The Venture Skills Blog

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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Oh yes welcome to another sarcastic Friday round up, this week has been a little farcical for many aspects of the web.

Digg Eats itself

Unless you have been sitting under a stone you can’t help but noticed that Digg community had a bit of a bad time last few days, you can read the full story on my own blog, though by far the best commentary is coming from Greywolf.
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There have been a couple of posts about the validity of site maps as a SEO technique the latest post from Rand at SEOmoz but why has the golden boy lost his glow?

Basically the argument goes, a search engine crawls a site in an organic way, it discovers pages through links internal and external and weighs those links accordingly. By submit a site map a web master is overriding this basic checking service, If a page couldn’t be crawled it would be noticed and could be rectified, however now any page in the site map will be crawled even if its an orphan. Is this a serious problem?

Yes and No, It is a problem if pages are orphaned and the site owner is unaware of the issue, it is not an issue if the page is a deliberate orphan (such as a landing page) but you still want it searched now most landing pages will have in bound external links after all that’s the point, but some may not for what ever reason. The second is a well designed site will have the necessary design structure to stop orphaning occurring, most modern site, uses categories or tags as means of structure and most CMS build these navigational aids in by default.
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You may remember this post about Windows Live sucks…

Well I have changed my mind Windows Live is the most amazing search engine ever, everyone should use it why well simple really ? Read the rest of this entry »

Google Sitemaps have been going for some time now and now MSN and Yahoo are jumping on board supporting the xml standard from sitemap.org this is great news and is slowly being reported around the various news channels and blogs including here & here as well as Techcrunch and Danny Sulivan.

I have submitted a sitemap to Yahoo via their site explorer which was pretty painless.

You can find the official releases from Yahoo, Microsoft and Google on their blogs.

Some other Articles on the Venture Skills Network about Google
Google Apps for your Domain Part 1 - Mail
What’s the future for Google Apps for your Domain - A wish List
Open Search and Google Custom Search - How TO
Google Custom Search Engine - Using Ajax Search with the new CSE

Like what you see try these articles on the Venture Skills Network
Information mining the social way - Using del.icio.us to mine your competitors
The Tim Nash Experiment part1 - Implementing our Identity Rule

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Sorry correction Windows Live method of crawling web site sucks I’m sure the interface is fine. We have been around a little time now, the blog is new but the main site www.venture-skills.co.uk has had content on it for several months, yet windows live search still has yet to pick it up. The top listing for Venture Skills is an American company specialising in web design, not to be confused with us the British company specialising in new media (fancy web design and the rest!) Read the rest of this entry »