Tag: Black Country

Autumn lands upon the Black Country and we get set to secure down the hatches to survive extreme conditions such as howling gales, monsoon-like torrents and icy spells as the leaves colour and tumble. Hats are on in expectation of a surge of conkers and acorns and you cannot move in the garden for squirrels burying the winter supplies.

All of this is perfectly acceptable to one such as myself, carrying out harmless and valuable SEO undertaking and able to sit in the home office and observe measures unravel outside of the window as well as the feathered flocks on their exiting migration to more pleasing climes. I cannot say I blame them and remind myself fondly of November holidays to the Gulf to visit my mum and dad when they lived there. Those days are long gone although naturally I would look favourably upon any Gulf based summons that may need site visits with free membership of The Club, business class on a suitable airline, suite at the Crown Plaza. Ah yes, I can imagine it easily. Or perhaps not.

Unfortunately, the occasional summons from the Gulf for IT support is less than likely to arrive which is actually not a disaster as I much prefer to hold to that on a local level. If somebody’s pc is forever crashing or needs rebuilding, a printer needs setting up then I’m more than happy to help out. I’m always happy to do someone’s IT support as the reasons for something messing about are normally easy to trace and do, but if you don’t know how to do it yourself then it’s an insurmountable issue and you need someone who does.

However, for the future period, I will continue with the SEO that I really enjoy and attempt to support business in the Black Country by getting them into the first page of search results for Google. After that of course, it’s down to the website to sell it’s products but I like putting the link to the site before the customer at the highest point of their search. It’s amusing to do apart from anything else but the greatest reason I like it so much is that, with the first Mrs Izzard lately being treated for breast cancer involving lots of journeys to hospitals, I need to be able to let go of everything at the drop of the hat protecting my head from gravity propelled conkers and acorns. Not to mention the chasing tree rodents.

Happily, cancer treatment in this area of the Black Country has proved to be extremely methodical and remarkable and as long as I can continue to be able to be there for her during this horrible time, I will be happy.

20101028

For more about small business software visit Osiris Web Services

categories: SEO,Black Country

Very Well, so the Kalmindon catastrophe is done and dusted. I know I’ve been ripped off by a team of two of very clever brothers with a very plausible story, it’s cost me 3 grand that I paid for SEO training that I could have found from the internet for nothing, with no prospect at all of the promised clientele that was ‘guaranteed upon course completion’ turning up. They were meant to have a ‘pool of clients’ waiting to have their site optimised and they would just join me up with the ones either in or nearest to the Black Country.

Of course the spiteful thing, which applies for all of us who have been cheated, is not the cash that we all paid out to the Brothers Grim, but the resources we used up in the meantime. Because they allocated us a website of their own to go with which needed plenty of articles, fifty in my case, in the expectation that a paying client was forthcoming and I could begin to generate some sort of income. In my case that means that since I started the training in April I have been living off my own money to support us during that period and now here we are in November and it is just about all gone. Happily, the cost of living in the Black Country is much less than it would be in lots of places, but it could not carry on forever, and it did not.

But, what I have come away with is the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one and some bright others have also been swindled equally so I’m not the only mug. The other is that I know how do SEO, something that I didn’t even know existed before the episode but now I understand it and really enjoy doing it. To me, SEO is the ideal occupation as my missus is having chemotherapy at the moment which means frequent trips to hospitals around the Black Country and I can go off for a time to go with her.

I had already been practicing some IT support for small firms in the Black Country though it just ran to the odd call to connect a printer or resuscitate a crashed pc, not as often as I would prefer obviously. But what I can do now is to combine both skills and offer SEO and IT support and hopefully gain steady business coming in.

But while I try to find something, I might have to see about a position at the Scottish burger restaurant or behind a bar somewhere but it isn’t likely to help very much as the first Mrs Izzard is about to go on half pay from next month as she has been off sick for treatment for six months now. Which is of course another rather inopportune case of timing as far as the swindle of time and money by Kalmindon is concerned.

So, although I’m not bred into the Black Country I have found them to be largely jolly and upbeat folk, and I will endeavour to adopt that outlook as I am, after all a far better person than the excrescences who most likely feel very satisfied and clever at having done me and the others. But then that is perhaps how sociopaths operate and I am a good fellow. So there. *Blows a raspberry!*

20101104

Want to find out more about search engine optimisation, then visit the Osiris Web Services site on how to choose the best affordable SEO company

categories: SEO,Black Country

I have domiciled in the Black Country now for 16 years. It’s funny as that is longer than I was at school and yet it continues to feel so fresh and new. In fact, I was at a school reunion last weekend and it was strange seeing everybody grown up as I have not seen any of them from the day I completed school. I’m very good about being naughty at dropping contact with people and not keeping in touch. I appear to find that I think ‘I wonder how so and so is’ and suddenly comprehend that you have not spoken to them in 5 years and feel too guilty to pick up the phone. Thank the Lord for social networking!

I came up here originally when I began freelancing when I was contracted to IBM on a job for the Midlands Electricity Board which was enormous fun. Since then my work has taken a lot of alterations in both job and geography, but these days I am in command of a business that offers SEO and IT support services to small companies in the Black Country area and the larger West Midlands. It means that I get work at home which is in reality the only place I’ve ever wanted to work. I have been lucky enough that freelancing has let me to go to other places and I have been to Brentwood, Coventry, Newcastle upon Tyne and, most exotically, Canberra before an all too brief return to the North East.

But I adore being in the Black Country and being out and looking around it. It really is very beautiful, and reminds me of my beloved Surrey, but different of course in that we are set in the middle of the Industrial Revolution. We do not have to move far to be surrounded by the signs of the past. This part of the Black Country was renowned for chain and glass construction. The chains and anchors for the Titanic were made here and the transport of them to the railway was recently re-enacted for a Channel 4 documentary. There are also canals everywhere you go connecting the coal, iron and steel production areas to the wider world.

Most of it has now gone of course, although bespoke metal bashing and steel product companies still operate. The modern Black Country now revolves around small industrial businesses, high end services and some dependence on the car industry which remains prominent in the West Midlands with Jaguar Land Rover, and Rover also making a low level return.

For myself, I am more than content now working for myself, using the skills that I’ve gathered in my working life and using them on my own terms. I was trained how to do IT support many years ago when I was at British Gas and used a break from programming to try something fresh, and that has remained with me through the years where I have been able to repair problems for people I was working with quickly and remove the need to call out the support teams. SEO I have picked up in later years and have discovered that it is wholly matched the way I like to work and have always had an ambition to do as I have always adored creative writing.

So for the long term, I will keep my focus on SEO with a little IT support as and when needed.

20101027

For more about computer help visit Osiris Web Services

categories: SEO,Black Country

Doing some IT support for a business earlier this year, I was concerned by how old many of their systems were. I originally went in to fix up a printer that refused to cooperate with the system that it was intended to be fixed to. I got it sorted via a back door route, but the overall issue was that the software they were using was very outdated and was having a job cope with something that was considerably more up to date.

I was back a few days later when the firm owner’s machine collapsed quite stunningly. It took ages to fix, eventually needing a total rebuild but we got there finally and I was told that the situation is not atypical. Apart from their accounting software, they had no IT support at all which left them exposed and meant that their IT systems had slipped more and more out of date. And this isn’t odd with smaller companies in the Black Country that are so focused on their primary purpose that the admin work was taken for granted.

This in itself is perfectly ok, you do not have to have the most modern systems, upgrading and changing every 6-12 months or even every couple of years, but operating systems and essential software should be upgraded every three years at least. Because some suppliers, partners and customers, particularly the major ones, will upgrade and as a matter of course they will share files and data and sooner or later, these files won’t be readable as the formats will alter. For instance, somebody operating MS Office from the mid to late 90’s (and many are in my experience) will not manage with a file sent from Office 2010 and when the day comes, everything to do with that partner and information will come to a halt. What if it’s an invoice or a big order? That could be very expensive.

The same pertains of SEO for companies who put their business online with an expensive and well constructed website, which looks fabulous, behaves well and is rarely seen by buyers looking to buy that could be going to that company. Let us imagine a Black Country steel company needs a new lathe and would prefer to get it from a firm close by the area, but cannot find a lathe manufacturer on the internet since all their online searches come up with firms who are better optimised. Our lathe manufacturer might not even be logged with the search engines in which case the most exact search in the world isn’t going to find them and they may as well not bother with a website at all. Maybe they are aware of SEO which, I will confess, has a poor PR image sometimes, and they see it as a doubtful outgoing. But proper SEO does work, is worth the outlay and how costly is not securing that lathe order?

Small firms have to prioritise on their primary business, of course they do. But they need to be kept up to date with their admin systems which means good IT support, SEO as well as the more obvious such as anti virus software. To let them get behind too much will one day make the dreaded outlay a self-fulfilling prophecy instead of a help to profitability.

20101103

Learn more about search engine optimisationStop by Jon Izzard’s site where you can find out all about affordable SEO company

categories: SEO,Black Country

The wife and I can’t wait for 31st December. Not because we have something magnificent arranged for the evening fun and games, even though we have, but because we can’t wait to see the back of this most terrible of years.

There have been positives, and we shouldn’t forget them, nor to count our blessings which are munificent. After all, we remain in the Black Country, we have our little lad William, our parents remain in rude health and we have marvellous family and chums. So not everything is completely dreadful, but these are the things that are generally fixed and not what one may refer to as ‘events’. Other than the jettisoning of Gordon Brown from Downing Street – now THAT was a wondrous occurrence!

Other things are not and this is the stage, things take a turn for the unpleasant. To start with, in January, I found myself out of contract which was bad enough, I had expected to be back in work quite rapidly, but it was not to be. Then, in March my final remaining grandparent passed away, a glorious lady of infinite dignity. And then in April, just after her birthday the real bombshell, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and procedures were set in train to deal with it using surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It was approximately the same time that I was informed by the DWP that I would not get unemployment benefit since I’d been paying the wrong kind of National Insurance, and so on top of all the rest I had no income.

And then things looked as if they would perk up. Mrs Izzard was browsing the Directgov website for job vacancies for me and discovered an advert promising work doing SEO. I had already done a bit of work for local companies, doing IT support and though I was clueless about what SEO actually was, I contacted the website linked in the Directgov advert and in time had a call from one of the managers of the company involved. He told me how SEO worked and told me about the job and what the company wanted from me and what they would do for me. We arranged to meet at a Jobcentre on the North end of Birmingham. I found him a charming, thoroughly pleasant man and we had a detailed talk about work, life, career, business and loads of other things and I finished up really wanting to work with him. I told him that although I did a bit of IT support I was not able to fund the training myself although I really wanted to do it. He said that he would find out about funding for me to cover the training since alas the company wouldn’t be able to provide it for free and it seemed fair.

We met again 2 of weeks later and having been told that I was not eligible for funding I passed over a cheque for 3,000 that I’d managed to beg from my olds in anticipation of the money that my grandmother had seemingly left me as an inheritance. And what a legacy! The chance to train to work from home for proper income for the long term! I go on with the course and it took something like six weeks. While the company worked out an ideal client for me, they provided me a site they explained they had built for a firm that had gone bust, but since they owned the website they were trying to sell it and it was a good idea to have it optimised when they did. You can view it at www.2bbq.co.uk and I came up with 50 articles using different keywords to bunt it up the results table.

A few weeks came and went and as my finances ebbed away I emailed the directors asking when I was finally going to get a customer, until in early November I discovered a group of folks on a forum who had all gone down the self same path and it became completely clear that there were no clients and the whole experience had been a rip-off to wring training money from unemployed people from all over the country, not just the Black Country like me.

So, now my own resources are almost evaporated as I’ve been using them to support myself and the family while waiting for the clients to come and now I realise that they never will. So, being a better person than the vile scumbags who have conned me, I will find customers and do SEO myself, as well as IT support which I will still offer to businesses in the Black Country and we will survive this in one piece, stronger and the legacy money from my grandma’s will will be reimbursed and spent on something worthwhile and valuable as she planned.

20101109

To find out more about Search Engine Optimisation and the advantages it can bring, visit Osiris Web Services

categories: SEO,Black Country

Many companies in the Black Country are not taking benefits of SEO which I am finding odd. I know that SEO has an perception issue. It seems straightforward and grandiose promises can be given, but to do it correctly is really not so straightforward because there are a number of facets to it.

The 1st stages are straightforward and can be done speedily. If a web design firm is used to construct the website, they can do the first task which is to identify the keywords that describe the website, the owner’s business and their broad industry sector. Then the keywords have to be put into the wording of the pages and any graphics used, and then correctly inserted into the HTML that is not seen by the user but is crucial to the page definition.

At this moment, a warning must be passed. The keywords need to be spread around the site and put into to the most suitable page. If a business offers general IT support services, the keywords such as ‘pc rebuild’ should be on the pages that describe the list of services and not in the home page, which ought to have more general words such as ‘computer’. Geographical keywords can also be expressed on the home page for example since our IT support may only function in a local area, so descriptions such as ‘Black Country’ are more than acceptable as would city names of the areas where they operate.

But then the real task of SEO doesn’t not happen or show results quickly. The stages above will not convince the search engines to give a website prominence in the results pages. What is required for that is the lodging of the keywords and links to the site in places around the web that will be found by the search engine ‘spiders’ as they scour pages searching for content. This is done by coming up with lots of articles, blogs, press releases and other pieces that can be loaded on blog sites, article banks and other locations that contain such content. There need to be hundreds of links, all relevant to the linked pages and properly constructed using proper grammar and sensible to the human eye. The pieces then have to be re-done in such a way that there may be hundreds of recreations of it, but they must each be unique in themselves. This means that the base article must be written so that the broadcast software can generate many different versions to post.

Once posted, the search engines will eventually discover them, link back to the target website and build a profile of importance so that they can match their users to the pages on the basis of their search guidelines. But this is a slow process and why it needs to be appreciated that SEO is a gradual procedure as it takes time for the links to be found and included in the profile.

Our IT support firm probably will not see themselves at the top of the results pages for a number of months but given time they will pull their way up the table and anyone else in a market that has plenty of competition will also have to be tolerant. However, since by this time they ought to be paying their SEO providers by results anyway, so they can afford to be kind.

20101101

To find out more about Search Engine Optimisation and the advantages it can bring, visit Osiris Web Services

categories: SEO,Black Country

I was feeling a bit green yesterday. Not quite the return ticket, a little unbalanced in the person as it were. So in the afternoon I took to my bed and recovered some sleep for a couple of hours. Once I woke up I was far better, fresh and revived and went back to work. Which was all simple to do as I work at home and for myself so I gave myself permission, continued with activities providing superior SEO and IT support services to companies in and around the Black Country.

It is a distinct advantage that the home-worker has. If I was based in an office somewhere I would have either had to attempt to haul my way through the day feeling grotty and most likely gradually getting worse, or make up my mind to jack in the day, make my apologies and go home without the possibility of returning and continuing where I left things. Plus I’d have the annoyance of having to fill in forms, possibly have to suffer a ‘return to work interview’ as I really need my intelligence insulted as a penance for feeling under the weather. But, in doing SEO work I can just save my work, take refuge under the duvet, snatch a quality snooze and when I come to again, cross the landing to the office and carry on.

It would not have been so if I had been on an IT support call of course, although the choice would have been to complete the job I was on and then either choose to put off any outstanding appointments or pause for a breath of air or a sleep in the car before going on. It would also depend on whereabouts in the Black Country I was of course, if I was near to home I could always pop back for my snooze and let future appointments know that I was going to be delayed, though of course if there was a dire emergency situation somewhere then naturally I would need to be really poorly to let them down.

It is of course the unending dilemma of the freelancer. No work, no income and if you let clients down then they will always have the choice to find someone else that they could consider to be more reliable, that’s everyday business sense.

So, whether being employed to boost a website with SEO, or keeping their systems and computers running by giving IT support, feeling poorly doesn’t need to stop me supporting my customers’ business, which being office bound probably would, which is for the best.

20101112

For more about for your business visit Osiris Web Services

categories: SEO,Black Country