It’s one of the oldest SEO questions out there. Basically it went

Should I use commas in my meta keywords?

and then this was the next big question. OK, maybe I’ve skipped 1 or 2 questions in between, but I swear someone has asked this every single year at SES London since 2006 (and no doubt at every other search conference too), so I wanted to collate a few thoughts from leading experts that might not have been published online before. Then like all good blog authors, I can tell you nothing and you can make up your own mind. Just for those of you wondering what the hell I’m talking about, the question is really:

Will hosting a website in my target country (so my website IP originates from the country my website targets) help me appear higher up in the SERPS in that country? E.g. will hosting my UK targeted website in the UK help me appear higher in Google UK rankings as opposed to if I hosted in the USA or somewhere else?

Click here to continue reading Should I Host My Website In My Target Country?…

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Selling on the internet is great. We all know that, right? One of the fundamental joys of selling online is that you can offer products and services globally from one location. Now, anyone who sells internationally will know there’s often many logistical headaches to overcome when doing this, but perhaps the most basic is showing prices in a currency native to your customer. No matter where you’re based, if your customers are in the USA for example you want to give them the option to see prices in USD, and so on for every country you supply. If you’re selling physical goods, you might only supply to a limited number of international countries for logistical reasons. If you’re selling virtual items such as software downloads, then you could easily see every country in the world as a viable source of customers.

OK, so you know you need to show prices native to your customers. Many e-commerce platforms support this out of the box and even if you’ve written a site from scratch, giving different currency options to different customers isn’t technically difficult. All you need now is some kind of currency data feed (preferably free, right?) so you can fetch the latest exchange rates and display prices accordingly.

Click here to continue reading Free Currency Data Feed…

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

So, a little over a year ago (doesn’t time fly?) Jason Roe posted a piece on his blog about a bug in the Ryanair flight booking system. In case you missed the post, you can read it here. Now although it’s obviously not a great user experience if your customers click a few links and ends up seeing the price as £0.00 during the order process, really it was a post about fundamentally nothing.

What made this post considerably more interesting, was the fact someone from the Ryanair development team decided to come and post retaliatory comments, such as:

jason!
you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it!

Marvelous stuff. Cue lots of links, mass hysteria and Ryanair issuing a statement about how they don’t correspond with Idiot Bloggers.

So, fast forward a year and you’d think Ryanair would now be a bit more careful about making technical mistakes, given the free-speaking nature of their staff. Well, apparently not as I discovered when their latest email promotion dropped in my inbox last Wednesday.

Click here to continue reading No Ryanair, Me Speak English…

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

How did I let this happen? Well, no matter, I now have a blog. Now I just need to think of something to post…..

I should probably thank Ahmad Fouad for his theme upon which my blog design is based; apart from the base64 encoded link in the footer, it’s a damn fine theme to start you off. You can download it here.

So, look out for my first real post soon.

Be Sociable, Share!

•