STV take over from BBC

A late cancellation from Phillip Jay of the BBC must have given the folks organising the YCF digital conference a “bit of a moment” to quote the late Colin McRae. However, the substitute speaker turned out to be pretty refreshing.

Robert Dawson Scott has only just joined STV – 9 days and counting. That newness gives him the chance to still look at stv from the outside in and that proved pretty interesting. Robert has been drafted in to sort out the online STV presence and by the sounds of things his work is cut out. Registered users are not registered across all aspects of the site, google only placed them at 55 when you did a search for Tommy Burns the other day – despite the efforts STV went to to cover the funeral, and they are being hosed by BBC’s iPlayer.

The average weekly use of iPlayer is 1.4mn and growing at 20% month on month. And that 1.4mn figure is double the use in January. So as Robert put it…. “the BBC are a bit of a problem for us”.

It’ll be interesting to see the impact of Roberts Work – why not track it on Alexa (as he is doing). It’s all about website structure and search engine optimisation efforts.

Online Marketing Scotland

We put live a wee while back Search Engine Optimisation Scotland for free SEO advice (free not just for the Scots of course – we wouldn’t want to be seen as exclusive). Trouble was as soon as we put our free SEO advice website live we knew we had more work to do.

We realised that we needed to explain about online marketing in a manner similar to SEO Scotland – ie simple and straightforward.  The logic was the same as before, simply provide information to our webwisebusiness website customers to ensure they could decided whether they wanted to do adwords or mass email or whatever. So Online Marketing Scotland is now live and offering simple to understand and free online marketing advice to the Scots and anyone else who is interested.

 

Search Engines and the webmaster

We’ve been looking at the effectiveness of the webmaster tool that you can use to monitor your website from Google. Unlike the brilliant Google Analytics the Google Webmaster tool seems to need a wee bit more work from the geniuses that are Google.

We’re finding Google Webmaster reports that some of the websites we have developed are getting high search position ratings for certain keywords. Good news! Well not really, when you check for the search term it’s clear that webmaster has got its knickers in a twist. But it’s not consistent either – as some of it’s info looks accurate. Our search engine optimisation service is getting increasingly popular as more and more folks in Scotland realise that SEO is important to their website so the free tools from Google are making things a lot easier. Despite the fact that they are free it still comes as big surprise when the Google tools fall short of helping us maximise SEO when we have been busy website developers.

Dinosaur eats banana

We’re beginning to think we are getting pretty smart on the Search Engine Optimisation stuff. However, we know the rules are prone to change so we can’t afford to be complacent. So to keep us on our toes and to make sure we don’t get too big for our boots……

On a Friday afternoon wondering why anybody works on a Friday afternoon we came up with a wee (scots for small) game – we’d pick a strange phrase to show our customers who need SEO help that you can be number one in Google for a phrase but if nobody is looking for that phrase it really doesn’t matter.

So we messed around trying to come up with a daft phrase and after far too much coffee….

Dinosaur Eats Banana

we googled and yes there are articles that use all those words but nothing exactly the same. So we have added a page

http://www.search-engine-optimisation-scotland.co.uk/AboutUs/Dinosaureatsbanana/tabid/62/Default.aspx

You can click here to visit our Dinosaur Eats Banana page.

No doubt SEO experts much cleverer than us will have a bash to hijack the idea and make us look like amateurs. So we reserve the right to give up, say we didn’t mean it and all those things you say when you’ve been knocked out of the competition in round 1.

So Dinosaur Eats Banana….. find out how on Search Engine Optimisation Scotland.