A few weeks ago I discovered that there were some very spammy listings in the search engine results pages for the term London Safes

This was discussed within the search community with Lyndon, a very respected link baiter from Sunny Cornwall also posting about it.

At the time of writing. both creativesuit and Cornwall SEO are ranking for London Safes, just by blogging about it.

So I thought I would test out how spammy you can be to gain rankings for another area.

What follows should not be replicated, it is merely a test too see how broken Google is in this sector.

Now, close your eyes. and repeat after me. If you say it enough times Google will come.

Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes, Kent safes.

Now lets see if that worked?

UPDATE: 11:30am

I did a quick search for Kent Safes, and saw something else in the google local listings.

What the hell is going on there?

Kent Kent Kent Kent kent

As creativesuit is a web design agency in Hale we are quite used to seeing a few celebrities around the village. Before he moved to Sunderland, we would see Steve Bruce in our local Barclays doing his banking, Steve Mcmanaman and Jason Macateer are always eating in Simon Rimmers restaurant Earle, which is directly opposite the office.

This morning we hear that Samuel Eto, the brilliant Barcelona striker who is looking like he could possibly move to Manchester City to be paid a staggering £195,000 a week, and will be renting (WHY?) a home from Andrew Flintoff.

Freddie Flintoff owns a £2.5m mansion in Hale, but has since has moved his family to another home in the relatively-nearby Cheshire village of Mottram St Andrew (on land once owned by Mark Hughes). Hence, the Lancashire all-rounder is now looking for a lodger.

Barcelona ace Eto’o is set to move into a Georgian style house in the plush village of Hale owned by cricket ace Flintoff, who is renting out the property for around £20,000-a-month - a fraction of Eto’o’s £200,000-a-week wages.

So says the Daily Mirror. Now that must be true eh?

We will be keeping our eyes peeled for any former Barcelona strikers wandering aimlessly round the shops, hunting for a sandwich for under a fiver.

It has been a frighteningly busy few weeks for creativesuit, and we will hold our hands up to admit we have been neglecting our blog and social network accounts recently. This has been due to several huge accounts being signed, and quite literally everyone has had to muck in and get these websites completed and get the SEO rolling.

There has been lots of talking points recently in the world of SEO and internet marketing. The launch of microsofts new search engine Bing, the recent change in Google UK which has been slated all over the place and is actually ranking hundreds of Australian and American sites above uk sites. Our SEO Manager and his team have been quite literally working overtime trying to figure out how to combat these latest changes. We all agree, as do many of the SEO’s we speak to in the industry that it only a matter of time before Google fixes it, as at the moment something is badly broken.  For example, a simple search for “Manchester”

Click here to search Google

Brings several results for Manchester in New Hampshire, America. Google knows we are based in manchester, that i am searching from Manchester. Why the hell would I want any info on the American Manchester. Somethings badly broken. There has been several Sphinn discussions regarding it, sad thing is it has been broken for most of June.

In the office, a new designer called Sam started the other week. I’m pretty sure this is going to be covered in more detail in the monthly newsletter, hopefully she will be redesigning the creativesuit website pretty soon, just when this ridiculous busy spell passes.

On the client front this month we have been doing loads of works with Ratio Money and their Unfair Loans website. We have just started a fresh project for Globalimps down South, with the East Anglia Conservatories market on the upturn thanks to the mini heat wave.

I promise that we’ll be updating the blog from now on at least a couple of times. And you can of course follow the twitter account if you need to stalk us.

,

Although admittedly we are usually involved in the design and building of websites, we do a lot of brochure work and occasionally we get asked if we do packaging.

Well we’ll have a go at that we thought, we design everything else so why not do a bit of product packaging. Our client, Baby Deli has a long history with creativesuit and a working relationship of three years and recently had their website redesigned. They were that impressed with the finished website they let us loose on the packaging of the products as well.

And this is how it came out.
We think it looks ace. But then again we would do.

Click the image for a bigger version.

Have a look at this site we came across today http://www.londonsafes.co.uk/

Have a look at the title tag

<title>London Safes London Safes London Safes London Safes London Safes London Safes L
ondon Safes London Safes London Safes London Safes London Safes London Safes London Safes
London Safes London Safes</title>

It’s quite possibly the worst attempt at SEO we have ever seen here at creativesuit.

(and the description is just as bad)

We won’t bother outing the SEO firm, anyone can see for themselves by viewing the source.

Thanks to the medium of the internet, you don’t actually have to be at an important conference to follow exactly what’s going at the conference.

This week, one of the most important Search Engine conferences of the year in the UK is happening, as per usual in London.  SMX London

Matt Rycroft, the head of our search team was planning on going this year, but yet again he has simply too much work on and will be following the presentations through twitter and a few blogs.

If you want to follow SMX, you can simply click on this link, or use one of the various Twitter clients that will allow search, such as Tweetdeck.

Just a quick note, to point out that we’ve moved office for the third time in the companies life, this time we have moved into the centre of Hale, a swanky little office on the main street. The move was extremely painless as we recently moved everyone from big clunky imacs, too small not very clunky macbooks. So it was a case of pack up your desk. Get in your car, unpack your desk. We hired a removal firm to do all the heavy stuff. 

Our new address can be found on Creativesuit contact details page, and it looks a bit like this:

161 Ashley Road
Hale
Cheshire
WA15 9SD

make sure you pop in for a brew if you are ever over in Hale.

As you are probally well aware by now, the other week Google launched Streetmaps in the UK. Much to the usual uproar of the Daily Mail about Privacy and notwhat. Well I (Matt) have a bigger issue with Google Maps. It just will not work anymore.

As I hope this problem is not just me, I thought I would write about it in a quick blog update to help you, fix yours, as I imagine you have come here searching for an answer.

We’re based in the uk. So by Default we get sent by Google, to the UK version of Google Maps.

http://maps.google.co.uk/

And this is just completely broken for myself. It doesn’t matter if I am using a Mac or a PC. From my office I get no controls, no zoom, no street view and it takes about 30 seconds to load, before giving up and offering me the “view site in HTML” option.

Things I have tried include:

Safari, Firefox, Camino and Omniweb on my Mac and Firefox and Internet explorer on the PC.

This morning I found this thread on the official google forum

And I clicked a link on this forum to maps.google.com The American version of the site. And it worked, perfectly. So the first thing you need to try is accessing the US version of the site and then going back to the UK. As this seems to be working for me now.

How very very Strange.

Jonathan Ross does it, Stephen Fry does it and creativesuit does it too. Twitter is the latest Web 2.0 tool to get everybody talking - and people and programmes all over the BBC are at it as well.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a very simple idea. You answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 letters or less, as often as you like. Other people can then sign up to ‘follow’ you and receive your updates. They can also reply to you, either in public by using their own update or in private via a Direct Message, a bit like an email.

Perhaps the most significant step so far in TV presenter Jonathan Ross’s media rehabilitation, after his three month suspension, was the revelation he is hosting this year’s Bafta Awards in February.

The news did not come in the usual way though, through a press release or publicist.

It came directly from Ross himself, through his Twitter feed.

Many people look at twitter on the surface and conclude that it’s just one big waste of time. like all social media and marketing tactics, before you can determine if something makes sense you need to analyze your objectives.

1) Would you like a way to connect and network with others in your industry or others who share you views?

2) Would you like a way to get instant access to what’s being said, this
minute, about your organization, people, products, or brand?

3) Would you like a steady stream of ideas, content, links, resources, and
tips focused on your area of expertise or interest?

4) Would you like to monitor what’s being said about your customers to help them protect their brands?

5) Would you like to promote your products and services directly to a target audience?

All this can be achieved and more through this powerful little tool, why not have a search for your industry now, we monitor various terms specific to our industry for example. Here is the result for web design. If there is an important event going on, and you want to get the news directly from people at the event you can search the name of the event preceded by a hashtag. For example, last week I wrote about the birth of Matt’s daughter had stopped him going too the Search engine conference in London. He was still able to follow excatly what was going on by searching twitter for #seslondon

Sorry we’ve been missing in action on the blogging front for a while, Matt, who generally updates the blog has been off work for the past two weeks, on paternity leave looking after the new addition to the creativesuit team. Baby Lilly. Who was born on February 10th, at the ungodly hour on 1.48am weighing in at 6.lb 13. Matt’s back in the office now so all of his emails that have been clogging up his inbox whilst he has been away should have been replied to by now and he’s back to full speed.

Here at creativesuit we have still yet too see any signs of slowing up on the work front despite the doom and gloom that seems to be surrounding the economy.

In the past 2 weeks we have launched a few sites, toyed with the idea of a redesign of our own website, despite it only being a year old. We feel it needs a freshen up again. If you are a talented freelancer and fancy having a bash at redesigning the site, contact us here, we’ll pay you well and It will definitely lead to a lot more work we could send your way.

Tindall Fabricators launched earlier this week, Horse Blocks launched last week, and Dekomed launched prior to that. All clients are over the moon with the work we have done on them and we are currently working with all of them into the next phase of their web strategy. Getting the site ranked, and customers contacting them.

In the world of Search Engines there has been lots of talk about Google boosting big brands up the search engines on the main .com variant of their search engines, no word that it has affected the UK yet, but we will keep you posted if this trend is continued here in Blighty. Aaron Wall of SEObook has written an excellent piece on this here. There is no point in us rewriting what has already been said over and over all over the blogosphere.

Search Engine Strategies in London, came and went. Unfortunately nobody from creativesuit managed to attend this year, as Matt Rycroft the SEO guru here, was away having babies, and everybody else had prior meetings and projects to complete. Hopefully we’ll be at other conferences later in the year. And the pricey £600 ticket sat here unused. Luckily the company credit card also remained untouched, as going by some of the photos on flickr, there were some serious amounts of alcohol consumed in the evening events.

Other things that have caught our eye on the internet in the past couple of weeks include:

This thing from Googles Matt Cutt’s explaining this new canonical link tag, this is a really big deal and we are already implementing it on clients sites.

This thing that teaches you how to moonwalk. Giving me 8 months to prepare for the Christmas party 2009. Word on the street is we could possibly going to see U2 in New York

This nice post from Google explaining in a nice easy way how many visitors your website gets from the new fandangled Iphone that EVERYONE in the creativesuit office now has. I remember when it was just Matt who was the trendsetter with his iphone 18 months ago. Now every tom dick and harry has one, including a girl.

This amusing post from the geniuses at last.fm, proclaiming a very influential website to be completely full of sh*t, all over the leaking of the new U2 Album.

And that’s enough of all that for now, My reporting tools have finished what the were doing, so best get back to speaking to clients about those results.

Tarah Tarah Tarah Tarah Tarah……….