RagePank

I was chatting with a friend recently, who was complaining about the data costs he incurred while travelling to the USA on a 6 month trip.
He said it cost 30 cents per 10kb of data.

I gave this some thought and realised it equated to a whopping $30,000 per gigabyte. I can understand that Blackberry users would never need a whole gig of data, but it's easy to go through that if you use your phone as a modem like I do.

Might I recommend using extra caution before considering data roaming - 30 cents doesn't sound like a lot of money, until you realise how little you can do with 10kb of data. Vodafone do advise caution on their data roaming page, but they don't mention the cost in gigabytes, for obvious reasons.

My friend is employed by the Government, so I'm sure his complaints would have been louder if it was coming from his ...

I'm booked tomorrow to do my first full-flash SEO implementation ever on a website. This has been a long time coming, and I can think of a few reasons why this is my first full-flash SEO project.

• There are plenty of good reasons why full-flash sites are a bad idea. Most of the time, SEO is one of them, but it doesn't have to be.
• Most clients simply can't afford the expense of re-architecting their shiny new flash website, and opt for Adwords instead.
• Quite often you can achieve the exact same effect with unobtrusive Javascript and CSS, which is preferable. I'll talk people out of Flash if it's not needed.
• And my Actionscript skills suck, so I haven't been chasing this work.

The plan of attack

The plan is brutally simple, and in my opinion this should be the default logic for new flash-only sites.

• Get your designer to create a great flash site, leaving blank areas for content that needs to be indexable.
• Store ...

When you are in business, you are forced to give away free stuff all the time. Especially in the SEO consulting industry, where I am selling time - every time I answer an email or pick up the phone, that's my core product being given away for free.

As you get a bit older and wiser, you learn the value of something that is free.

Free SEO reports

I used to offer free SEO reports from this site. In most cases I could have said "put your keywords in your title" and left it at that, but I generally spent about an hour on the free reports making sure the information was accurate, and useful.

Most people never implemented anything from the report, and many didn't even have the basic courtesy to respond with a simple 'thank you'. Some even came back complaining about how rankings hadn't improved, despite them largely ignoring the recommendations that were made.

I eventually realised the value of these reports was zero. It doesn't ...

Kiwis and Aussies have this friendly rivalry thing going on - it's been there forever, or at least since the Queen used Australia as a dumping ground for convicts. We love beating the Aussies in sport more than any other nation, and we we can always use the 'small country, small population' card when we get beaten. The Aussies, when they aren't underarm bowling, like to claim Kiwi icons as their own - Dragon, pavlova, and Russell Crowe come to mind, but there are plenty of others I'm sure.

But don't let the dingo get your baby - this post actually does have some relevance to website matters. (OK seriously, I'm all done with the Aussie bashing, sorry)

New Zealanders and .com.au domains

When NZ or AU companies decide to expand their market, the first thought is usually to expand across the ditch. Recently, I have had lots of enquiries from Australia from businesses looking to setup in New Zealand. And plenty of enquiries in the past going the other way. I'd imagine ...

It's very rare to find a web developer who has the whole bag of skills - someone who can create a website from start to finish, which is professional in all disciplines of the trade - I'm talking backend programming, frontend coding, usability, design, content creation, marketing, SEO, and anything else I have missed.

As a general-purpose web developer / SEO, I find myself working with freelance graphic designers on most new projects I take on. Sometimes it's easy and 'just works', sometimes it's frustrating and expensive. Here's some of the things I have learned over time.

1. Someone is in charge

Somebody needs to be ultimately responsible for the project - if the website fails to sell anything, or just doesn't work, it will be this person who has to explain to the client what is happening.
Sometimes this is the designer, sometimes it's the web developer, sometimes it's the SEO. Sometimes it's the client. I would say that establishing leadership in ...

Here's something cool I hadn't noticed. I was in the middle of a blog post when Vista started throwing display driver errors and eventually blue screened.

I was pretty thrilled about losing a good half hours work, as you can imagine.

So when I restarted the machine, and opened Firefox, it asked if I wanted to restore my session. I did.

It's alive!

To my surprise, my blog post was there, happily sitting in the text box where I left it before the BSOD (blue screen of death). So the Firefox session not only contains your open tabs, but any unsaved form data as well.

I'm very impressed - what a great feature. Thanks again Firefox.

Source: Firefox 3 remembers form content

Seriously, if someone can recommend a good link builder / link building expert based in New Zealand, please let me know.

The problem I have is that everyone is a SEO expert and everyone is a link building expert; if you go off what it says on everyone's website.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not an expert link builder - my expertise lies with fixing pokey technical on-page issues, especially with custom CMS systems, and optimising body copy. I'm very good at these things. Yes, I do link building as part of any SEO job (to do otherwise would be unprofessional), but it's not my core area of business, not my bread-and-butter.

Then every so often a job comes along where the success / failure of the site depends solely on links, and my fixing duplicate content or jamming extra words into the title isn't going to make one bit of diference. I'd much rather focus on doing great on-page SEO, and the logical course of action is to pass the job to a ...

I just happened across a page published by Microsoft detailing 8 SEO tips. Oddly, the information is well presented and I find myself mostly agreeing with what they suggest.

A lot of readers will be familiar with all this anyway, but I thought it might be relevant to some website owners or new faces.

Microsoft: help people find your website.

I particularly like that they mention Google's services before MSN's services - proving that this article is more than just a shameless plug for MSN search (well done team(.

Source: Some SEO wisdom from Microsoft

People often get obsessed by links, and get all wound up about whether a link is nofollowed or not.

The truth is, many links have 'secondary' benefits that are far more powerful than a little trickle of link juice.

This morning's example is how to get your page on finda ranking in the top 10, instead of somebody else's page on finda. While finda only lists New Zealand businesses, this concept applies everywhere.

Presell pages

A presell page is a page about your business, hosted on somebody else's website. More often than not, you also get a link, but that's not the main purpose of the presell page. Ideally, the presell page should rank for the same phrases you are targeting for your site, so that there are effectively 2 results for your business in the top 10 Google results.
A presell page is not the same as a directory (which lists all sites on one page). The distinction is that you ...

My father just forwarded me an email he received which happened to contain the word "SEO". To be honest, I'm impressed he actually remembered that's what I do, I'm pretty sure the concept goes over most people's heads.

The email was promoting a New Zealand SEO course (www.seocourse.co.nz), apparently the first of it's kind in NZ.

I thought I'd check out the SEO course and see if it's any good.

So, I got as far as the homepage and then got a bit frightened off by the design. It's one of those typical hard-sell one-page websites with everthing highlighted in yellow. Now, this isn't to say the course isn't any good, but the page looks like thousands of other one-page sales websites, and screams of a 'make money online' template. Not a great first impression, but no doubt this page format is very effective at what it does.

SEO Course SEO

So putting that ...