MarCom Professional

You know that Twitter has crossed over into the mainstream when instead of bands telling people to check them out on MySpace, they instead ask the audience (several times) to follow them on Twitter.

Last night, in front of a packed crowd in Holmfirth, Wedding Present and Cinerama front man David Gedge, asked the crowd to follow him on Twitter (he's @weddingpresent) and assured us all that it is, indeed, him doing the tweeting and that he is in fact extremely interesting and he does reply to people.

It's the first time I've seen anyone tout for more Twitter followers at a gig and if you're really bored, try checking on how many new accounts referencing the Wedding Present have been set up since last night.... More...

Here at I-COM, our SEO consultants cut through the confusing gibberish of the internet like a knife through a lasagne sandwich. If you're a business new to internet marketing, we can help you understand all the great things that SEO has the potential to do for your business. Good SEO can improve the number of visitors to your website, improve your conversion rates and help raise your brand profile across a number of internet platforms from organic search to social media to image search. One thing that we, as SEO consultants, often struggle to convey to people who are only just embarking on their first serious internet marketing campaign, is what they can reasonably expect to achieve from their websites for the budget they have available. More...

It seems that somewhere in the night theTwitter fairy stole in and introduced a new feature: Name results.


While we're not seeing this sort of result for all name searches, on selected searches Twitter is returning results for potential Twitter users that match the searcher's query.

We assume this is just another way of making the search feature more useful as Twitter's own variation on blended search results. As it stands it can be quite difficult to find other people on Twitter without knowing their exact username, so this looks like a step in the right direction to us. More...

So you have a brand. You sell red widgets, but really high end, luxury widgets with all the bells and whistles. You learned to make widgets by hand when you were 14 and you take great pride in your work - and people phone you from all over the country when they want a really special red widget.

When you first set up in business, you chose the name your brand very carefully, so it's unique, memorable and evokes your brand values and history.

This week you decided you wanted to make the move online. People are always asking whether you have a website so they can see pictures of your widgets and read information about how you make them. More...

For those of you who can't read it and don't want to enlarge the image, that link has a rel="dofollow" attribute attached to it. 

Here's the thing - there's no such thing as a "dofollow" attribute.

The search engines created the "nofollow" attribute so webmasters could indicate links to which they did not want to pass PageRank/link authority - for example, advertisers, sites they were talking about negatively, etc. You don't need a "dofollow" because any link that doesn't have a "nofollow" attribute is by default going to be followed - it'll count. More...

Years ago there was this great, authoritative resource called The Open Directory (Or DMoz). This directory prided itself on being staffed by volunteers in it for the value of the resource and to give something back to the web. Their job was to find the best sites on the internet and list them by location and category.This site used to be such a great resource that even Google, itself on a mission to categorise, classify and map the web, used a scrape of the Open Directory for its own Google Directory. In fact, it was considered such an authoritative resource that Google (and Yahoo) are still prone to using DMoz descriptions of websites ahead of descriptions provided by the sites themselves.Submitting a site to DMoz used to be the first thing any SEO consultant did in a campaign, particularly for new sites,  because the value of the DMoz link was like a giant gold brick. More...

Yesterday was the first (annual) SASCon (that's #sascon if you want to see what people were saying on Twitter about it) SEO Conference, held at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester and the first major SEO event in Manchester. For an inagural event I must say I was impressed with the quality of the panelists and impressed at the relatively few and minor hitches (overruning keynotes, lack of wi-fi) in the day.Here's a run down of some of the highlights:Bruce Daisley from YouTube gave a keynote address which was very much a pitch about why businesses should be using YouTube and moving into video - and he was very convincing. More...

In honour of the UK Government rushing through the Digital Economy Bill despite mass online protest about the provisions regarding copyright infringement online, we're republishing a selection of responses.

Naturally, as our own ISP we are now legally required to monitor ourselves and report ourselves for copyright infringment to the copyright owners.

I'm sure they'll all be very upset by the free publicity and links and as a result we'll be required to shut off our own internet access, but hey ho. Such is life in 2010 when laws about the internet are made by the people who understand it the least. More...

Some readers may have seen our "announcement" this morning about a new "premium" SEO service called the "SEO Red Button" which purports to get you to the top of Google for a single keyword (in fact, to remove all other listings but yours for the keyword) with the push of a red button by our SEO team here at I-COM towers. Funny April Fools joke, ha ha, but it was a reaction to a much wider issue with both  the way some SEO companies market their services and with some misconceptions outside of the SEO industry as to how search engine optimisation works.

In short, anyone who tells you that SEO is a quick-fix, that they can get you to the top of Google in a day/week/month for a specific keyword or set of keywords or that they can guarantee you a certain level of traffic for a certain term is lying. More...

We get asked frequently about the value of XML sitemaps for SEO. Apparently many SEO firms are saying, as part of their sales pitches, that where a current SEO company hasn't created an automated sitemap they are damaging a company's potential for ranking.

I say this is total and complete rubbish.

The sitemaps feature in Webmaster Tools was created as a way to help sites identify all their pages to search engines and let search engines know when they add or modify content. They also enable search engines to flag errors in reaching specific pages. They have nothing to do with ranking - they merely serve to help with indexing, if your site needs a little help. More...