The Venture Skills Blog

So now more or less fully restored Hackday I thought I would introduce a few of the more interesting concepts that were being banded around the event some of which are relevant to search engines and online presence. However before getting to anything interesting I thought it was discussing some of the under pinning technologies.

Geo RSS

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed," "web feed," or "channel," contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. source: wikipedia

Georss is an extension to the standard rss which provides additional location awareness tags in their simplest form these are

<geo:lat></geo:lat>
<geo:long></geo:long>

Yep that’s longitude and latitude so now an RSS node can be given a geographical location but why would you want to do this?

Yahoo amongst others have been busy adding georss to a range of products and services including maps and Flickr both are great examples of what can be done.

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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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Whether your an individual a company or a marketing/SEO company reputation management will become part of your business and business strategy, knowing what’s being said about you and your clients is not only important but in many business paramount.

Having decided that this is the case your question is how to best to keep and analyse your reputation and brand, you could

• Hire a reputation management company (that would be us right )
• Employ a full time specialist
• Do it or get some one to do it yourself

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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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