asking 5 accountants and getting 1 answer is fair enough, but don’t forget that the Inland Revenue publish their rules to all and sundry, whereas Google tell noone what the mix of factors is that affects search engine results, so it’s bound to generate slightly different suggestions from each SE ‘expert’ you talk to.

I did run a pay-per-click google adword campaign for a promotional gifts company in Malmesbury, Wiltshire a few years ago, and this might be the way to go for you (especially in the short term whilst your page rank is being developed) as it delivers traffic very quickly (but at a price) to your site. Your seach terms will be very competitive though.

My client is developing a business to supply print and media design services to, principally, the Education market. Typically, their clients will be schools, colleges and universities that want to produce high quality promotional material such as magazines and prospectus. The initial requirement was just for a straightforward website, for which the client provided the design work, that delivered a web presence that could be modified via a content management system.

Our Solution

We have delivered the content management system via the WordPress framework. Whilst the development was straightforward, due to most of the design work and content being provided by the client, there were several difficulties.

Firstly, the company with whom my client had registered the domain name made it very difficult for him to point the domain at a different name server. The original intention was for the website to be hosted on a DMJ server, and the site was developed with this in mind.

Secondly, as we had developed the site in WordPress to provide a good CMS for the client, there was a requirement to add MySql (as WordPress needs MySql to function) to the services provided by the domain hosting company. This would have had an additional cost impact on my client and so we needed to find a way around the problem.

Whilst the client has several pages on the website which are still under construction but which will not be ready for some time, he does not envisage many short-term changes to the site.

Our solution was to continue running a ‘development-mode’ version of the site on our server, allowing WordPress to function normally and for changes to be made to the site in the short term. Static html files for each page of the site were then created from the wordpress-generated html which were then moved to his hosting area. This means that the site can run on the existing limited server without MySql whilst ensuring that when the client moves his site from his current to the DMJ web server all of the components should be in place for the site to continue running sweetly.

Why not take a look at the finished website?

What does the client think?

Other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our other clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. we use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.

Whilst these books are functionally and practically really no better than a well-designed website image gallery, and take a little putting together to make look really effective, they can be really impressive and offer website visitors something a little more interesting than the normal content. For example, they could be used to make your holiday rental property guestbook available online so that your web visitors get to see the real words written by your guests in their own handwriting (see our example on the right). Whilst this can be fiddly to put together, and time consuming to keep scanning and uploading more pages as they change, it can be an effective tool in persuading your visitors that they are real testimonials.

Have a play with the example on the right – you need to click the image then, once the book pops up, you can page through it by clicking the bottom corners of each page, or by using the navigation, or by double-clicking on the page to turn it.

We like it and can see a number of possibilities to use this to make some of our own content more appealing, as well as for our clients (e.g. brochures, newsletters etc. and anything where you want to give your customers the opportunity of saving the planet by providing an online version of your printed materials – if your website doesn’t already do this!).

We did come across a few glitches when installing, configuring and using the flippingbook plugin, the most confusing of which was having to change the file attributes of some of the images in the gallery to at least ’644′ before the book would display its contents.

What do you use it for? Can you see a use for it on your website? Get in touch and ask us to help.

Then comes the cold slap of reality, that cold kipper round the face (see example on right).

These aren’t comments from people that have something real and insightful to say about your post. It’s SPAM – verbal diarrhea, garbage, provided by those whose only interest is in writing a completely irrelevant comment in the hope that it generates traffic and link juice for their own web page. This is usually a pointless exercise anyway – as nobody will read the comment and think “ah, that sounds interesting, I’ll just click through and find out more” and there will generally be no link juice to be gained because the page will either not be valuable enough to have any in the first place, or the site owner would have instructed search engines not to pay attention to these links (see earlier post on using nofollow on your web pages).

But – these comments can still be rather disruptive to your blog, as they will devalue your content if left in place and can be time consuming for the blog owner to keep removing manually. Akismet is a plugin that all WordPress site owners can use (free for non-commercial use) to trap spam comments and bin them before they spoil your blog. You can review the comments it traps before deleting them for good, and you can set it so that all trapped comments are automatically deleted after a month.

So if spam is still spoiling your blog, take a look at Akismet and make it a problem of the past.

I also try to differentiate between what I blog and what I tweet. The whole point of micro-blogging sites like Twitter is to let your followers know, in a succinct manner, what’s happening in Your World, right now, in 140 characters or less, with perhaps a shortened link included so that they can find out a bit more if necessary (for example, if you’re grumbling about a web site then perhaps point at the web site in question). Conventional blogging should (in my opinion) be used for the meatier stuff – your top 10 tips on the best ways to handle cold callers, or some instruction on how to install a website toolbar, or your experiences trekking through Outer Mongolia etc.

So why do so many people choose to write a comprehensive blog post and tweet it too? If I find your blogs interesting I will subscribe to them and pick them up in my feedreader, iGoogle or some such. If I am interested in you as a person and am interested in your 140-character sound bites, I will follow you on Twitter. I might even choose to do both – but I wish that people wouldn’t take that decision for me by posting all their blog posts to twitter, and worse, by asking all of their friends (some of whom I also follow) to re-tweet everything for them! Sure – re-tweeting is good when it comes to the really important stuff, like looking for help resolving a problem.

It’s a difficult balance to achieve, but I think the real social and commercial winners will be those that manage to strike the right balance – blogging interesting content and ideas, and micro-blogging important snippets, without overdoing things and without constantly repeating and regurgitating old news.

My own usage hasn’t really shifted over the past year. I have been aware of other browsers, and need to use them all in the course of my work. I still mainly use Firefox (although I’m not always sure why). I guess we all use what we’re used to, and once our browsers are set up and configured to our liking it’s often a pain to move elsewhere. After all, they are all good and bad, with some faster than others but at the expense of fewer features etc.

Take part in our poll (see right) to help us understand why people choose their browser strategy. It’s free, you don’t need to register, and we won’t capture your email address (but of course we won’t mind if you get in touch with us to discuss)!

My client has 3 properties in the Manche department of Normandy in France. The brief was to create a single website to effectively advertise each of the properties, whilst providing a good backend content management solution to enable further changes to be made by the client.

Our Solution

We have developed a WordPress website using a premium theme that allows a slider control on the home page to showcase each of the properties.

The site uses the PIMS Holiday Rental Management system for availability calendar and pricing tables, and we have incorporated the booking form option to allow better integration for the owner and potential renters. All of this means that our client can use an external system to manage their holiday bookings whilst ensuring that theavailability calendar is automatically updated on the site.

Integrating the holiday rental management system inside a WordPress site requires some additional coding to allow url parameters to be sent by PIMS and picked up by the website. Contact us for details if you are a holiday property website owner and are having problems.

Why not take a look at the finished website?

What does the client think?

Other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our other clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. we use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.

The reason for this is that WordPress automatically strips out parameters it doesn’t recognise before it builds your pages. The solution is to trick WordPress into accepting your parameters as though they were integral to the framework. I couldn’t find an ‘official’ wordpress plugin to allow me to do this, but came across this neat solution….

http://www.webopius.com/content/137/using-custom-url-parameters-in-wordpress

You will need to edit the template file which loads the page you want to receive the parameter, and you will need to upload some code as a plugin to name the variable(s) that you want to use, but it seems to work well.

Here is the plugin code, which needs to get uploaded to your plugins folder and activated….

<?php
/* Plugin Name: Parameter
Plugin URI: http://webopius.com/
Description: A plugin to allow parameters to be passed in the URL and recognized by WordPress
Author: Adam Boyse
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://www.webopius.com/
*/
add_filter('query_vars', 'parameter_queryvars' );
function parameter_queryvars( $qvars )
{
$qvars[] = 'yourvarname';
return $qvars;
}
?>

…and here is an example of how to use it in your template page….

global $wp_query;
if (isset($wp_query->query_vars['yourvarname']))
{
print $wp_query->query_vars['yourvarname'];
}

You need to change yourvarname to the name of the variable your page expects to receive.

How do you optimise your website for search engine users in China? Baidu has the largest share of search engine traffic in China (70%-80%), with Google back in 2nd place with around 20%, so if you sell in China it is important that you rank well in Baidu. If your site is also important to Western internet users then you won’t want your Baidu SEO activity to do anything to impact its effectiveness elsewhere.

I have recently done some research into Baidu, as I am currently building a website that will need good Chinese Search Engine ranking, but found it difficult to differentiate between sound, proven advice and the hypothetical, anecdotal kind of evidence found in forums  that is difficult to substantiate. In addition, much of the information I found was written a couple of years ago – this is a huge time in the internet search engine world, and so much could have changed to render any advice irrelevant today.

So, what do you do? From the research I have done there do appear to be a few important points….

Baidu Search Engine Hints and Tips

1. Baidu attaches importance to a lot of the same things as Google (e.g. URL structure, page titles, header tags), therefore if you have addressed these points on your website already then you should be wll on the way to getting well ranked in Baidu too;
2. The Baidu Search Engine is not as effective as Google in working out the quality value of links, and so more emphasis is placed on quantity of inbound links rather than where those links come from. This could be an issue if you only have a certain budget / time available for link building for your site – do you focus your efforts on finding fewer, higher-quality links to suit Google, or do you just go for quantitity to rank better on Baidu? I would go for the quality route as, over time, Baidu is bound to put effort into delivering higher relevance SERPs to protect its market share;
3. Baidu still attaches ranking relevance to META Description and META Keywords, whereas Google no longer does. So, if you haven’t bothered with these tags in your pages it might be worth taking another look;
4. Baidu is sensitive to the use of certain words and phrases (such as adult content and words on the government block list) that might get your entire site removed from their index;
5. Baidu isn’t just for Chinese language websites. Your website will still be indexed by Baidu if it is in English, but it’s worth knowing that most Chinese Baidu users will search in Chinese, therefore incorporating simple Chinese into your web pages will be a good thing;
6. Baidu won’t necessarily find and index your website on its own. Use this link to submit your website to the Baidu search engine.
7. Advantage may be gained by hosting your website within China, but this may also impact its search-engine visibility and performance elsewhere in the world;

We’ll add anything else as we find it. Please give us your own tips too!