IT & SEO Consultant Blog

The recession cause by an ash cloud.

admin — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:02:35 +0000

It has now been four days that the planes over most of Europe stayed grounded and although the light at the end of the tunnel is insight the problems it has caused are far from over yet. Not only will the financial loses that the airlines and airports have an impact on the aviation markets there are also be other problems arising that have a more global impact. For example think about the employees that were on holidays and are due to return home last Thursday, the work they were suppose to be doing has not been done yet and the backlog of work needs to be caught up and paid for of course. Or what about the couriers like DHL and FedEX, the next day delivery promise has been broken and although the alternatives as shipping the packages by boat or car might have gotten the packages on the destination. They would have been late and it would have cost the companies a whole lot of cash more and let’s not forget the packages them selves that might have contained important documents or contracts to close a business deal or even a hearth or a kidney for that transplant patient waiting in the hospital. All these costs will have to be come out of somebody’s wallet and sadly enough most likely this will be paid by the EU Taxpayer, saving another airline from going bust. So just look ahead the coming months for a possible mini recession but this time we can’t blame the greedy bankers… we can only accept nature and its powerful force it still has upon us.

If Dublin bus would give Spanish lessons…

admin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:21:48 +0000

After a week of travelling through the south of Spain, visiting top spots like Seville, Cordoba, Toledo and eventually Madrid it was time for me to return home to Dublin. Even though I am not a native to Ireland I do feel that after 6 years of living and working here I can call it my home. So after travelling over a thousand kilometres around in Spain in my rented Toyota Yaris which I have to admit was a fine vehicle and flying for 2 and a half hours with Aer Lingus who might be a bit more expensive then Ryan air but at least you don’t feel dirty after sitting in a plane with them (unlike Ryan air) it was time to head home. Since I spend most of my money on the holiday it was an obvious choice to take the bus which drops us off very close to the apartment anyways. For those who have never taken the airport bus serviced by Dublin Bus let me give you a small run down. The bus is actually the same as a normal Dublin bus but some seats have been removed to make space for luggage and two monitors have been fitted. Half way in to the journey you will be greeted with the poor audio quality of the recording that has to convince the tourists to take a Dublin bus tour and a ghost tour. Sadly enough the video and audio editing are so poor and amateurish that it is more laughable then convincing, the Dublin sightseeing tour shows video’s of industry pipes with smoke coming out, dread full weather and a few ugly buildings (including that of Dublin Bus in O’Connell street does not feel appealing and I don’t blame tourist for just heading in to the pub and drinking until the holidays are over. The Ghost tour video / presentation I am not even going to mention since it is equally bad if not worse. What I do want to talk about a little bit is the great way Dublin bus translates the stopping location in various languages. Someone in their marketing department must have believed that saying something in English with a Spanish accent will make the Spanish people understand. Well wrong so please guys try this out for a change,

Instead of saying:

Arriving in Central Bus station (with Spanish accent)

Try

Término de autobuses central (With any accent you like, maybe in a cork accent for comedic relief)

Anyway that was my shout out for today… It’s been a while that I have blogged but I will definitely try to work out some more posts.

Firefox memory leak Fix !

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:55:19 +0000

Just follow these simple steps to get your Firefox memory usage under control. The solution was in ”about:config” Firefox hidden configuration options.

Get the main configuration screen by putting “about:config” in the browser’s address bar.
Right click on the page and choose New then Integer and create an integer called “browser.cache.memory.capacity”. Set it to a low number (I use 16384 – that means 15MB). This controls how many kilobytes of memory are used for the browser’s cache.
In the Filter of “about:config” page (top of the page) put “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. Set “browser.cache.disk.capacity” (right click – Modify) to between 5000 or 15000 (I use 15000). For example: if you have 128MB to 512M use 5000, if you have 512BM to 1GB of RAM use 15000. This controls how many kilobytes of memory are used for the browser’s cache.
Configure Firefox to swap memory to disk when minimized. In the Filter of “about:config” page (top of the page) put “config.trim_on_minimize”, Right click on the page and choose New then Boolean and create an boolean called “config.trim_on_minimize”. Set it to true. This mean – when you minimize the firefox window it will free up memory.
In the Filter of “about:config” page (top of the page) put “network.prefetch-next”. Set “network.prefetch-next” to false. Network link prefetch will download all pages with the rel=”prefetch” tag, with false you avoid that downloading.
In the Filter of “about:config” page (top of the page) put “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers”. Set it to low number. I set it to 6. This controls how many pages of history are kept in the back/forward buttons.

Restart Firefox and that’s it! Now, your Firefox and your computer will be much faster and you are ready for faster surfing. Enjoy!

Wordpress SEO – A Video tutorial

Antonie Geerts — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:35:44 +0000

As many more question came in recently in relation to WordPress SEO I decided to create a video tutorial on how to use the SEO plugin all-in-one-seo pack for wordpress and give some Google seo examples.
I also discuss some reasons on why to do certain tricks and why you shouldn’t do others.

Hope you enjoy the video and if you have any questions or comments they are more then welcome !

Up and coming blogs

Antonie Geerts — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:02:25 +0000

As you might have noticed it has been a bit quiet the last month(s) with minimal blogging activities. The reasons for this are that I had to do a lot of work on a social marketing and media seminar I co-presented. Working with a new client who was some great ideas they want to get working on, have started writing on my e-book on SEO and Social media Marketing and then of course we have Christmas that came in the mix. The good news is that the ball is rolling and I have time now to spread out some things and make time for blogging so hopefully today I will create another Video tutorial or write a nice blog.

So keep on checking up since updates will arrive soon !

Christmas gifts for men

Antonie Geerts — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:04:25 +0000

Since the fat man in red is arriving pretty shortly I decided to put on a little wish list of gifts most guys can appreciate. Just so that you don’t have to ask your boyfriend , husband , brother , friend etc directly you can pick some of these..

The low budget ones:

Gillette Mach 3 – Even if your boy is an electronic shaver user this would be most likely because he never had a proper blade one. For about 10 euro’s you have a great little set and often with Christmas there are special offers going on. PS Go for the Original Mach3 – Fusion ones are crap.

A funny t-shirt- Get something in relation to drinks, coolness, or sex and you will have a winner they are cheap enough and can be bought in any shop that has loud music on. Funny Boxers are a winner as well.

The mid budget ones

So you got a bit more cash to spend… Good then why not buy..

A External Hard drive: If he is a bit of a tech head , or he downloads / watches a lot of movies then this might be a great little gift. For about 70 buck you can give him a great 1 Terabyte ( 1024GB ) sized drive.

Very cool laptop speakers: Who doesn’t love music ? Well this set of speakers will really rock any laptop and they are pretty cheap as well!

Now the high budget section.

As you can tell the high budget for me is not thousands but maybe 100 to 200 euro because that’s what 90% of the Christmas loving people might spend in this recession..

XBOX Arcade: Yes forget about Play Station , WII, DS’s just buy the Xbox arcade.. Not only is it the cheapest one of the bunch it also is great for online movies, facebook , digg and other popular websites and it has some of the GREATEST games available. Don’t think too much about it. Just get it

Apple IPOD Touch 3g: Ok it is not a IPhone but it will give you almost all the same features (except for calling people). You can pick it up around 150 euros and will make a great little gift.

little note

Antonie Geerts — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:03:28 +0000

You might have been wondering why its been so quiet and well i’ve been very very very busy lately but I am working on a nice new tutorial to get your small business up and running in social networking… keep on checking !

When viruses go nasty.

Antonie Geerts — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:10:53 +0000

My track record in computing has now been 15 years of active using it starting it out with programming on my MSX and Commodore 64, driving up the phone bills with my first 286 and a 14.4K modem and eventually ending up as an IT engineer for a 40 hours work week. In those years I seen a lot of changes and one of the most unanticipated changes was that of the virus. Back in my school years I used to write simple “viruses” myself just to fool my classmates and although it might not have been very nice of me, back in the day it gained popularity in the school I was attending. Now years later the viruses are not there to piss off your class mates but they are there to do serious damage to the users of computers and the inescapable Internet.

The virus I wrote was a simple Turbo Pascal program that would keep on writing to the hard disk until it ran out of space. Fixing it was easy; remove the large file and never touch the program that says “runme.com” again. Nowadays however viruses dig deep in to the computer registry and in to your own files, especially the latest trend is the infecting of web pages on your computer which due to most browsers inability to check you will not notice until someone is mentioning it and than more then often you will not really understand what is going on and you will ignore it. What happens is that the virus will add a little section to the lower part of your webpage which will load in a malware site, spam site or even a “SEO Juice” website. You will not see the difference in your editor and right clicking on the page will often not display it either.
So why this virus? What do the creators of this virus gain by infecting my pages.

Simple answer is cold hard cash, most of the newest viruses are there to serve a purpose by having your website link to a spammers website will result in that website having a huge number of inbound links and with a huge number of inbound links the website will become more popular for sponsors , advertisers and the search engines.

How good does your site need to look? – The 5 rules of online shopping sites in 2010

Antonie Geerts — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:27:29 +0000

Internet marketers have tried to answer these questions since the beginning of the web but with new innovations coming up every month, new answers have to be given.
If you read my blog, often enough, you might notice that I dig these types of internet puzzles and also now I have a few ground rules that you might want to consider in your new website becoming an exciting one.

Rule number 1: Let it be prepared, tested and stable before any SEO is done.

Everyone can create a website these days, often enough with only a few clicks of the mouse button. But as it happens, you make your site, you submit it to the search engines, you apply some SEO tricks and then… you’re not really happy with it and you start all over again. There is nothing wrong with changing your website BUT when you change it around you will have to do all your SEO again. Broken links that are already indexed by the search engines need to be fixed and you have to deal with “lost” visitors due to your change.

So before applying any SEO or submitting your websites to search engines and internet directories, you will first want to prepare on paper what you want , test out the functionality and have it run for a couple of weeks (months) before doing your magic in getting visitors to your site.

Rule number 2: Make your design clear and interesting.

More and more businesses look at going online with their company and the products they are selling. The fact that people can now make purchases online is great and your market has the potential to reach millions of people a day. But YOU are not the only company trying to sell these products. Many other business might have just started doing the same thing as you so you will need to step up and be sure that your site is more appealing to buy from.

Sloppy images, mismatching colours and different types of letter fonts are a BIG NO NO. Keep it clear and clean if you want to sell a product online because you don’t want to walk into a shop where the colours are all over the place, the shop assistant is talking to you in different pitches of voice and accents and the product you want to buy is somewhere hiding in the attic of the shop. Unless, ofcourse, it’s a coffee shop in Amsterdam.

Rule number 3: Give something free just for YOU

Have you ever gone into a department store when the announcer of the shop gave you the sales pitch : “Hi valued customers in our shop, we have a new promotion going on and with this once off promotion comes a great little kitchen gadget Just for YOU.” It happened to me and I ended up watching a guy chopping an onion with some new* gadget. After his 15 minute demo watched by me and a whole group of other people we all received the free gadget which was just a piece of plastic for garnishing a tomato.

It worked, we all watched the demo and some were even convinced enough to buy the chopping device for 35 euro (Later that day I noticed my friend had the same device in his kitchen which he bought for 8 Euro in Argos). So invest a bit in free offers, maybe find a collaboration with other businesses and sell your stuff !

Rule number 4: You are safe with me. I promise

Media frenzy around hackers, credit card schemes and the dodgy Nigerian businessmen with their millions in heritage money makes a potential client not very confident in buying online. In order to do safe credit card transactions online, your website will need to have some kind of security in place. Often this security is put in place in the form of a logo of the company that secures the website; companies like Instant SSL, GEOTrust , Comodo and many more will have a cool little logo with a lock on it. However, a large number of customers will not know what it means; they see it as just a little part of the overall design. In order for this to become clear, state the guarantee that your purchases are done safe and secure clearly on the main page of the website and on the checkout pages.

Rule number 5: Become more sociable – Use social networking and media

The last one which has become an obvious part of getting clients to your products is the fact that social media and networking websites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have a huge impact on attracting customers and also on how well your service and products are. If you sell a bad product, then the online communities will know about it in a few minutes. Numerous consumer issues have been brought forward by users of Twitter and because of the large following, it would have reached the pages of most news sites in no time. Get your product solid and get in touch with your customers on a personal level.

Generation 2010 : A new business perspective

Antonie Geerts — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:12:48 +0000

If I would ask you the question describe a businessman in 5 words? The chance that you come up with terms like: Suit, sleek, smooth, direct, greedy, grey , boring. Is very well likely even when you are in business yourself you tend to have this kind of stereo type in your mind and most likely you will have met 1 or 2 of these types of business people. But more then often the average business person is not the boring suit wearing stereotype we all can in vision. The new generation of business men and women will be a bit looser, more social and funny. You will have to admit, you rather do business with a fun person than with a grey person when it comes to new and innovative ideas. The internet with its social media networking for example is where businesses try to “connect” to their consumers and the only way to connect is by relating with them. Hence lets get rid of this picture:

And with that picture would also come the businesscard….

Now let’s get rid of it Let’s get ready for the business view of the future.

And lets not forget to spice up the businesscards like mine :