It’s the question that has been keeping you awake at night, do you go for the full on Mullet or just the appearance of a Mullet with the Mulldina?
I know your problem I to have had the same sleepless nights and the answer is to use both in your social media campaign.
Please note no 80s TV idol was harmed during the writing of this post!
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How British is your site? Is it British enough to get into google.co.uk?
Regardless of where you come from you will no doubt have a regional Google be it China or Brazil but getting into these various search engines can at times be difficult unless you know what to look for.
We have discussed this subject before but now I want to give some sort of ranking to the various factors so here is our guide to Geo Targeting.
Through out this article we refer to regional rather then country tld (top level domain) and search engine, while most regional search engines are country specific a couple are not and with new domain names making up a series of countries such as .eu (urgh Europe 
) we are starting to have to think of Geo Targeting on many levels.
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I’m getting a little bit excited, less then 2 weeks to go till myself and David Castle open All about Asking a two day SEO residential course here in the UK in Nottingham.
We have announced details of couple of the workshops
I’m particularly looking forward to semantic markup and search engine optimisation, this is a subject that’s dear to my heart and I have been busy preparing several practical tutorials and bits for people, along with a set of scripts, css and html templates for people to take away. The second workshop which has been announced in detail is getting in the right search engine. This workshop is focusing on getting your site into the various search engines, regional, local mobile etc. Again its really a practical session with everything from XHTML geo targetting tracks to working with CHTML being discussed and played with.
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I made a quick reply to a question posed on Marketing Chat forum but thought I would expand upon it here the question went,
The site was up until the start of last year US based, though about a year ago it was moved to UK servers.
He’s looking to get the site listed at #1 in the .co.uk version.
Apart from building links from UK based sites does anyone have any other ideas how this can be achieved? I’m guessing Google simply hasn’t recognised the fact that the site has moved.
Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I don’t think it makes much difference where your servers are located, or rather the difference is limited. This is based on anecdotal evidence we have run and maintained sites with .co.uk domains on servers in the UK, USA and Germany. We have also moved sites wholesale between providers and countries with no loss of position in SERPs. Now unless your looking for correlation tracking changes is very hard to do particularly when there are so many variables but we have been very successful in wholesale domain moves and have never noticed a problem. It also stands that as we move more to distributed systems for providing our hosts with processor power the physical location of the box will be less important.
So how then can we Geo-Target a domain to a specific country and in particular for Google?
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As we begin the start of our move to our new home, I thought I would discuss some of the problem and pitfalls of moving a blog to a new domain/site and how best to deal with these minor crisis’s. but before we start we need to think through the whole process and ask ourselves why we are moving.
Why are you moving?
When people first start a blog it normally starts on one of the free services such as wordpress.com or blogger, these services provide a great no risk way to get a blog of the ground and most people are busy with there first post in a matter of minutes. However as time marches on the limitations of these services start to appear, the ability to adapt the theme to the way you want or to add that really cool widget you saw on some one site starts to build. The answer is to set up a new site but how do you manage migration of visitors? This site was kept separate from the Venture Skills site to help gain multiple positions on SERP for our own brand, but it has grown into a nice budding community and now it’s time for it to rejoin the main site, when V3 is launched in the near future. So this series will act as the demonstration for the techniques discussed.
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Now we are very lucky at Venture Skills to be able to pull on a copywriter for our clients (but I’m cheap scate so you get me for the blog) most sites are not so lucky, however there are hundreds of tutorials on writing good Linkbait out there some go deep into branding and how focus your users on pages and sites, some look to women magazines for help. What ever your method this is article is about what to do when it fails…
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With all the Drupal bits on the blog recently people may be wondering if we do any reputation management at all so I thought I would provide a run down of some of our popular, and not so popular content.
Drupal is a fantastic content management system but is perhaps not the most non developer friendly however 3 simple modules can help you create compelling and powerful web site. So in this 3 part mini series lets see how easy it is to develop new content types and ways to view it. To help us lets use a fictitious company called AA Design who are about to start teaching a range of courses.
Quick note this post refers to Drupal 4.7 however several of these modules are now available for Drupal 5
Themeing our CCK and Views
So the big thing for CMS are to be SEO search engine optimisation friendly at the moment and so I thought it would be worth highlighting a few of Drupal features and modules to aid in optimisation and content management. This is not the definitive list just a few ideas and bits that have been banded in my head.
This article is based around Drupal 5 which means far less work, those on 4.7 reading this may also want to check out articles about sending correct 404s and robot.txt file
Many bloggers have discovered a new approach to garner links, the paid review and now the prize review, the concept is not new and has been around since the time of the first shop (well maybe later) in less the 10 words tell me why x is great. Only this is the internet and most of these people are SEO or internet marketers, so its write an honest unbiased review while starring at this wad of fivers that must be over 250 words and includes the following words…
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