We’ve been running this blog for a few months now, and one of the reasons we decided to launch it was to see first hand what effects it would have on our search engine rankings.

We’ve put a variety of topics in here about all sorts of things that interest us, but at the back of our minds it’s also been a little experiment. If we write a post, how long will it take for a Google search to bring us up as a result? How can we use this to pro-actively market ourselves?

The trick is to write about things that you think potential customers will search for, hopefully meaning that they will see your post in their Google search results and potentially consider using you for their project. Here’s a list of our top ten search engine hits so far, in no particular order – and all from posts within this blog. We’ve included the ranking in Google out of the total number of returned results.

Bear with me on this one, and read right through to the last result, which we think is quite staggering!

• “Vive la Tour”
  Position 7 out of 4,630,000

• “Dragging the shutter”
  Position 11 out of 388,000

• “Nikon 85mm f1.8″
  Position 10 out of 577,000

• “Building up contacts”
  Position 4 out of 273,000,000

• “Should I sell online?”
  Position 6 out of 128,000,000

• “Free high res desktop wallpaper”
  Position 9 out of 597,000

• “Reasons for being standards compliant”
  Position 6 out of 9,330,000

• “Photographer portfolio online”
  Position 9 out of 10,400,000

• “The myth of the fold”
  Position 25 out of 175,000

And finally, our personal favourite:

• “Is size really that important?”
  Position 1 out of 108,000,000!

So, naturally at the end of this our top tip is to start writing a blog and link from your blog to your main website! We’d recommend having the blog on the same url as your website, for example our blog address is www.elmnet.co.uk/blog, rather than www.elmnetblog.co.uk.

The reason for this is that although having external links to your site is a good thing, the value of each of these links subsequently decreases if they are all from the same url. If you have ten links from your blog to your main site then every link counted after the first link is worth considerably less in Googles view.

It therefore makes sense to write good, search engine friendly copy, and then to host this on your main website domain and let other sites link to you because your content is interesting. This means that you now have many more inbound links from different sites all pointing to your domain, and Google can’t get enough of that!

We thought we would try a little experiment! We’ll write a new blog post based on the most interesting idea suggested to us, and in one month’s time we’ll see how it does when a Google search on the subject is performed.

You can suggest a topic by leaving a comment, dropping us an email, or  via twitter.

Our local village shop has recently rebranded (click here to see what we’ve done for them) and opened as a delicatessen, showcasing the best that the region has to offer.

I have to admit I am genuinely impressed by the thought they’ve put in to this. It’s all very well having a shop  with a nice sign, some solid branding and a fancy website, but ultimately a delicatessen like this will be judged on the items it stocks and the service they offer.

We always expect delicatessens to be expensive, but I’ve found that this simply isn’t the case. The trick is buying seasonally from local suppliers. You’ll not find asparagus on their shelves in November, or spring lamb in the fridges in January. What you will find is produce that is ready now, and at a good price – certainly no more expensive than you would pay at the supermarket for an often far inferior product. Our favourites so far have been beef from Acomb Farm, the most amazing ice-cream from Beckleberry’s in Blaydon, and fantastic Brown Ale Bread from the Thomson Bakery.

I really think that this is such a good thing. A local business promoting the best that small providers in the region have to offer. Small businesses have such a lot to offer given the opportunity, and I think that we should support them whenever we can.

We would miss them so much if all that was left were the Sonys, Tescos and Microsofts of the world.

UPDATE: Just recently tried the most amazing home-made pies from the shop. Proper pies, with pastry all the way round, not just some excuse for a lid sat on top. Can’t recommend them highly enough!

I receive around 50-100 legitimate emails every day. My server’s junk filters do a pretty good job of filtering out the undesirable ones.

However, a few pretty convincing ‘phishing’ emails always make their way through, and normally I can spot them pretty quickly. The one I received earlier today though had me fooled for a couple of seconds before common sense quickly prevailed and the delete key was hit.

It looked convincing enough. It was apparently from HM Revenue & Customs and it was great news! Out of the goodness of their hearts they had emailed me to tell me that I was entitled to an income tax repayment of £1500, and I should log in to my account by following the link and submit a repayment request. The reason that this scam was a particularly effective one was that it combined a number of features which all worked together and on first impression just made sense.

Firstly, the timing was right. Anyone who fills in a tax return generally needs to make a payment on account by the end of July. This email arrived in the middle of August, just a fortnight after deadline. The email looked official, it was sent to the same email address that I have registered with HMRC, and it was possible that I had made a mistake with my return and the tax office had picked up on it, right?

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth I quickly noticed the holes in the scheme. The first thing I thought was that surely HMRC couldn’t possibly know that based on the information I had sent them I was owed money. Their online system works the whole lot out for you, so saying I was entitled to a refund effectively is the same as telling me that the online system doesn’t work! Highly unlikely! I’m also not entirely convinced that the HMRC would be particularly quick to tell me that they wanted to give me money back.

You also tend to find that email scams have imperfect grammar. This one told me “Click here to submit you tax refund request”, and “A refund can be delayed a variety of reasons”. So, a ‘you’ instead of a ‘your’ and the word ‘by’ missing from the second sentence. Small things maybe, but a legitimate email probably wouldn’t contain basic errors like this.

But the clincher had to be when I hovered the mouse over the ‘click here to submit your tax refund request’. I right clicked the link and copied it to the Mac’s ‘Text Edit’ application. The url was a completely different one to that which the email claimed to be sent from. So, unfortunately it was all a hoax, but for a second or two I was having a really good day!

So what do the people who send these emails out have to gain from it all? I imagine that on following the link I would be asked to enter the details of the bank account I wished the reimbursed funds to be deposited in. You can probably guess what would happen after that!

I’ve seen a lot of this kind of thing throughout my years spent online. Most of them are fake emails from banks saying that my account has been suspended and I must act within 48 hours or it will be closed down. This scam adds in a time element to try to make you act quickly. Emails from PayPal are also commonly imitated, where you are told about alleged security breaches and how you must log in and authorise your account – of course on a fake website.

So what’s the best defence? Well, a good rule to start with is the classic “If it’s too good to be true then it probably is!”. Next, if it appears to be from a bank or institution informing you of a security breach and a requirement for you to verify your account then never log in to your account via the link on the email. Go to the company website direct and log in there, or call customer support and speak to a human (get the number from the website, not the suspect email).

Finally, for suspected scams then Google can be your friend. Type in a phrase from the email and you can be sure that if it’s a hoax then it will be reported on the web somewhere. Just make sure that you look it up on a reputable site, as sometimes the dubious website that is returned in search results is what can infect the unwary users PC.

The web can be a dangerous place, even for those who are familiar with it and have been using it for years, but generally by following a few simple rules and applying common sense in all situations you shouldn’t go too far wrong.

I’ve finally accepted that I’m getting older. I realised this when I heard myself saying “It wasn’t like this when I was a lad”.

It happened just a couple of weeks ago. A friend of mine is currently travelling around Australia, and regularly updates friends and family via their mobile phone and facebook. I travelled around Australia nearly fifteen years ago and spent just under a year on the road, but I didn’t have the luxury of the technology (and the reasonable price of this technology) that is available today.

When I crossed the 1200km of semi desert known as the Nullarbor Plain in my 20 year old station wagon I was out of contact from civilisation for three days. No mobile phones for emergency use back then, or if there was it was well beyond my budget at the time. Contacting the folks back home every couple of weeks was either by air mail letter, or if I had just been paid I would drop dollar after dollar into the thirsty ‘Telstra’ payphones and call home for a very brief few minutes. I think that the internet was only just beginning to make an appearance into peoples homes. Looking back I’m pleased that this is how it was – it seemed much more of an adventure! I recently re-read a letter that I wrote in Australia and sent to my father, and I laughed when I read the part about asking him if he had an “email number”! I had no idea what the internet was, how it worked, and certainly had no idea that it would play such an important part later in life, for both a career and for personal use.

So, this got me thinking about how my father used to always talk about the things they didn’t have back in his day. I think that we often take technology for granted, so I’ve had a look back through the years and made a very quick list of the things I use now, and the equivalent that I had when I was younger.

So, where to start? Why not with computers. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum+. This had a ‘massive’ 48kb memory, a 3.5MHz processor, no hard disk, software that needed to be loaded in from a cassette recorder and cost the princely sum of £129 back in the mid 1980′s.

To put that in perspective, 20 years later I use an Apple Mac Pro with four 2800MHz processors, 10,000,000 kb of memory and four internal hard disks. When I was a kid the Spectrum was just amazing, but I recently dug out the old games and installed an emulator on the Mac, and for the sake of prosperity played them again for the first time in a decade. And boy they were awful!

Now, on to cameras. I had a couple of manual focus SLR’s before this, but my first autofocus SLR was a Nikon F401.  And it wasn’t at all bad to be honest! The big difference between this camera and the one I use now is that the F401 used this strange thing called ‘film’.

You had to buy a roll of this ‘film’ and pop it in the camera. You then had either 24 or 36 exposures, and you had to wait until you had the film developed before you could see your images! The big advantage in film though is that a lot of the technology is in the film itself. A Nikon F401 (retailing at around £300 in the 90′s) loaded with the same film and with the same Nikon lens as the F4s (retailing at nearer £1200) would take the same image in the same circumstances. With digital cameras a larger, higher resolution sensor is the key, so a more expensive camera generally takes a technically better image.

It’s difficult to compare the actual technology here as film and digital are so different, but what is important is the end result. There have been some simply magnificent images taken on film, and I really believe that ultimately you shouldn’t be able to tell whether an image has been taken on film or digital, it should stand up on its own merit and simply be an outstanding photograph. It’s not really that important how it is taken so long as you get the end result you wanted.

The last item I want to look at isn’t work related, but it still plays an important part in my life. It’s my first proper bike! It was a Raleigh Strika, it had no gears, no suspension, but was built like a tank.

I wasn’t big enough to have the ‘Grifter’ with it’s bigger wheels and three gears, but the Strika fitted me well and was a load of fun.

Things change though, my current equivalent steed is a Commencal mountain bike, with its 27 gears, hydraulic disk brakes, suspension and high quality aluminium frame.

So, to conclude this increasingly long trip down memory lane I guess that what I’m saying is that the important part is the experience at the time. ‘When I was a lad’ this was all cutting edge technology, and we were as proud to own it and as impressed with its capabilities just the same as we are now with the latest gizmos that appear in the stores every year. Kids are increasingly comfortable with technology, and we now have the first generation who have never experienced life without the internet, mobile phones or HD TV. So what’s next?

I imagine that the day where our grand children talk about how they didn’t have teleportation and time travel when they were kids will eventually be upon us!

A couple of things have got me thinking about inspiration and where it comes from. I’m sure it works differently for different people. Some are inspired by nature, some by science, but for me it’s always specific individuals and their actions or achievements. People inspire me, and in many different ways.

People who know me know that I’m a keen cyclist, so naturally I’ve been watching the Tour de France lots over the last three weeks. I’m continually amazed by the physical condition of these guys, and after watching each stage I’m all fired up to get out on the bike and give it that little bit extra. It got me thinking that these athletes are an inspiration to many people like me, but who inspires them? They are at the top of their sport, no-one is better than them, there is no-one really for them to look up to. What they possess is the most incredible inner strength and drive, and that’s what makes them the best at what they do.

But it’s not just these super human athletes that give me inspiration. I’m also continuously impressed by many others, and quite often these people are our own customers. It was Richard of Engleby Associates who inspired me to start writing a blog after I saw the excellent job he was making of his – click here to take a look. I’m inspired every month by Rhys at Urban Cafe and his constant ability to come up with new ideas for pushing his business forward. David Taylor (of David Taylor Photography) impresses me consistently as he just doesn’t seem to be capable of taking a bad photograph, and Brian Reid of Aurora Creative Arts deserves a medal for his daily contribution to the arts and crafts scene, often with the odds heavily against him as funding is now just about non existant.

So, to our customers – sometimes it seems like a hard slog, but you’re not going unnoticed by us, and therefore we can only assume that you are making a difference to others to!

Social networking – the internet buzz words of the moment! So what exactly is it, and how can it work for you?

I must admit that as a web developer I knew little about social networking until recently. I saw it as ‘something that the kids did’, and so that meant that as a self confessed grumpy old man there was little there for me to be bothered about. But then I heard so much about Facebook from friends that I thought I should at least see what all the fuss is about.

Facebook is addictive, there’s no doubt about that! Once you manage to find a few friends it’s good fun, and you can quickly and easily see what your friends are doing. It’s also dead easy to quickly write a message on your ‘wall’ so that they know what you are up to. You can be as distant or as involved as you like really. There are some people on Facebook who have literally hundreds of friends. I’ve got around 50, and I don’t think I would want any more as they simply wouldn’t really be my friends, more people that I’ve just met along the way. Facebook used in this way is aimed to be used by people who are already friends, and not those you who haven’t met yet.

There is another way of using Facebook though, and that is to set up a ‘Facebook Group’. Any user can subscribe to a Facebook Group, and when you write a post on your Facebook wall it will appear on the wall of everyone who is subscribed to your group. That’s a pretty powerful tool! The best example I can think of is also my favourite marketing campaign of the last ten years. It’s genuis, and it involves a small furry animal called a meerkat. Of course it’s comparethemeerkat.com which is a superb spin off from ‘Compare the Market’.

Quite brilliant really, set up an alternative marketing campaign which is far more interesting that the business activities of the real organisation (car insurance) and use social networking sites like Facebook to spread the message. Aleksandr Orlov – founder of “Compare the Meerkat” currently has nearly half a million fans on Facebook. Absolutely amazing, that’s half a million! So twice a week half a million people receive a funny message from Aleksandr on their Facebook wall and it doesn’t cost the company a penny – and all the time they are being drip fed the branding. When they want car insurance where are they going to go first? So there you go, Facebook – not just kids stuff.

The next social networking application I began to experiment with was this one. The blog. Today it’s dead easy to set a blog up. If you are a web developer you can write your own blog program. If you are a web developer with little time then you can install a WordPress blog (host your site with Elmnet and we’ll do it for you for free!). This blog is run by WordPress, and I’m very impressed with it’s simplicity and flexibility.

A blog gives a website owner the opportunity to discuss a subject online. There are two important factors though, the first is that they can invite the world to leave a comment and become engaged in the debate. The second is that they can do this in the framework of the blog, leaving their site to do the job of the site. Rather than have all of my rants and ravings in my site (cluttering up the main message) I can put it all safely to one side in the blog which is specifically designed to hold lots of text. There is also a search engine benefit to a blog. Google likes lots of text and keyword rich environments, and where better to put it all than a blog. I’m enjoying writing the blog too, so even if nobody reads it (though I hope they do) I find it quite therapeutic.

The final application I’ve tried is Twitter. I’ll be honest, at first I just didn’t get Twitter. It just didn’t make sense. One question, “What are you doing”, and 140 characters to tell the world. After using it though the penny has dropped. It’s been said that the developers of Twitter quite happily admit that it’s a rip off of the Facebook “What’s on your mind’ question which appears at the top of everyone’s Facebook page. I’ve found that this is what I read the most of on Facebook. I’m not too interested in the squillions of photographs that friends upload, or all of the comments that they make on each others baby photographs. Twitter condenses the whole lot beautifully.

With Twitter you are not limited to following friends, but can follow anyone you like provided they don’t block you. I’m currently following Lance Armstrong and Stephen Fry, and it’s actually quite cool to take a quick look and just see what they are up to. So the same opportunities exist for Twitter as for Facebook. Stephen Fry has 572,000 followers, and Lance Armstrong over a million. Everytime they ‘tweet’ a combined one and a half million people get the message.

So, clearly social networking is something that has to be explored. I’m not saying it’s the answer to everything and that it will work for all businesses, but it will probably do more good than harm.

If you want to follow elmnet you can follow our tweets by clicking here.

Last Wednesday I had the enviable task of doing a presentation about a career in web design to two full classes of 8 year olds at a nearby primary school.

Not having children myself I suppose I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was genuinely suprised at how ‘on the ball’ these kids are when it comes to the web, I.T. and computers in general.

“So how many of you have been on the internet before?” was my first question, as every hand shot up within a second.

“How many have been on more than ten times?” was my second, with the same re-action from the kids.

“OK, which sites are your favourites sites?” was the next. The answers were many and varied. Social networking played a big part with Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, MSN and even Twitter (yes, Twitter with a bunch of 8 year olds!) scoring well.

We then went on to look at a selection of ten websites I had chosen the night before and talk about whether we liked them, what we like about them and what we didn’t like. The car sites scored well with the boys with “Audi” and “Porsche” being the sites of choice. A much more intelligent choice came from the girls with the excellent “Coraline” site from the stop-start animation film and the breathtaking “Hello Sour Sally“, which has to be the most inventive way ever to try to sell pots of frozen yoghurt!

There were some clangers too, like the intentionally appalling “World’s Worst Site” and the textbook ‘how not to build an information website’ example at “Havenworks“. To their credit, the kids picked out all of the clangers and came out with incredibly astute observations such as “I like this one because it is nice and simple, you understand what it does and you can easily find your way around it”.

Other comments such as “I like this one cos it’s got a smiley flashing face in the corner” restored natures balance though!

The full list is here if you fancy a look. Which are your favourites?