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 you find this via Google search proper – there are a couple of train options: the Gatwick Express and the less well-known Southern Railway option. If you are on expenses or in a desperate hurry – or simply get a geeky thrill from flashing your ticket confirmation from your mobile phone – then by all means take the Gatwick Express. However, the Southern Railway is a lot cheaper (£6 per leg) and not a lot slower. Thank you. This has been a public service broadcast from the Travel PR bog. Have a nice day.

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 suppose Google is one of his daddy’s favourite things, particularly if the conjecture is correct that the latest page rank adjustment has clobbered sites which buy and sell links. That makes me very happy.

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 up my sleeves and getting it spinning. Activate Events is an event management company in Tayport near Dundee. It operates in a crowded and highly competitive market with lots of well-established players.

In order to help them be more easily found and then build relationships with potential customers, we launched The Corporate Events blog this summer.

Clearly the domain name was chosen to give them a boost on Google and though it is early days, we are already seeing good results on long-tail searches, particularly for anything to do with environmentally friendly corporate events in Scotland.

However this is about more than search engine results. If we mange to convey something of the personality of the events team and the creative approach they bring to team building and event management – for example a recent It’s a Knockout corporate event they held in Scotland – this should engage the internet visitor more effectively than any of the static brochure-type sites of Activate’s competitors.

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 un-installed Google Desktop search and almost immediately my Macbook felt as if someone had untied its feet. It’s been flying ever since.
Your mileage might vary. All I am saying is – if you are experiencing Mac slow-down problems and you have Google desktop app installed, you might want to take a close look at that sucker.

Technorati Tags: google

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 to the blog.
Very shortly afterwards, thanks to a combination of RSS Menu and Growl, the new post appears before my eyes or at least pops up on my monitor.
I go into WordPress, tidy up post – and any images – and then put my SEO hat on and rewrite meta tags, including the title, the description and list of keywords. This last bit is a reasonably quick process thanks to an array of really good WordPress SEO plugins including SEO Title Tags and Add Meta Tags.
Then I save the post again and make sure directories are pinged.
And then we come up with some ideas for the next post.
That’s about as easy and effective as I can make client blogging.
For now.

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 page that looks and feels more like an interactive encyclopedia.

I think the idea of your search results ultimately having the richness of an interactive encyclopaedia would be very appealing for many users (and a living nightmare for traditional SEO’s).

I won’t parrot the whole thing but I found Mayer’s interview with Gordon Hotchkiss really interesting and I’d recommend reading it. You won’t be surprised to know I was particularly interested in her take on the increasing integration of rich media. This particularly resonated:

The other thing we’re seeing is different mediums, audio, video. They used to not work. If you remember getting back a year ago, everytime you clicked on an audio file or a movie file, it would be, like, ‘thunk’? It needs a plug in, or “thunk”, it doesn’t work. Now we’re coming into some standardized formats and players that are either browser or technology independent enough, or are integrated enough that they are actually going to work.

I don’t think we’re quite there yet with standardisation and but we’re certainly moving away from the universal thunk.

That’s why travel companies should be rolling their sleeves up right now and gaining experience in creating rich content, not just to gain attention in the organic search results but also as part of their paid search marketing. Because, as Mayer predicts:

as the page becomes richer, the ads also need to become richer, just so that they look alive and match the page.

Technorati Tags: google, travelpr

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 words Firefox Unresponsive Script problem the link to Vlad’s solution to help anyone looking for that phrase. I’ll check how it’s doing on Google in a day or two.

UPDATE: Sorry if this post has appeared more than once. I have been trying out various WordPress meta tag plugins on client blogs recently. This evening, I had a look at the code on Vanessa Fox’s blog and noticed she used this Add-Meta-Tag plugin – which ought to be something of an endorsement, so I have now installed it here to see how well it works.

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 the same solution, filling the SERPS with the same advice – alter your javascript run time in Firefox’s configuration.
For many of us that isn’t the answer. That’s why I am linking to Vlad Bogdanov, who did the donkey work, digging through scores of Firefox plug-ins and managing to narrow the Firefox Unresponsive Script problem down to the Google calendar plug-in. Following Vlad’s advice, I removed it and everything worked fine again.

Technorati Tags: firefox, google