Someone once said to me ” There is no room for sentiment in business ” they then smiled wryly. Inside I knew this person was fundamentally wrong and perhaps a victim of their own ego. Sentiment  and principles of good business go hand in hand, consideration to others who are struggling in difficult times often brings countless rewards if not for your own feelings of compassion but to your business too.

My point here is this - today competition is sharp and everyone wants to make money but there is also room to help others at the same time.

Would you for example charge a one woman/man business the same price for a 3 page brochure website as you would to do a site for a large corporate?  Think about this, what if the smaller business grew and became bigger than the corporate it’s likely they would remember how you helped them in the first place.

Help others to help yourself then ?

I know we all need to make money but isn’t it more rewarding if you can actually help others in the process ?  So-called business experts will give you different advice.

Dan Horton SEO

Dave had a meeting with a client on Friday which I came in on at the closing stages.
Since starting here one thing I have noticed about Dave is that he likes to explain SEO tactics directly to clients, face to face with a pretty down to earth approach. The client had no online presence and had no experience as to how much value the Internet could give to them or the concepts behind an effective online marketing campaign.

Not for the first time when I walked in the meeting room it was quite clear that the clients looked totally confused by the link building process.

Dave had already gone over the process of obtaining links from quality web sites and establishing authority. He had also fully explained about paid links going through redirects and using the all famous rel= nofollow attribute.

The levels of confusion had started to rise when it was explained that footprints should be eliminated and linking directly to certain sites may well look as if the client were simply paying for links and not be good for the sites ranking in the eyes of search engines who certainly wouldn’t see these links as unbiased.

The meeting went on for another twenty minutes and question that triggered Dave’s exit was “I thought you were supposed to act in the customers interests not just for search engines?”

I ended up trying to explain again what Dave had already gone through in great detail and yet it still seemed the client had been crushed by footprints. It’s not always easy then to explain why we do things in SEO and we can empathise with client’s lack of understanding of processes.

Dan Horton Seo

I tend to fly out of Manchester Airport these days and stay in the short stay parking at Terminal 3 or the short stay at Terminal 1, it’s Like £25 a day but at least my car is undercover and In a secure part of the airport…

well I parked in the short stay carpark on the 20th of last month, I was only away 1 night and when I came back one of the supporting box sections had rusted through and dropped a 1 foot lump of metal and crap on my BMW..

photo’s :

Car park:

BMW 5 Series:

I’m just happy it didn’t hit me on the head !!

DaveN

With the growth of PPC advertising in the UK at over 40% I wonder how many companies are paying out far too much from improperly set up campaigns ? Most online marketing companies boast that they can easily manage companies budget, but with the likes of some companies spending in excess of 1 million per year on advertising, how do they no they are getting a good deal?

Some companies seem to approach ppc with no real plan and just attempt the campaigns through trial and error methods (Spending clients money at the same time) Marketing is a funny old game and you often come across people who think they know it all, that you have no idea about PPC and they know better! I guess the proof is in the pudding….

Microsoft have recently purchased Jellyfish.com which is really a high end comparative shopping engine with a community twist. I guess Microsoft is building up it’s shopping channels in live search. Links : Live Blog and Jellyfish