SEO and W3 Compliance

Posted: under News.

There has been much debate over the years about how much influence that having a site validate to w3 standards has on Google page rankings. Matt Cutts has come out and states that it has absolutley no effect at all on P/R. Does that mean the end to all the hard work? I don’t think so.
The main reason that folks want sites to validate is that it makes it easier for sites to be cross browser compatible, which regardless of what the philistines say, is actually quite important. However, I no longer subscribe to the “must validate” at all costs philosophy. Not all validation errors are fatal to browser rendering. Take the use of the ampersand in coding. If not written as “&” then it will cause a W3 validation error. Now although this would clearly be better from a coding point of view,if not then it is no big deal.

It is true, though, that some errors will stop the bots spidering past the error even if it doesn’t prevent the site rendering and if the following piece happens to contain the all important key phrase or phhrases, then page ranking is bound to suffer as a consequence.

There are some who argue about the need for compliance to the above standards, but surely if the web is to develop then we should be ensure that there are standards that browser developers can work to and make life easier all round.

Ever ask the question, if Microsoft had not released IE6 (and IE7 for that matter) and IE8 had been closer down the line, then FireFox would not now be the second larget browser in town?

Comments (0) Sep 23 2009


New Web Marketing Project

Posted: under Projects.

Just started a web marketing project for leading hosting company. We will be involved in analysis and monitoring of statistics of new campaigns. These could be in the form of micosites, banner or Adwords. The focus of the project is the immediacy of the reporting with samples being taken very quickly after commencement in order than any fine tuning can take place. End of the month will be too late.

This is an exciting project for IY e-Solutions and demonstrates our credentials as web marketeers. We will be reporting on progress in the coming months.

Comments (0) Sep 11 2009


Slow Broadband Speeds

Posted: under News.

So you think that you have slow Broadband speeds? A South African Company was so frustrated that the challenged their telcom that a carrier pigeon could do better. The pigeon took just over an hour to reach its destination and some 40 mins or so to upload the data from the USB it was carrying. In the same time only 4% of the data had been uploaded by the telcom company. Don’t know about you but the prospect of our information winging towards us by pigeon has a certain symmetry about it in these days of everyone wanting us to hgo back in time to save energy.
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8248056.stm for full article.

Comments (0) Sep 11 2009


Director Level Jobs Portal

Posted: under Projects.

We are currently working with CorporateEagles in the design and build of a new portal for senior executives and Board level directors.

Comments (0) Sep 02 2009


Google Maps Tracking

Posted: under Projects.

Two of our websites are blogs charting the progress of two sailing yachts Jalan-Jalan and SY Concerto. Almost simultaneously, they each requested the facility to have people track their progress.
Using the Google map protocol and a combination of php and kml scripts this was embedded in a blog page.
There are a number of options which can be utilised in tracking depending on the number of co-ordinates that are in the code. In open waters it can be set up as a “track” but with coast hopping, it is better ste up as a number of points – otherwise one can have the track going over land – never a good thing with a yacht.

Although, the skippers forward the co-ordinates to me for uploading, this can be done simply by the crews – providing the co-ordinates are written in a specific fashion – and uploaded using ftp.

See where Jalan-Jalan and SY Concerto are currently.

Comments (0) Sep 02 2009


Spanish version of the Swipe

Posted: under Projects.

As a large proportion of the hits for The Swipe – guitar string cleaner – are from Spanish speaking countries, changes were made to the code to allow the inclusion of Spanish text to the site. These include Spanish language meta headers. eg Limpiador de Cuerdas de Guitarra is Guitar string cleaner.

The code is driven by a neat piece of php coding which recognises the langauge chosen by the user.

As El Swipe is currently no 1 in Google.es, we are confident that this strategy will drive even more traffic to the site.

Comments (0) Sep 02 2009