Archive for March, 2011

SEO Consultant Vacancy at Blueclaw

Published: March 24th, 2011

Blueclaw Media Ltd is a well established, fast-growing SEO and internet marketing agency based in Leeds, UK. We are also winners of the DADI Award for SEO, Ecommerce and PPC.

Based in an old warehouse building, Blueclaw is a creative space with a dedicated SEO team working to deliver exceptional results for our clients. Our clients range from local to national companies and government-sponsored organisations.

Due to continued growth we now wish to recruit for the position of SEO Consultant. You will have expert knowledge of SEO, link building and social media marketing with experience of running multiple campaigns.

You will need to have:

  • Excellent written ability
  • Good eye for detail
  • Strong analytical and strategic skills
  • The confidence to express new ideas
  • Good telephone manner
  • Client facing skills
  • Strong SEO knowledge
  • HTML Skills

This is a fantastic opportunity for a highly motivated team player for a fulfilling career. We will offer a great salary and benefits to the right person.

Please apply direct and not through and agency. Call 0113 234 3300 - or email fergus{at}blueclaw.co.uk, send your CV and a covering letter.

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Firefox quickly follows up Internet Explorer with a new version

Published: March 22nd, 2011

Hot on the heels of Internet Explorer 9′s release last week today saw the final release of Firefox 4 (another browser that seemed to be in beta / release candidate stage for ages).

With an updated UI making it look very much like Opera the latest Firefox version promises improved speed, more CSS3 support and a host of new features. Last week Microsoft were attempting to claim IE9 was the most advanced web browser, it will be interesting to see if they continue to keep up this claim when FF4 offers arguably more.

Download firefox4 now

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SEO Checklist For Pre-Launch Ecommerce Sites Part 1

Published: March 18th, 2011

Unlike a normal blog or a website, onsite audits for ecommerce sites can be a mammoth job to undertake. It is always better to go through the site and make sure it is seo compliant BEFORE launching. This is to prevent google from indexing non-optimized pages or worser still, finding countless 404s and duplicated content.

  1. If the ecommerce build is currently on a “dev” subdomain or a sub directory of a site, ensure that it is uncrawlable by password protecting the directory. This is usually the best method instead of adding meta noindex, no follow on page level or blocking bots by the Robots.txt file
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IE9 launches so upgrade now

Published: March 15th, 2011

Microsoft have been working very hard in the last couple of months working on their reputation, just a few years ago they were the big evil giant of the tech industry with their anti competitive business practices not winning them many friends. However times change and their seemingly unsurpassable dominance in home computing has been eroded most notably when it comes to the web browser. Where once they had a 95% market share it has now slipped under 50%, as faster more feature rich alternatives such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera have chipped away at their lead. Well the men from Redmond are fighting back with their latest offering Internet Explorer 9 and it is a big step in catching up in area they were being left behind.

Having learnt from previous launch issues (such as the much criticised Windows Vista) this has not been a rushed job. There have been a number of beta versions leading up to this official launch with Microsoft looking to involve web developers throughout the testing process. They have made use of social media channels and even throwing a big party at the South By Southwest conference in Austin Texas, their hope is no doubt to attempt to build a better relationship with the web development community who have been suffering for years now to deal with IE6′s incompetency. It seems they have realised that the key to the success of this latest iteration is that the developers get on board and make their HTML5 web apps compatible with IE9 and I for one applaud them for this.

So if you are still using IE8, IE7 or are even IE6 (god help you) then please please please, if you are not going to make the switch to chrome/firefox etc. then at least upgrade to IE9 and let we the web development community take full advantage of CSS3/HTML5 functionality.

Get IE9

 

On a side note it’s not been all good news for Microsoft however as they PR took a big hit the other night when they attempted to get twitter coverage by offering to donate aid to Japan earthquake victims for every retweet. This attempt to capitalize on the tragedy and suffering of the Japanese people seem to be a hark back to the bad old days of the evil empire and the twitter backlash resulted in the trending of the hastag #fuckbing.

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Use jQuery to manipulate your DOM post page load for SEO and Performance benefits

Published: March 11th, 2011

Working as a developer for an SEO focused company like Blueclaw I have to make every effort to ensure the final HTML produced for any page I am working on is optimised for the search engines (well duh!). A big thing for me is to cut out any bloated markup, in this post I am going to cover how to use javascript (in this case JQuery however the techniques can easily be transferred to any other framework or just in plain old vanilla js ) to help reduce this bloated pages, not only to help streamline your code for SEO but also giving you the added benefit of speeding up page loads.

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