I recently came across a problem while creating a custom theme the other month; I was trying to set up Google Analytics tracking but noticed that the tracking script just wouldn’t appear in the code.

For some strange reason it just wouldn’t load and thus the theme couldn’t track traffic, and more importantly, couldn’t track eCommerce data. After lots of searches in Google to no avail I finally found the solution… Continue Reading

Over the last few weeks I have done a number of website reviews for clients and each time I have been shocked at the mistakes made by web designers or the things overlooked by developers. Things that you would think would be part of a pre launch checklist but are seemingly not.

The types of mistakes I am talking about are the types of mistakes that cost you and your website money or leads or conversions. So the point of this article is to ask the simple question, does your website work? Below are a few of the things you should check if you currently run a website or are having one built. Continue Reading

After a while it can seem like you have hit a dead end in your SEO efforts and no matter what you do, you cannot seem to move positions, get more traffic or get more sales/conversions. This is a scenario that affects every search engine optimiser at some point in their career. But not to worry. There are steps you can take to get your campaign back on track. I’ll cover some of my favourites in this article. Continue Reading

Recently I got a new Ubuntu server and decided that I’d use it as a development server for projects. So after installing the required software to run it as a web server I decided to install Magento (ver 1.5.1.0) for some testing. After following the SSH instructions on Magento’s site and successfully installing it…I ran in to a problem.

Every page except the homepage would produce a 404 error. Which as you can imagine wasn’t ideal. So how did I fix it? Continue Reading

I knew it wouldn’t be long before the failure of Google Wave, Googles attempt at an integrated social experience, became a distant memory and the search giant decided they had to enter the social market again. But seemingly they have done it in a much smaller way this time. Introducing the Google +1 button. But what is it and why should we care? Continue Reading

“As I’m sure many of you well know, page speed has become a factor for ranking in the search engines. Although, for the engines it’s not a make or break factor but I’ve always felt that it is for visitors.”

Check out my recent post on SEOmoz for some great actionable information into increasing the speed of your website!

Comments and thoughts are welcome.

If you have been anywhere on the internet in the last week then you will have surly have seen that Apple has just launched the iPad 2. And not wanting to be left out, I decided that every web developer and search engine optimiser needs to think about the iPad 2 and most importantly what it means for the future of the web. The user base of the internet is increasingly shifting towards the mobile medium. Continue Reading

If you have been active in the internet marketing world over the last few years then I’m sure you will have heard all the hype about ‘social media’ and how amazing it is. Without a doubt for some it has been an amazing medium to increase their sales and draw people onto their website but what is it and can it work for you. Continue Reading

One question that gets me confused more than any other is why do people spend thousands, if not tens of thousands, of pounds to have a website designed and built only to let it sit there with no effort or money put into promoting it. To put it simply, why would you build a shopping complex in the middle of the desert where nobody is ever going to find it.

And I guess the same is true if you switch the question.  Why would you put thousands into internet marketing if you have a terrible unfriendly, unusable website. Continue Reading

I recently read an article on seomoz on link building and one particular paragraph stuck out for me:

Nofollow & Dofollow
“A lot of people go out and source dofollow links, but in doing this they do more harm to their link profile. Every website should have a good balance of nofollow links – there have been cases where sites with a very low number of nofollow links have not ranked as highly as others who keep a good balance.”

Source scott.mclay On SeoMoz.

Natural Websites Have A Mix Of Follow And No Follow

And when you think about how the search engines see websites then it makes sense. Any natural website is always going to get no follow links, the type of links you get from blog posts, but any small or medium website that has none seems a little too unnatural. Even the biggest websites in the world still have a large number of no follow links.

Find A Balance Between The Two

And this is why you need to find a balance, I mentioned in a previous article that a good way to get links is from no follow blog posts (they don’t affect your PageRank but they can help you rank for your keywords). These will help balance out your follow/no follow ratio of links and help expose your website.

What do you guys think about this? Leave your comments below.