Value for money: one year on

By Joe Gardiner Friday, 3rd February 2012

At the end of June last year I published a report entitled 'Does the UK Government get value for money?' which analysed the COI's 'Reporting on Progress 2009/10' document. The publication listed key website metrics such as page views, hosting expenditure, and page requests for departmental customer facing websites, not backend applications. Using these metrics I was able to calculate figures such as the cost per request for each department and specific departmental websites in order to analyse performance.

Following this report there was a reasonable amount of press interest, it also formed the basis of my Innovation Launchpad presentations which took me to the final stage (and Downing Street) as one of ten. Now the Cabinet Office has published the 2010/2011 edition of the report it gives me the opportunity to revisit my initial findings and see whether or not if, after a year of lobbying, the UK Government's new ICT strategy does in fact get value for money.

Introducing SocialBizzle.com

By Joe Gardiner Tuesday, 31st January 2012

I met with Lee and Ali last year to talk about SocialBizzle.com and how CatN vCluster could help their business grow not only through stable, fast hosting, but also through a partnership with CatN. My objective is to build an eco-system of innovative, creative businesses who can offer additional services to CatN customers. If you check out our partner page you can see some of the people we are working with catn.com/partners. SocialBizzle certainly fit the bill, and we're currently discussing how we can work together.

Posted in Partners | No Comments »

Link Building For Your Site

By Ricky Dawn Friday, 13th January 2012

Link building is one of the, if not the most important parts of any SEO campaign, it is also one of the hardest and most time consuming.

However there are easier ways to build links, some of which I mentioned at the end of an earlier post (Getting your site indexed), but these links are not very powerful and are only really good for getting your site indexed.

There are many ways you can build links to your site, some of which I have listed below.

The good Ol' fashioned link request emails

This tactic has been around for a long time, is probably one of the most used, and can provide the best return, you can potentially gain a lot of quality links by simply asking Webmasters to link to your site. This tactic works much better with more established sites with some authority rather then new sites.

The only problem with this is that it can be very time consuming and with more web savvy site owners today they are sometimes reluctant to place a link on their site, as this would negatively affect their Google page rank.

A good trick when using this tactic is to provide something in return, for example I check the Webmasters site for crawl, code and SEO errors and inform them on these before asking for a link, I then keep a conversation going with them until eventually I ask for a link.

Add Banner to your WordPress.org Plugin Page

By Neil Sweeney Friday, 6th January 2012

Feel your WordPress plugin page needs a little something more? Then try adding a banner!

It seems this little under advertised feature of the WordPress.org plugin directory is really easy to do and makes your page look that much better. I recently added a banner to Simply Poll plugin page and it looks really swish now.

Posted in Guides, Plugins, Wordpress | 3 Comments »

On-Page SEO Guide

By Ricky Dawn Monday, 5th December 2011

In the SEO series I have been talking about how you can get your site indexed, using the Google keyword tool and your site's architecture. By now your site should have great architecture, be indexed in Google and have a list of keywords.

Now we move onto rankings and how to move up in the SERPs (Search engine rankings position). Any good SEO campaign will begin with an On-Page SEO strategy, only when you're confident that this is in good shape should you consider moving onto Off-Page SEO.

Before you start your On-Page SEO the first thing you should know is why you are doing it and how do Google and other search engines use it.

The reason behind On-Page SEO is so that Google knows what your web page is about. If your page is empty or is solely a flash site which Google cannot read then how is Google supposed to know what your site is about? This is why many of the suggestions below include adding keywords to certain areas of your website and in specific ways.

There are many different factors to consider when completing your On-Page SEO. A lot of the time people can be all over the place when completing On-Page SEO which means some things get overlooked. Follow our On-Page SEO guide to have some seriously great On-Page SEO for your site.

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