The latest example of someone making an Internet post they wish they hadn’t came when twenty year old Hadley Jons, from Detroit, posted a comment on her Facebook profile about she believed the defendant in the trial that she was a jury member of was guilty – before the trial had actually finished.

Naturally, as any good defence lawyer does these days, every member of the jury was researched online. Defence lawyer Saleema Sheikh was delighted when her son Jaxon, who works with her at her office, discovered the comment made by one of the jury members about her client.

The indiscretion was pointed out to the judge, Diane Druzinski, who promptly removed the juror and warned her that she could be charged with contempt of court.

Local newspaper, The Macomb Daily, reported the judge as having told Jons:

“You don’t know how disturbing this is”

Defence lawyer Saleema Sheikh believes that Jons needs to be taught a lesson about the judicial system:

“I would like to see her get some jail time, nothing major, a few hours or overnight,” Sheikh said. “This is the jury system. People need to know how important it is.”

With Google and Facebook being as powerful as they are, everything written about you, and by you, can be found. Therefore anyone researching you, or your company, is likely to find any information that exists online. Controlling your online reputation can be difficult, and while reputation management can remove any unpleasant results, the best option is always to proactively manage your reputation by being very careful about what you post in the first place.

Even without Jons however, the defendant was found guilty.

OK, so yes, we’re all getting older. Therefore if we’re using social networking websites, users are, ergo, getting older. Perhaps I should have rephrased that. The average age of users on social networking websites is getting older. There, that’s better.

The research states that more users over the age of 50 are using social networking websites to keep in touch with their relatives and to catch up with old friends who they haven’t seen for a long time. Fifty plus surfers are logging on and using websites to stay in touch, and to find assistance on medical matters. The number of ‘silver surfers’ on social networking websites has in fact doubled in the last 12 months.

Oh Mildred, you're not tagging that photo of me!

The research states that 42% of the silver surfers surveyed, some 2,252, stated they were regular users of social networking websites. Only 22% of those surveyed in 2009 purported to use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The report commented:

“While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools.”

“Although email continues to be the primary way that older users maintain contact with friends, families and colleagues, many now rely on social network platforms to help manage their daily communications.”

While there may be more seniors using social networking websites, the scene is still very much the domain of the young – with 86% of Internet users aged between 18 and 29 stating they use Facebook and the other social networking websites on a regular basis.

As mentioned earlier however, it is the older generation that is increasing in its use of social networking over the young (or are we just all getting older) as there has been an increase in social networking activity for users aged between 50 to 64 by 84%. The younger age bracket meanhile has seen its use of social networking websites increase by just 13%.

With a more mature audience now using the Internet, and social networking in particular, this should change the way you look at your website’s SEO if you’re aiming at an older market. With seniors embracing the Internet in such large numbers, perhaps it’s time you did too?

It sounded like a good idea, but as Duncan Bannatyne and Peter Jones pointed out, with an average order value of around £4.50, a low conversion rate and a reliance on Google Adwords for traffic he was never actually going to make a profit. This was compounded by the fact that every time Patrick spoke of what he needed the investment for he stated ‘Google Adwords’ in order to increase his traffic levels to circa 100,000 uniques per month.

Every time he mentioned this, I shouted at the TV ‘NO!”. This is not the way to increase your traffic levels and, as Peter and Duncan had already identified, you wouldn’t make a profit doing that. Yet still Deborah Meaden kept repeating that they needed to increase their advertising on ‘Pay Per Clicks’ (as she called it).

Value My Stuff Now

Surprisingly, Deborah and Theo Paphitis teamed up to invest £50,000 each into the website. This prompted me to check it out and to see if they really were throwing money away on Google Adwords for a site that had an average order value of £4.50. Thankfully (and perhaps unsurprisingly as Deborah and Theo are obviously no mugs) the website is using SEO and content as its main form of online advertising. The site has a news section offering daily news from the antiques world which, as we have mentioned here on our blog once or twice in the past, is the best, and most economic, way of attracting traffic.

While Google Adwords may get you clicks, you pay for each click. With content, your content exists forever and will keep bringing you new traffic for as long as your website is live. It gets indexed by Google, gets cached and stored within Google’s huge list of pages (the number of pages is so high, even Peter Jones couldn’t attest to have a pound for every one) and then when someone searches for something relating to the content of the page, Google offers your website as a result – earning you traffic.

Valuemystuff.com is doing it the right way, and will no doubt become very successful as it as the backing of two Dragons, and a successful SEO campaign. While the support of Dragons may be beyond most businesses, effective SEO isn’t.

This is actually a difficult question to answer and, to some degree, depends on what you expect from your SEO company. For example, if you expect to have a ‘hands on’ approach to your SEO and you want to be able to meet with your SEO company regularly, popping in to see them and have them visit you, then you’re probably better off with a local company. Also, if you want your SEO to be aimed at specific geographical regions, such as local towns and communities, then a local SEO company would be more likely to have this specialised local knowledge. This means that if you’re based in Cheshire, you should be looking for SEO companies in Cheshire – as opposed to London or worldwide.

However, where an SEO company is based doesn’t in any way affect its ability to perform search engine optimisation. The tips and tricks are still the same the world over, so you don’t need to pick the closest SEO company to you. You could, for example, choose to use a company based in London, New York, Sydney or even in India – as SEO is conducted on the Internet, there are no limits to how far afield you can go for the right service, for the right price.

Of course, whether you look for SEO companies in Cheshire or in the USA, the most important thing is to choose the right one – and that comes through research, speaking with them about their processes and seeing what their clients say about them. Only by opening a dialogue with them can you be sure that their service is the right one for you, and that they understand your business and your target market.

But then again, if I don’t have something catchy, the Internet user will click on someone else’s title… Ugh. Which is more important?

At such times, the decision of King Solomon comes to mind. The wise king of old was confronted by two women, both claiming to be the mother of a child. Faced with a very difficult choice, Solomon decided to cut things down the middle, so to speak, and when one of the women protested at the idea of cutting the child in half he knew he had found the real mother.

Okay, the decision the wise king faced was perhaps a little more serious than deciding whether to put one word before another in the title of an article on a website, but the analogy still stands.

Fitting your sometimes-clunky keywords into a catchy title is one of the harder SEO jobs, so you have to use your common sense. Sometimes, the keywords really do have to give way. At other times, the keywords are so important that a dry title is necessary. Sometimes, though, you really do have to split it down the middle – just watch out for wailing mothers.

If you’re unaware of who she is, she’s the mumsy 45-year-old who was caught on CCTV disposing of a neighbour’s cat in a wheelie bin.

In the hilarious yet disturbing footage, she is seen petting fuzzy bundle of fur Lola, lulling her into a false sense of security, before grasping her by the scruff of the neck and popping her into the bin like a balled up chip wrapper.

The cat was rescued 15 hours later by her owners, and they posted the video on Facebook in a bid to find out who had mistreated their precious pet. Bale was soon identified and, after defending her actions by proclaiming “it was only a cat”, saw the error of her ways and apologised profusely.

We’ll never really know her motives. Her elderly father is known to be ill in hospital, so she may have acted on an impulse to have some element of control in her life. She may have mistaken the furbag for Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch, and thought she was putting him back in a bin where he belonged, or she may simply not like cats. What was interesting was the reaction to the footage; pretty soon, a Facebook group called ‘Death to Mary Bale’ had been created and was attracting lots of followers. Calling for the summary execution of Mrs Bale, its members suggested that she be “repeatedly headbutted” and “flogged to within an inch of her life”.

Mary Bale Throws Cat In Bin

The level headed among us can see how ridiculous this is, but it serves as a lesson in online reputation management for many businesses. Although you may strive to provide the best service you can, sometimes things will go wrong. As the Internet offers a degree of relative anonymity, you can be sure that you will attract some disproportionate criticism. A swift, profound apology can take the wind out of a critic’s sails, but negative comments can follow you around on the web like a bad smell, and show up in your search results for months, or even years, afterwards.

If your business is plagued by the acrid niff of overly harsh criticism, it’s time to call in an SEO expert. A reputable search engine optimisation company can plan a campaign to restore your positive search engine returns to the top of your SERPs, and can guide you in minimising the fall out from future attempts to unfairly besmirch the reputation of your business.

Just make sure there are no CCTV cameras around before trying to recycle your neighbour’s cat.

Sickly golden syrup analogy aside, the point still stands. If your website has loads of good quality links from similar websites, your website will perform better. With that in mind, one of the best ways to increase the number of links to your website is by commenting on the blog posts of other websites within your industry, adding a link to your own site within the URL field.

Now, this raises one or two important points – points that must first be made clear before you rush off and start spamming the bejesus out of your competitors.

Firstly, while the anchor text used within a link is important in SEO (the text used for the link itself), and the name you add when you post a comment becomes the actual link text, your name should NOT be added as a keyword. Nothing shouts ‘spam’ louder than a comment on a blog being posted by someone named ‘cheap laptops’ or ‘business cards Dublin’ – as we have noticed on a few blogs lately. The more discerning blog owners will not approve comments made by people who attempt to use keywords as their names, and the ones that will approve them aren’t worth being approved on in the first place.

Use your real name; it’s controversial, but you’ll stand a much better chance of the comment being approved – plus, most comments are ‘nofollowed’ anyway so the ‘link juice’ attributed to the anchor text wouldn’t apply.

Secondly, make sure your comment is both unique and relevant. If you run your own blog you will have noticed a succession of comments being posted on your blogs that all follow the same lines, and are often the same comment… something like:

“I like your site I will come back often”

Or the classic:

“Hey, this is my first comment on ur site. I’ve been reading it for a while in my RSS reader but haven’t commented before. Anyways, thanks for the post.”

These are spam comments. They add nothing to the post, or the conversation that may have started in the comments below it, and the more knowledgeable blog owner would not publish them. Instead you should read the post, or at least part of it, and comment on the post itself. Offer some feedback, a comment on something you have read or even some advice on what has been posted. You do not have to write much, just a line or two, but the more specific your comment, the more chance it will be published and your link will be added.

This of course takes a little time – which is why, as with everything online, it’s better for your website in the long run. If the quick and easy path were better, we’d all be doing it and we’d all rank #1 in Google for every search. We don’t, and as it happens, it’s physically impossible – which is why the better quality websites, with the better content and the better links, rank above those with poor quality content and poor links.

Which one of those descriptions applies to your website?

Having a reputation for letting new, interesting, things slip out under the radar, the latest thing that has been unleashed from their nerve centre (presumably located in a dormant volcano, complete with a monorail and boiler suit-wearing goons and being scoped out this very instant by a suave British secret agent) is an incremental search. In other words, your search results update the instant that you type something in.

This has obvious disadvantages, along with its many advantages. On the plus side, it does mean that you don’t have to type the whole of ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch train station timetable’ into your search box to check the departure times from everyone’s favourite Welsh train station, but on the other hand it could prove problematical if you want some information on the herb ‘Whorlywort’ and your boss happens to be looking over your shoulder as you type out the first four letters w-h-o-r… Do’h!

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

This feature has yet to be rolled out in the UK, but it seems that it is just a matter of time. Of course, this can have an impact on your search engine results as well. If your business has an unusual name, or incorporates numbers instead of letters or words, it may lead to some confusion for the customer trying to seek you out on the web.

This issue can be addressed by a search engine optimisation company. Often, a consultation with an SEO expert can throw up some issues that you may not been aware of, such as optimising for common mis-spellings of words, or even Americanised versions. Although Google’s search algorithms are shrouded in secrecy, at least this is a problem that can be avoided as part of a thorough SEO campaign.