The Travel PR Blog

I have been playing with Google Transit which now covers public transport in the South East of the UK, but sadly does not yet include trains. Ask it how to get from Gatwick Airport to London’s Victoria Station and it will tell you to take a bus. Just for the record - or in case [...]

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It’s my birthday. Thanks. My five year old woke me with a card on which he had drawn a few of his father’s favourite things. Right under the figure playing tennis and a foot kicking a ball, he had sketched a computer with just one word in the middle of the screen: “Googel”
Fair enough, I [...]

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The business of running multiple blogs is like keeping plates spinning at the circus. So excuse me while I flap over here in my size 20 clown’s feet and get this particular platter back onto its pointy pedestal.
One blog I started recently has only a tangential connection with travel but I am still enjoying rolling [...]

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Like many Mac users, I’ve been pretty pleased Google’s desktop app. There are plenty of times when it has played Spotlight right off the park. However, recently I have noticed a deterioration in my Macbook’s performance accompanied by increasingly frequent visits from the spinning beach ball of death.
You know what’s coming don’t you?
Tonight I [...]

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Now that I have got that email-to-WordPress posting business sorted out, the work flow looks like this: the client writes a quick email (on their mobile phone if they prefer) or opens Windows Live Writer (they are MS people) to compose something more considered. They hit send - or publish - and off it goes [...]

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Want to know what Google’s universal search results will look like in a few years time? Listen to Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, talking about an experiment the Google UI team performed some time back:
When you started seeing some diagrams, some video, some news, some charts, you might actually have a [...]

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In a conversation about Google Webmaster Tools with Lee Odden from TopRank, ex-Googler Vanessa Fox once again mentions the importance of anchor text. She points out that having keywords within anchor text linking back to you can make a huge difference to your ranking.
Incidentally, that’s why - in my last post - I made the [...]

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If you use Firefox and you suffer from a really tiresome unresponsive script bug which causes Firefox to hang when you execute a contextual search via Google, you have probably searched for a cure via the search engines. Unfortunately this is where the blogosphere as echo chamber has its downside; most blog posts just parrot [...]

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It took Google Blog search almost exactly half an hour to notice my last post and send it out as a Google Alert. Not quite as fast as sending content out directly in an RSS feed, but almost.

Technorati Tags: blogs

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Hallelujah, looks like the Blogger Web Comments Firefox extension is working properly again. It’s the easiest and quickest way to find out who has been talking about any site you happen to visit.

Technorati Tags: blogs

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There is a good post in Travolution about the joy of blogs and search engine optimisation. Kevin May points out that the Travel-Rants blog can currently be found in second place on a Google search for “flight search engine” without, as Kevin puts it, any special investment. It certainly underlines the SEO impact of a [...]

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Want to know if you’ve been blogged? One quick - and very satisfactory - way used to be to install the Google Blogger Browser extensions for Firefox. Then you just check the little speech bubbles in the status bar for posts and comments.
Recently, however, I have found all sorts of unrelated links popping up and [...]

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