Business Startup Show - 28th & 29th November

Once again, the Business Startup show hits London. this years show (2008) is expected to be the biggest so far, with guest speakers, contacts to be made, and information to be gained. Its being promoted as the UK’s largest exhibition for people starting and expanding a small business. Just one day at the Business Startup show will help you make contacts, help your business run smoothly and most importantly: make you more money.

Date: 28th November - 29th November

Region: London

Location: Olympia, London

Website: http://www.bstartup.com/

Contact: Simon Chicken: 0870 351 7998 simon@bstartup.com

Top six ways to get your web site boosted

For those that use their web site for their day to day marketing, here is a list of the 6 most important search engine ranking factors as voted for by 37 of the leaders in the world of organic search engine optimisation...

The original list was put together at SEOmoz by Rand Fishkin, CEO & Jeff Pollard, Web Developer back in April, 2007 as 'Search Engine Ranking Factors V2'.

I'm don't totally in agree with the order of this list, personally ranking some factors differently than the 37 SEO experts, but overall there is no argument with the fact that applying these 6 basic techniques will help get your websites better rankings in most search engines.

1 - keywork Tagging

Keyword Use in Title Tag - Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page's HTML header. Good titles help everyone. They help the search engine categorise your site, they help the searcher know what to expect from your page, thus helping to increase CTR (Click-Through Rate) and they get better SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Positions).

2 - Internal Links

Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure - Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page. A good linking structure makes certain that important pages get enough emphasis in the same way good navigation structure on the web page helps visitors get around your site slickly.

3 - External Links

Global Link Popularity of Site - The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web. Encourage people to link to your site by becoming an authority on your subject. In short, make a great website.

4 - Anchor Text

Anchor Text of Inbound Link (or making the text of important words the URL link to other pages) - These pieces affect Google's weighting of links from external websites pointing to a page. Absolutely, but difficult to control.

5 - Keyword Use

Keyword Use in Body Text - Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page Yes, this is important, but do NOT, whatever you do, 'spam' the targeted keyword(s). Only use the keyword phrase throughout the page where it makes sense. Search engines are sophisticated beasties and will apply topic analysis to learn what is truly relevant.

6 - Site age

Age of Site - As measured from the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines. With the concept of 'authority' weighing so heavily in search engines' ranking factors these days, it is unsurprising that this factor featured in the top six. Of course, the age of the site is not something you can do a great deal about, but perhaps it's worth bearing in mind that your website should be considered a long-term project. Don't just paste up a site and then leave it. It shouldbe regarded as an ongoing investment, not a one-off or single-quarter project. Retain the people, processes and budget to keep it working for your business after the initial implementation is complete.

A Rant - Microsoft bloats our development environment

This week, I have come to realise that Microsoft have lost the plot. For this week, they made available, the various patches to their Visual Studio 2008 development environment, including patches for Silverlight, Framework, and the actual development environment.

When I started computer programming, Visual Basic was a joy. It was small, lightweight, fast to develop in, fast to run programs, and fairly forgiving for bugs and typos. Now, Visual Studio, their latest and greatest development environment is a bloated, slow old cow.

Take the graph on the left, this compares the install sizes (on disk) of VB6, VS2003, VS2005 and VS2008 (all features installed), the install size (distribution file size) of a typical program to display a grid for entry from a SQL Server table, and the 1st patch release size of each product.

When I used VB6 (and I started on VB3), I could write a program which fitted on a floppy disk (1.4Mb). Now, with VS2008, its coming close that I can no longer fit the smallest program on a CD (640Gb), once you have all the frameworks and other bloat included.

The same program in VB6 takes up 120kb of RAM to run, and for a sample test, runs in 10 seconds. The same program (same features and functionality) in VS2008 takes 6 seconds just to load, and 32 seconds to run, and adding together all the required frameworks, takes 980Mb of Ram.

Ok, VS2008 may have some nice features, but at what cost? So come on Microsoft, stop creating this bloatware for us to use, and give us something thin, fast and easy to use again.

Business Podcasts (the best I have found)

When I am out on the road (driving, sitting on the train, etc), I tend to listen to my MP3 player rather than the radio (I prefer my taste in music than the DJs, or spend my time listening to adverts for soap or sales).

One of the many things my home server does (when its not running my web sites, downloading emails and sending them to my PDA, or running my applications) is downloading podcasts.

It then mixes them into my MP3 collection, which I refresh once a week, so I have new tunes and new pods to listen to each week.

After a lot of trial and error (there are a lot of podcasts out there, but some are not updated for months, or change subject (one month it’s a business podcast, the next month its about buying gold))), I have found a few good and consistent ones.

Can I therefore recommend to you, the following podcasts…
Small Biz Pod (UK) - http://www.smallbizpod.co.uk/
A new podcast is added every week or two, and interviews people who have set-up their own company, the issues they faced, how they went about it, what they learnt. Generally, very useful stuff. The web site also has many good posts and a good forum. No adverts, but some cheesy music for the last 5 minutes.
FreeLancers Switch (USA) - http://freelanceswitch.com/podcasts/
Currently, my favorite podcast for tips and tricks. You have to get through the first 5 minutes of everybody saying hello and what they have been working on, and after that, you get to the meat of the discussion. Every POD, the subject changes, and they have listeners who ask questions, give advice on marketing and other useful stuff. However, it appears on a hap-hazard basis. On the plus side, there are no adverts.

Build your Business Radio (USA) - http://www.wsradio.com/internet-talk-radio.cfm/shows/Build-Your-Business-Radio.html
Published on a weekly basis, and with some useful tip-bits now and again, but generally, is people who appear to tell you what you already know, or come on to talk about specialist subject to advertise their web site or service. Every 15 minutes, there is a commercial break (which can be annoying), but I listen to this as it does have some good sales and marketing techniques, once in a while.

Happy listening.

Finding Work and Contracts - Part 5 - Being Visible

When I was on the other side of the fence, as a head of major projects, and looking through all those CVs of both permanent and contract people, working out who I wanted to interview, who I should employ, who I should reject, there was always one final thing I did before I made a decision…. I goggled them.

A quick search on google with the persons name in quotes can reveal an awful lot about a person – where they have worked, what they do in their spare time, what they have done in the past, and what they are up to now. I can recall a few times where I was all set to meet somebody or offer them a contract, only to find that they had a web site selling pirated software, or had a blog ranting about their last two ex employers, or even a case of one person who said they were cleared to work in the UK, to find there name on a pending deportation list (all of these are true).

So its worth typing your name into Google and see what comes up, and if you can, trying to get your name off of the bad stuff. At the same time, if you find yourself with a few spare few hours, it worth creating a few ‘white papers’ to see if these can listed in various paper sites, such as the new Google Knol (http://knol.google.com/) which credits you with the papers, and makes them appear on google searches (finding that they person you are interested in is credited as being knowledgeable on their subject can only help).

Its also why, if you look for my full name in this blog, it will not appear.