To understand the context of this post, it would also help to understand what SEO or search engine optimisation is. If you prefer a more visual approach here’s SEO explained in pictures.

Last Friday, I had a great conversation with a business owner in Manchester. He was crystal clear about his businesses strategy and how many new customers a month he needed to grow his business.

The only thing standing between him and success is that the people who want to buy what he’s selling don’t, currently, find his website when they search in Google. In other words, his website doesn’t generate leads; it’s not a lead generation website.

Contrast that with the reason he and I were having a conversation, yup, he found us in Google

During these strange COVID 19 times, one thing has become clear; on the other side of this crisis, we're all going to be more aware of digital business tools. The use of video conferencing has skyrocketed, and e-commerce has increased, and they are just two examples.

I recently attended a Chamber of Commerce networking event. Despite generating most of our business online, naturally, I felt it was essential to making the most of our new membership. I enjoyed it. I met some lovely people and who knows, it may lead to some useful contacts and opportunities. Plus, I met some people whose services we can use.

I'm an engineer, a problem solver, although I now work in the field of marketing. Digital marketing to be precise. That includes web design, inbound marketing, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, paid search such as Google Ads, social media marketing, and so on. In this post, I'm thinking about branding.

Okay, so I'm on Lochnagar again, simply because I like coming up here. Today, as you can see in the video, visibility is just about zero. So after all the hard work of getting up the mountain, there's nothing to see.

In this video Red Evolution's Dave Robinson talks about getting to the top of the search engine rankings mountain from, you guessed it, the top of a mountain.

A good mate, Steve, asked me a question today about a previous blog post I'd written. I was talking about SEO, for a change, and he said the post made it sound like SEO wasn't cheap and it was far from guaranteed to work. His point was, if, as a digital marketing agency, we wanted to attract clients why would I be so brutally honest.

Every week we have conversations with potential new clients that don't go anywhere. The reason for this is, primarily, cost. They think hiring us is going to cost circa £150/month when the reality is our SEO services start at 10 times that amount. There's no meeting halfway with this kind of differential.

www.net.tutsplus.com have provided an extremely useful and exhaustive list that identifies a variety of factors that are likely to impact positively on the worthiness of your website as an attraction both to search engines and to “human” visitors.

So here we are in 2010. A new year and you are hoping for great things from your website in this new, potentially austere, decade. Utterly confused about how to make your website more effective you trawl the web looking for a silver bullet.

If there's one aspect of SEO that causes countless arguments and pointless slanging matches it's the subject of Pagerank. I guess if you are reading this you are looking for a definitive answer on whether or not Pagerank really is dead, well read on.

In the crazy world of SEO it's rare that a genuine player, not one of the self appointed gob shites that seem ever present, but a genuine player gives such a no nonsense overview of SEO. Google's Matt Cutts delivers a great, entertaining but importantly comprehensive SEO talk in this unmissable video.

Joomla creates great search friendly web sites right out of the box. This simple video shows you how we do it.

Further to my last post/rant/moan/wine/whinge/ (delete as applicable) I've created a video (which became two videos thanks to YouTube's 10 minute rule) to help SEO newbies cover the basics of on page SEO.

If you think a website is like a brochure where you can just set it and forget it you would be better off to just forget it and save yourself the effort of the 'set it' part.