Welcome to the Escape Blog

Last year, No. 10 created a website to create petitions.

Ian Fenn has created this one:

In June 2006 the DTI launched their new website. Despite an approximate
cost of £200,000, the website failed to meet basic accessibility
standards. In short, this meant that the information on the website was
inaccessible to some UK citizens - this is absolutely inexcusable.
Further work (requiring further taxpayer money) was promised to bring
the website up to Level AA of the Web Accessibility Initiative. The
purpose of this petition is to ensure that all future government
websites meet basic accessibility requirements from launch.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/govaccessibility/

Wordtracker have released a Free version of their Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Using tools like this you can begin to understand search numbers of keywords and phrases. I do use Wordtracker and find the information handy (sometimes) and this free version covers the top 100 phrases so should be deep enough for most.

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise has released the 2006 data for search terms in the UK. Not sure there’s too much
to learn from it apart from (and this is gonna sound a little arrogant) how basic some of the terms are.

It just goes to show how much better the search traffic you will get from being specific with your content and to not think too much about keywords, but to focus more on "key phrases".

Common mistakes we still see on websites is generic ‘fluff’, ie. We offer bespoke solutions that fulfil your companies requirements, etc. That’s all well and good but what does the bespoke solution pertain to?

Much better to focus on:

• Your actual services - design agency, web designers, etc. How do you say what you do and how would your customers say it?
• Geographical location - we all have boundaries. Why go for England when you can get Hampshire web designers, or even Basingstoke web designers?
• Buzz phrases that relate to what you sell and the generic terms that they relate to. EG. I went to a seminar in November and everyone was talking about KPIs. KPIs, I learned, are key performance indicators. I knew what they were buy didn’t know the buzz words. When I did, I created this page about KPIs for websites. It is pulling in traffic pretty much from day one, not necessarily relevant to who I am selling to but authoritative traffic all the same.

Remember, key phrases, and the words that make them up, don’t necessarily need to be together, just a culmination of the words on the page will help. Just make sure you mix them up between Page Titles, Headers, Sub Headers and Paragraph text.

E-Consultancy reports: Microsoft has reportedly earmarked $500m for a massive global advertising campaign to support the launch of its new Vista operating system.

I am not sure it is a product worth waiting for but I use a Mac so I would say that wouldn’t I? It is a shame, in my view. Microsoft were in such a great position to innovate and they seem to have fallen behind the pack. Arguably they have the hardest job being the leader but that’s really no excuse.

$500 million is a lot but it won’t make the product any better. I would also argue that if Microsoft understood the web (or web two point zero) then they would have been able to do a much better job with a fraction of that figure mobilising bloggers, etc. to sell the message.

Vista will succeed, or course it will, but I want more from you Microsoft - wow me like you used to!

Mobile phone users in the UK accessed the internet via their handsets about 15.9 million times throughout December 2006, reports the BBC.

In the past three months, mobile users accessed the web 45.6 million times with huge predicted growth in location-based services through 2007 delivering relevant results based on the users geographical position.

By the end of the year, you could be asking your phone for the nearest Pizza Restaurant, talking of which…

Off topic slightly but we are loving this website :: foodtube.co.uk :: after being contacted by the owner of the site about possible on-line marketing. Great idea using a Mash Up with Google which offers real value to anyone in London looking for food. This is the future of content delivery on the web (I think) with locations, reviews and categorisation; all utilising existing content and user-generated reviews.

We ran the first of our Seminars this week - "Online Permission Marketing". We had some great feedback and no-one seemed that put off by the massive traffic delays due to icy weather and road works! Go on then, we’ll let you download the presentation so you can see what you missed.

The Routledge and Young website went live this morning. First web project of the year to go live!

On the client front, we have picked up a nice project from Basingstoke & Deane Borough Council to promote an upcoming Careers Fayre in North Hampshire.

We also celebrated late Friday after winning a three-way Pitch for the Total Active branding who are part of the Simplyhealth Group

Escape client, RRG, are undertaking their first ever exhibition in Vienna in March we will be supporting them with exhibition stands, promo items and lots of other collateral.

Joanna was bowled over by the silky smooth tones of one of the UK’s sales gurus, Gavin Ingham, as part of her professional development – she even asked for his autograph!

Lisa Drew starts next week as a Project Manager and she came in this week to say hello. We are all looking forward to a new Escapee. We did lose one this week, however, with the departure of Charlie.

My one last reason for maybe running Windows on my Macbook Pro has been struck off the list.

Adwords Editor is now available for the Mac!

When showing how SEO worked to prospective clients, you used to have a bit of fun.

By typing in ‘Miserable Failure’ you got George Bush’s Home Page and by typing in ‘Liar’, you got Tony Blair’s; to name a few. They were called Googlebombs.

This was based on people linking to these pages using those specific terms and manipulating the Google Algorithm.

Well, they put a stop to the fun…

Aaran Wall nails his colours to the mast (via a post at Threadwatch):

Let me tell you about the most common penalty Google uses. It doesn’t have a catchy name, and people generally refuse to talk about it because this particular penalty requires taking responsibility.
It’s much easier to blame the +-30 penalty, the Sandbox or the new 950
penalty than it is to accept that you’ve been nailed with the most
common penalty of all. What is it you ask?

It’s the My Site Sucks And Google Just Figured It Out penalty.

It happened to one of our clients once. They bought a domain and then let it slip and lost the domain, only for someone to snap it up.

But, then again, they weren’t Google.de… according to Techcrunch:

…it appears to be because Google forgot to renew the Google.de domain
name. It expired and someone registered it. While the site was down the
site showed a standard domain name registrar parked page (probably
including Google Ads).